Severance is a classic “mystery-box” show. Prototyped by J. J. Abrams’s Lost (2004-2010), mystery-box narratives offer audiences a series of puzzles, with the promise that they will all be satisfyingly resolved eventually. In real life, there are no writers scripting our reality (so far as we know). However, the paranoid forms of political explanation taking shape on both the contemporary Left and Right share an affinity with the speculative uncertainties of the mystery-box show. 

Conspiracy theories (“fan theories” about reality) abound, and not just on the fringes of the far Right and far Left, but among the sensible denizens of the establishment center as well. The spread of a conspiratorial worldview reflects our current crisis of authority. But more than this, it distorts our understanding of what is really happening. We find ourselves searching for hidden hands and shadowy conspirators rather than facing our problems.  

In Britain since Brexit, neither the Conservatives nor Labour seem to have relished being in power. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak sometimes seemed as if he were trying to pass himself off as the leader of the opposition, promising to “put things right” after the next election, rather than when he lived at No. 10 Downing Street. 

Since Labour came into power in August 2024, both it and large portions of the British media have often behaved as though Reform UK (with five MPs) and the far Right (with no MPs) were the actual government, and Labour only the beleaguered opposition. As with The Board’s speaker in Severance, it is by no means clear where the voice of authority in Britain is actually radiating from. The suspicion that political power always lies somewhere else, and that whoever purportedly possesses it is actually power-less, provides perfect conditions for conspiratorial thinking.

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In the United States, meanwhile, the sense that power itself is out of power is a mainstay of political discourse. The Trumpians and the online-Right more generally are fond of speaking of an amorphous “they” directing the course of events. “They” don’t want you to know. “They” want you to live in fear. A permanent elite called “the regime” — a Left-leaning cabal comprising elements from the media, Big Tech, education, the NGOs, and “woke capital” — really controls things. The background assumption behind such rhetoric is that although it controls all three branches of government, the Trump GOP is, in fact, still at the mercy of malign and hidden forces.  

Like the world of Severance, our political imagination appears to be fundamentally adrift in time. Many on the Left have convinced themselves that their Right-wing political opponents are literal throwbacks to 20th-century fascism. Conservatives have succumbed to the same tendency: for them, the political opposition are really communists. For the Right, corporate DEI, “woke” capitalism, the use of critical race theory in schools, the increased emphasis on heritage justice issues, and the new zeal in progressive circles for open borders — all have become signs of old-school Marxism. 

Conservative commentators seem unable, however, to explain why supposedly extreme Left ideas have been so successful at capturing what were until recently slow-moving, conservative institutions and corporations. So they offer us spy-novel scenarios in lieu of political explanation. Conservative writers such as Christopher Rufo describe a multi-decade “long march through the institutions” by a global cadre of far-Left conspirators, who are now supposedly poised to bring about the revolution. As with the “Right-wingers are really fascists” thesis, there is a sense of time-slippage at work in these narratives. We are being invaded by the forces of a nightmare past. Unmask your opponents, and the eternal enemy will stand revealed.

A more plausible explanation can be found in the writings of the Left-conservative French philosopher Jean-Claude Michéa. Rather than a battle between communism and fascism, Michéa sees a struggle taking place within contemporary capitalism. Two forms of contemporary liberalism — economic liberalism (or neoliberalism) and cultural liberalism (progressivism or so-called “wokism”) — are working together and reinforcing each other, in order to enable global capitalism to function. Indeed, according to Michéa, it is “dual liberalism” that typifies the current establishment.

Michéa, in his 2007 book, The Realm of Lesser Evil, describes contemporary neoliberalism as a “vast, humanity-crushing machine” that is busily “dissolving the extraordinary diversity of existing cultures into the icy abstraction of the global market.” Neoliberalism dictates that there must be unrestricted flows of capital, goods, and labor across borders. To achieve this, it redefines the world in terms of transparency and metrics. During the ’80s and ’90s, under the New Public Management or so-called audit culture, public sector bodies were compelled to recant their previous objectives and justify their existence in value-for-money terms. The long-term result has been a kind of capitalist version of the Leninist permanent revolution. When applied to institutions, it produces a new normal of continual restructuring. All existing organizational structures are turned upside-down and inside-out. Whatever was there before must be reformed. All sense of prior mission and long-term stability is lost.

Rather than resisting neoliberalism, Michéa observes, many progressive elites have allowed themselves to be recruited into its service. Whereas socialist politics was once concerned with protecting the interests of working people and safeguarding national populations, the progressive or neoliberal Left is hostile to the nation-state and any sense of continuity with the values of past cultures. Elites have thus created a highly selective, pared-down version of Left-wing ideology that is compatible with the needs of global business, and manifests itself as the current iteration of “woke” cultural liberalism. 

This new liberalism embraces the principles of openness and boundary-breaking, and focuses on overcoming what it identifies as society’s dominant norms. In doing so, it claims to free people from the oppressive structures that restrict human potential. In reality, it is attacking the last vestiges of the pre-capitalist traditions that once made societies distinctive entities. Unburdened by past values or cultures, nations can be redeveloped in the standardized terms of the new global capitalism. 

Schools and universities have accordingly aligned their teaching curricula with environmental sustainability goals and “global challenges,” and now go about the business of producing outward-facing global citizens, rather than passing on traditions. Heritage institutions, such as museums and art galleries, have sought to make themselves relevant to the current moment by critiquing their own former missions, turning their collections into exercises in moral repentance rather than commemoration. Dissent has become compulsory, so long as that dissent is aimed at the status quo. Of course, what this means is that our actual dominant norm is the compulsion to attack dominant norms — which conveniently fulfills the larger neoliberal project of dissolving all prior structures. 

Cultural liberalism and economic liberalism are not opposing forces. Rather, they work together to further the interests of the current system. Once we view the contemporary workplace through the lens of this dual liberalism, much that might have otherwise seemed puzzling begins to make sense. Corporate DEI and environmental and social governance frameworks are not, as many on the Right would have it, forms of “Marxist” indoctrination that have somehow captured the corporate sphere. Instead, they enable the extension of managerial logic into new domains, both legitimizing private enterprise and providing new opportunities for growth. 

The “woke” capitalism that emerged in many corporate workplaces during the 2010s was a particularly evocative example of dual liberalism at work. Corporate managers once defended the value of the work they did in the old “audit culture” terms of efficiency and value for money. After the 2008 financial crash, however, capitalism sorely needed a new justification. The restatement of corporate missions in moral terms, as well as the new corporate tolerance for workplace activism, reassured progressive employees that their workplaces and professions had meaningful responses to contemporary crises. And management’s newly compelling moral framework silenced dissent. How could anyone defy managerial decision-making when management had become fluent speakers in the languages of social inclusion and environmental justice?

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By the end of the 2013 film The Congress, much of humanity has mentally migrated into a simulated world, leaving their withering bodies (and the physical world itself) neglected and abandoned. Our current tendency to operate within a dreamland of historical analogies is strikingly similar. The ubiquitous accusations that one’s political opponents are really fascists or communists are an easy means to win an argument — but also to evade reality. 

In truth, dual liberalism creates problems for both Right and Left. As Michéa observes in The Realm of Lesser Evil, Right-wing conservatives champion free markets and then purport to be shocked by the world those markets create. Their focus on communism allows them to not follow economic incentives to their logical conclusions. And it also allows them to blind themselves to the fact that woke is simply what neoliberal capitalism had evolved to look like in the late teens. Right-wing populism of the sort offered by Reform UK has no intention of breaking with economic liberalism, and thus no answer to economic problems. Instead, the party proposes reviving exhausted Thatcherite economic policies. There is no recognition that these policies have already been tried and that they led here, to this precise — and problematic — moment.

The realities of dual liberalism are just as disquieting for the Left. While progressive rhetoric might resist marketization, progressive principles — choice, openness, autonomy — inevitably create spaces and opportunities for the free market to exploit. Relaxed border policies and the low-wage precarity of the gig and outsourcing economies are inextricably linked, as much as moral defenders of the former might decry the social consequences of the latter. Whereas anti-globalization was until recently a mainstream position on the Left, suggestions that we should reimpose restrictions on cross-border labor flows are now increasingly labeled “fascist” or “far Right.” The influence of the economic strand within dual liberalism — a deep commitment to flows and radical progressive change for its own sake — has rendered the contemporary Left strikingly different from previous Left-wing traditions.

One of the complaints from viewers of mystery-box shows is that their final reveals are usually disappointing. The buzz surrounding online fan theories conceals the less-appealing reality that the writers don’t have the answers, and are making it up as they go along. We can have answers, if we choose to, but we must wrench ourselves out of the dream world of rhetoric, and confront the escalating problems that face us in the real world.

America, by contrast, is much wilder — with its mountains, deserts, hurricanes, bears and rattlesnakes. Unlike in the orderly UK, it’s easy to feel here as if the state has all but disappeared. Surely America’s vast landscape must play some role in shaping political life?

Certainly, following Donald Trump’s victory, it is impossible not to notice the profound contrast between the two countries. Over the last few years British politics has had a decidedly sad, small-country energy. Boris Johnson and “cash for curtains”, Liz Truss and the lettuce, Rishi Sunak in the rain, Keir Starmer snaffling free Taylor Swift concert tickets. In the US, on the other hand, we have an epic political drama that people will be writing about centuries from now. In the last three months, multiple assassins attempted to kill one candidate while plutocrats defenestrated a senile emperor so they could continue to exercise power through a talentless cypher. In a late plot twist, the plutocrats were thwarted, and now their nemesis is preparing to return to the seat of power. Clearly, this level of drama can only happen in a big country where people carve the faces of their greatest leaders into a mountain.

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The physical environment shapes politics in other ways too. Consider the perpetual debate over gun rights and the Second Amendment, for instance. This is extremely perplexing to outsiders, partly because they do not understand the sacred role of the Constitution. But there is also a pragmatic reason for gun ownership, which I learned from my father-in-law, who grew up in the Texas panhandle. Out there, he told me, the counties are huge, and police are few and far between. Dial 911 and you might be waiting a long time for help to arrive. In a wilderness full of coyotes, snakes, and bears, you need to be able to protect yourself.

You see this sentiment reflected in American attitudes to hunting. When I was growing up in the UK, the image of a hunter was a toff in a red coat, perched on a horse, setting his dogs on a fox. In the US, there is still an element of man against nature, of waiting for hours to shoot dinner, or perhaps to take out a feral hog with razor-sharp tusks charging at you at 25 miles per hour. This is also why the Democrats sent their bumbling vice presidential candidate Tim Walz into a field with a gun: to demonstrate that he was worthy of the male vote, he had to inflict violence upon nature. When he was filmed struggling to load his weapon, he was mercilessly ridiculed, and instantly lost credibility.

Another way the landscape has shaped American politics is by its sheer scale. A large nation forges a different type of politician: to play the game of power in such an immense country, you must become big yourself. In Britain we have a vestigial memory of this; anyone who reads history cannot help but be struck by the fact that our imperial elites, fighting uprisings across the globe while translating Thucydides for amusement, seem like an alien species. Small island Britain no longer has need of such grandiose figures, and for decades has only produced mediocrities and nonentities. Americans, by contrast, have the confidence of a people who have conquered an epic landscape. Trump made his money by developing the land and erecting garish hotels on what was once wilderness. But he is only one rich man among many. America’s rulers know that there is much left to exploit, but you cannot do that if you go small, so the land forges grandiose liars, monumental crooks, and titanic phonies.

America’s landscape is abundant in resources, and this, too, plays out in political debates. In the UK, the case for renewable energy is bolstered by an understanding that resources are finite: one day the oil will run out, and that will be that. In America, though, there are deserts, forests, mountains, glaciers, swamps. How can a land so huge and diverse not feed itself, make its own cars, and produce its own energy? If you exhaust one area, you could just look elsewhere, or dig deeper, “drill baby drill”. This vastness also fuels a greater confidence in renewables. When I see a lone wind turbine in a field in the UK, I imagine it might just about provide enough power for a toaster. When I see the endless rows of turbines rotating slowly in the deserts of West Texas, I am struck by the transformative potential of the wind.

This sense of abundance also defines attitudes towards immigration. Economists may argue that mass immigration is necessary for growth, especially in the face of declining populations, but in Europe the emotional case is centred on inherited guilt: migrants should be welcomed as recompense for historical crimes of racism and imperialism. In America, the emotional case is more positive: it emphasises generosity, that there’s enough for everyone. “Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” goes the poem by Emma Lazarus inscribed in bronze inside the Statue of Liberty. Pro-immigration arguments always point to the fact that America is a nation of immigrants, and that they should extend the good fortune their ancestors enjoyed to newcomers. Indeed, Matt Yglesias’s book One Billion Americans is predicated on America’s great abundance: not only could the land house one billion people, he argued, but this would lead to still greater riches. You could never make this argument on a small, crowded island such as the UK — nor in any European country, for that matter.

But just as America is blessed with great natural wealth, so it must regularly suffer the Wrath of God in the form of recurring natural disasters, such as hurricanes, forest fires and periodic earthquakes. These, too, have a direct impact on politics, although the extent of the political fallout of a disaster depends on which party is in power at the time. For instance, following Hurricane Katrina, George W. Bush’s administration was pilloried for weeks and then months; the inadequate disaster response was clear evidence of Republican perfidiousness and racism. Following Hurricane Helene, however, there was infinitely less coverage, as the Democrat’s media stenographers feared harming Kamala Harris’s chances of success in the election. Perhaps, now that she has been soundly defeated, they will develop a curiosity about what is happening in the affected regions.

These disasters also provide regional politicians with opportunities to demonstrate that they are effective in a crisis — if they fail, then their foes make hay. The ice storm that struck Texas in 2021, causing major power outages across the state, was still being used in political attack ads against Governor Greg Abbott two years later. When Kamala Harris argued that Ron DeSantis was refusing her calls and using the crisis to play political games, Joe Biden, perhaps bitter from his ousting, took the opportunity to undermine her by calling DeSantis “gracious”.

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Yet when all is said and done, I think that the American landscape’s ultimate contribution to US politics is something that is at the core of the American character: optimism. The belief that better days are ahead has been central to American politics for as long as I have been alive, from Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America” to Barack Obama’s “Hope” to Kamala’s “Joy” and even Trump’s “Make America Great Again”. No matter how polarised American politics becomes, both Republicans and Democrats agree that a new dawn is always right around the corner. And as traumatised as the Democrats may currently be by their crushing defeat, I am confident that they too will soon lift their gaze from the smouldering ruins of the Kamala campaign and once again find hope.

Those who view America from the outside may find this optimism baffling. The same goes for those who live in coastal metropolises and spend far too much time online, succumbing to feverish fantasies that a new civil war is looming. Yet step outside the dysfunctional cities, leave behind the demented discourse and actually enter the landscape and you will find that a sense of renewal is never far away. It’s everywhere: on the edge of a great lake, in the desert, on top of a mountain, or simply driving past immense fields, teeming with crops. This land — diverse, abundant, wild — is still young. And this is why, for all the talk of the end of America, and despite the corrupt media and devious politicians, optimism keeps breaking through.

In some ways, the relatively slow pace of Lawson’s political career is itself the point. Lawson was chancellor during the deregulation of the City of London in the “Big Bang” of 1986 and it was he, in 1988, who introduced a top rate of income tax of 40% — lower than it had been for many years before and lower than it is now. In short, Lawson achieved more without being prime minister than any recent prime minister achieved during their time in Downing Street. Lawson, in fact, was a rare example of a British politician who had the sense to recognise that his great gifts did not necessarily make him prime minister material. He was never a candidate for the leadership of his party.

One of the problems created by the febrile state of Conservative Party politics in the years since 2016 is that any Tory MP thinks he or she could be prime minister. Shortly after losing his parliamentary seat, Steve Baker gave an interview to Spectator TV in which he seemed to suggest that having read Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People gave him a unique insight into ”leadership”, equipping him to lead his party and his country. Sunak is the last survivor of an age when senior Tory politicians were expected to be substantial and able people. As well as Lawson, the Thatcher Cabinet contained, at various times, Michael Heseltine, Douglas Hurd, Ken Clarke, Cecil Parkinson and Norman Tebbit, all of whom achieved important things in their ministerial positions. All were people who might plausibly have been prime minster, or else have had a successful career out of Parliament. Heseltine, for one, had made a fortune in business. When he resigned from the Cabinet, he took his ministerial driver onto his own payroll — probably offering him more money and a flashier car to drive.

Like Heseltine, Sunak had a successful career in business before he went into politics. His enemies sometimes say that he was well qualified for any position other than prime minister, but the alarming thing about his two potential successors is that they seem unqualified for all jobs as well as that of prime minister. If you were interviewing for a post in middle management and the recruitment agency sent you the CVs for Robert Jenrick and Kemi Badenoch, you would ask for your money back. Many of the most able Conservatives — Dominic Grieve or David Gauke — were driven out of the party by Boris Johnson, and I suspect that some Conservative MPs are beginning to feel uncomfortably like those Red Army soldiers in June 1941 who had to go into battle after Stalin had shot their best generals.

The second respect in which Sunak’s departure marks the end of an era relates to the politics of conviction. Sunak’s enemies portray him as a mere technocrat. They imply that he would be happier in the later stages of Ted Heath’s administration than in the government of Margaret Thatcher. This is an absurd misunderstanding. Having convictions, and being willing to act on them, is not the same as making statements about the importance of convictions. On the whole, the language of the Thatcher government was remarkably moderate. It had a small number of central principles and was usually pragmatic about the means by which it implemented them. Thatcher’s ministers did not, for example, say in public that they wished to crush the National Union of Mineworkers; they probably did not even say it in private until they had decided that there was no other means to get what they wanted. Compare this to the public war dances of senior Tories as they declare their willingness to fight some inoffensive institution — the Office for Budget Responsibility or European Convention on Human Rights — to which leader writers on the Daily Mail have taken a dislike.

Sunak talked soft but did more to implement the policies of the current Tory Right than any other front bencher. He voted for Brexit in 2016. As chancellor, he seems to have argued against lockdown more than any other minister and to have done the most to ease its impact. As prime minister, he did not even pay lip service to environmental policies — incidentally, this last stance would have pleased Lawson but exasperated Thatcher.

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The contrast between Sunak and Liz Truss is particularly marked. Sunak is the urbane Jesuit who turns out to be willing to kill or be killed for his faith. Truss, by contrast, resembles a character in one of the more depressing Graham Greene novels. She believes in belief but does not have it. No one seriously thinks that she believes in anything. Perhaps she hopes that she will be granted the gift of ideological extremism if she goes on talking to Tucker Carlson — just as Greene’s characters hope that they will be granted the gift of faith if they keep on attending Mass and making their confessions.

If we truly want to understand why Sunak’s departure matters, we should think back to a phrase that Lawson coined to refer to the government’s Medium Term Financial Strategy in the early Eighties: “Rules Rule Ok.” It sounds a banal remark until one looks at the context. Lawson’s view was that economics must be governed by predictable and inflexible consequences — people must know that if they contracted debt they would have to pay it back and not see it inflated away. Lawson wanted to escape the notion that the government might suspend what he saw to be the rules of the market when it became electorally advantageous to do so. This meant, by the late Eighties, that Lawson supported the creation of an independent central bank. It was also the reason why Lawson was sometimes, at that time, interested in an alignment of European currencies. He would probably not, even then and even in private, have put it in such blunt terms but, effectively, he liked Europe for the very reason that modern Conservatives dislike it — because it keeps important decisions out of the grubby hands of the British electorate.

 A Conservative Party that revolved around rules had implications that extended beyond economics. Thatcherism was, above all, a response to the disorder of the Seventies — street crime and violent picket lines played a large role in the evolution of Conservative thought. It is interesting, incidentally, to note how often British Conservatives in the Seventies saw the United States — with its drugs, student protest and the dystopian chaos of New York in that decade — as a kind of anti-model for their own politics. More than anything else, Thatcher believed in the rule of law. It was, admittedly, an easy belief for a Conservative to sustain when so many judges made no secret of their own Right-wing opinions.

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What has changed since then? One simple answer is that Thatcher won. Rules matter most to those who are weakest, and the British middle classes often felt weak in 1979. Ten years later, it was the organised working class which felt the need for protection — hence the increasing enthusiasm of trade unions for Europe and its myriad regulations. Anti-Europeanism became both a cause and effect of changes in the Conservative Party during the Nineties. The journalist Hugo Young noted that Eurosceptic Tories moved away from a belief in sound money as the desire to control their own currency became a feature of their case against the European Union.

Lawson, of course, became a Eurosceptic himself, as did his admirer Sunak. But this was partly because both men thought that the disciplines that they valued would be imposed at national level — particularly, of course, by the independent Bank of England that was created by Gordon Brown in 1997. Sunak’s case against Truss in the 2022 Tory leadership campaign was partly about fiscal discipline and the need to observe rules associated with the Bank of England, as well as the simpler and more brutal edicts issued by Her Majesty the Bond Market.

But the end of Sunakism is about more than economics. Sunak stands for personal qualities that would once have been valued by Conservatives. He is courteous and disciplined — one cannot imagine him referring to the Tory party as a “cuntocracy” which is, according to Boris Johnson, what another former minister did. Sunak’s enemies reproach him for not concluding a tacit or explicit alliance with Nigel Farage’s Reform Party. But, as the personal attacks on Sunak during the electoral campaign and the riots after it showed, Reform is intertwined with a violence and vulgarity that can easily slip into mob rule, a prospect that terrified the Thatcherites during the Seventies. Thatcher would have been stunned to hear Conservatives denouncing the police or expressing sympathy for rioters.

The truth is that the social groups which gained most from Thatcherism have little to fear now. Their privileges are safer than ever — the Labour government is obviously shaken at the prospect that its policies might cause the rich to leave the country or even that it might make the slightly less rich send their children back to state schools. Perhaps indeed, as a Marxist might suggest, the problem with the Conservative Party is precisely that it has ceased to be a useful instrument for the social class that was once behind it.

Oddly, the one group among the English bourgeoisie who look scared are Conservative front-benchers. Theirs is a miserable life. They may win the election in five years’ time but if they do, it will be back to the faction fights and plots of the last few years. Constituency parties are controlled by people who make the Trots at the grassroots of the Labour Party in 1978 look tolerant; all the while, the threat of Reform looms over party leaders. Perhaps the mystery is not that no talented person wants to lead the Conservative Party but rather that any sane person would even consider the prospect.

Their timing has been awful. Every critical stage in their lives has coincided with disaster. Britain’s millennials were fresh out of university during the crash of 2008, and were struck again by lockdown on the cusp of middle age. Having no assets, they saw no benefit from the asset price inflation of the intervening decade. Unlike their American counterparts, Britain had no tech boom to make at least a few of them rich, or to serve as an outlet for their talents. Nor were they, as in continental Europe, cushioned through the long barren years by things like perpetual studenthood. Britain’s millennials instead had to settle for the quietism of the graduate scheme.

Unlike Gen Z, they are too proud to keep up a raffish existence on the margins, through streaming, cryptocurrency, the monetising of hobbies, or outright unemployment. But even the path of respectability has availed them little. Britain’s private sector has slower progression than in America, and is famously parsimonious with its salaries. Millennials are underpaid, overtaxed and overcharged for everything.

Politically they have also failed. Corbynism was the authentic cause of Britain’s millennials; it, alone, made at least some attempt to speak to their material interests — like student debt. All was soon blown off course by Brexit, an issue that millennials were entirely indifferent to. Nor can they claim to be any kind of cultural vanguard. Throughout the 2010s, Britain had no campus movement to speak of, no Antifa formation of any significance. All social reforms in Britain have been carried out by fiat from above, by Roy Jenkins in the Sixties or David Cameron in 2011.

Other generations have had their share of trials. But here’s the key difference: with millennials, none of these have brought any edification whatsoever. Bankrupted, locked indoors, wages winnowed away. For previous generations, war and disaster at least brought opportunities for advancement, and a general burning away of societal deadwood. The generation of Frenchmen who survived the Napoleonic Wars could look forward to the comfortable mediocrity of the 19th century. Not so with the millennials, who have been given neither catharsis nor a quiet life. Theirs was not the kind of adversity that hardens, only the kind that makes you curl up into a defensive ball, perhaps never to come out.

So it proved. British millennials are dutiful, conscientious, courteous almost to a fault. But they have essentially checked out of history. In most things British millennials have now simply fallen back on the tastes and assumptions of their parents — the Britpopper generation. They fawn endlessly over grandees like Ian Hislop. They’ve even taken their parents’ enemies for their own, like Margaret Thatcher, someone who left office before many of them were even born. Generational deference can even be seen in the music of the millennials, in Ed Sheeran’s strange thraldom to Elton John.

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As prime minister, Rishi Sunak went along in a similar vein. Of millennials he was, of course an atypical one: a Thatcherite who shared in none of their money woes. But Sunak — along with colleagues Suella Braverman, Robert Jenrick, and Claire Coutinho — was Britain’s first real experiment in millennial governance. Little was ever made of this. Unlike Blair and Brown, or the Conservative modernisers, there was never any self-sense of a rising group of youngsters ready to challenge the incumbents. That would require the breezy confidence of youth which Britain’s millennials had beaten out of them long ago.

This is the story of Rishi Sunak and his government, told one way: a younger generation dutifully upholding a set of inherited pieties that are basically alien to them. Sunak and his colleagues were the first true digital natives to hold high office, but they were called upon to defend an essentially analog worldview, these Alastair Campbellisms, which holds that the exact conditions of Britain in 1997 must be defended to the last.

Sunak, for his part, was a man of the 21st century. He had built up a fortune in private equity, and had, in Silicon Valley, seen a world beyond Britain and its “broadcast ecology”. But because of their generational hang-ups, people like Sunak never found the courage to tell Britain’s gerontocrats to get with the programme: that the United Kingdom cannot in fact maintain first-world living standards with “world-beating creative industries”, and that we might learn something from the healthcare systems of France or Singapore. At the very least, they were willing to log on to the internet and read about these things, a task that has always proven beyond the Britpopper generation.

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Rishi Sunak was thus one of the few “Wets” in the true sense of the term: someone who recognises what the historical moment demands of them, but dithers and temporises endlessly. He was talked out of things. His younger colleagues were taken from him. He suffered himself to be ridiculed for taking an early interest in AI, something that is set to transform all our lives. Internet use was second nature to him, but he went along with absurd legislation against online trolls that nearly caused WhatsApp to delete itself from the UK market.

But the subordination was never quite total. After all, Britain’s millennials did not share in the generational experiences that produced New Labour and the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics; for them these “collective memories” are to be obeyed, not really believed in. When Rishi Sunak as Chancellor presented a new “Diversity Built Britain” coin, he was repeating the pieties of what is to him simply a public doctrine.

As millennials come into power, there will be a moment when this false consciousness breaks for good; when it is realised that these inherited pieties are what’s keeping them poor and diminished. Ending debt vassalage to the aged, school selection by property, and fiduciary obligations to non-citizens would each represent a huge social and financial windfall for them. They simply have to learn to say no.

This looks some way off. With the new administration, the British state has reverted to the Britpoppers, and ripe ones at that — Keir Starmer is 61, Sue Gray a stately 66. But I wonder. Even now, a millennial like Wes Streeting can say astonishingly frank things about the NHS: to the extent that the health service ever was a national religion, it certainly isn’t for people of Streeting’s age, who have actually heard about the alternatives.

No doubt, at some point in the future, a 34-year-old technologist from the Tony Blair Institute will chafe at being told by an ageing “Comms Guru” that his latest procurement request is unworkable, unlawful, and violates the Nolan Principle of Openness. In overthrowing these pieties, what is now the greatest weakness of the millennials will become their greatest strength: general disillusion.

It is easy to put the tumult down to the spectacular failings of individuals in the party and around it. Without Johnson’s pagan personality, the risks of imposing pandemic lockdowns while life in No.10 continued in its usual manner would not have proved so hazardous. Only a wild-card character such as Dominic Cummings could have managed a campaign to leave the European Union that had at its centre a promise to restore democracy, and then try to launch a coup days after. Rishi Sunak might be a poor politician, but his reputation would have been less shredded if he had appointed advisors who understood there were no ifs and buts about his simple duty on D-Day.

The party’s failings were also structural, though, originating in the hard political world of the 21st century. From the start, the personal weaknesses of individuals were exposed by the inability of those at the top to grasp how realities far beyond the party’s manoeuvring for advantage at Westminster could overwhelm them.

To succeed, the Conservatives have always needed a cross-class coalition held together by an aura of being more competent at governing than first the Liberals and then Labour, and also being more committed to the Union. Even in the Thirties, when the Labour Party split, and during the Cold War years, when Labour twice ceded competence on defence with promises of unilateral nuclear disarmament, the Conservatives could never be the party only of capital and those who thrived under the economic status quo. During the interwar years and the Fifties they expanded their electoral coalition in part by getting more houses built.

But traditional centre-right parties will always struggle to construct such coalitions when growth prospects are poor and financial conditions inhibit younger generations  from acquiring property at the same rate as their parents and grand-parents. The unpopularity of large-scale immigration with the kinds of working- and lower-middle class voters who have historically eschewed the Left can only magnify the problem.

In this respect, the Conservatives have long required either relatively benign economic times in which to govern as in the Fifties, or the opportunity to make relatively easy to implement reforms as in the Eighties. But they came back to power in 2010 in an era marked by economic stagnation and political problems too big to confront.

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By the middle of the first decade of this century, what the ancient Greek historian Polybius thought of as “aristocratic excess” was rife across Western democracies. Being both democratic (in giving all citizens a vote) and aristocratic (in concentrating power in the hands of a few), representative democracy risks both democratic and aristocratic excess. But since it has historically co-existed with a form of economic organisation in capitalism that creates large-scale inequalities, and was from the, 20th century challenged by the rise of technocratic national and international institutions, it has long been vulnerable to the problem of aristocratic excess.

During the Nineties and early 2000s, the dangers arising from this lay largely buried under the democratic triumphalism let loose by the collapse of the Soviet Union. But a reliance on finance-driven economic growth, and the EU’s moves to close down national democratic political contests over some economic issues, including pan-European migration, moved the problem of aristocratic excess centre-stage. In Europe, the French and Dutch “no” votes in 2005 to the EU Constitutional Treaty shattered any presumption that European electorates were at ease with the drift of power away from elected representatives. Then, the 2007-8 Crash drew visceral lines between those who benefitted from 21st-century global capitalism, and those who paid the price. It also accelerated the already declining rate of home ownership.

From the moment he became party leader in December 2005, David Cameron appeared ill at ease with a political world in which the problem of aristocratic excess had to be contained. Indeed, his strong preference was to wish away any need for the Conservatives to reconstruct a cross-class coalition by rendering the social conservatism and Euroscepticism of working-class Conservative voters, rather than deindustrialisation, the toxic legacy of the Thatcher period. Certainly, the 2010 Conservative manifesto paid lip service to the idea that there should be no return to finance-led growth in the post-Crash world. But in practice, Cameron largely assumed the party could govern as if the relationship between the governing and the governed had not changed since Blair’s heyday. When he proposed changes to the planning laws, it was to make extensions easier not the construction of new homes. If there were a strategy to kick-start the economy, it was only his Chancellor George Osborne’s bid to secure Chinese investment to fix Britain’s infrastructural decay and make the City of London a financier for China’s Belt and Road project just a few years before Xi Jinping’s Made in China 2025 incentivised all western states to rediscover industrial policy.

It was a similar refusal to see how far consent to the Union had broken down that allowed Cameron to let the Scottish government campaign for independence for months on end in 2014 before the panic-driven Vow to deliver more devolution, as if Westminster was indifferent to the outcome. Saved by the fact that Alex Salmond couldn’t find a solution to the Nationalists’ currency problem in a post-eurozone crisis EU, Cameron then had the good fortune to find an SNP that was popular without being materially able to deliver independence. Now, with not that many more votes than were won in 2010, the Conservatives could take out the Liberal Democrats as soft on the prospect of Labour-SNP co-operation at Westminster without having to address the medium-term existential problem facing the party.

Only over the EU did Cameron appear fully cognisant from the start of what had changed since the Nineties. Judging that sooner or later, the UK’s semi-detached position would have been put to a democratic test, Cameron made several efforts to reset EU membership before his gamble on an early referendum. But Cameron, and indeed the whole British political class, had little idea how to act in the kind of politics where strategic predicaments were being directly confronted rather than evaded. Having made his wager on his own powers of persuasion, Cameron then surrendered any notion of prudence by banning contingency arrangements for a “Leave” vote while promising he would implement a decision he had no intention of seeing through. The climax of this botched reckoning saw Osborne try to terrify the voters with the threat of a punishment budget to appease the financial markets.

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Then came Theresa May, whose honeymoon period arose because she seemed able to subordinate her own personality to the new political reality. For a few fleeting weeks during the 2017 general election campaign, her promise to deliver Brexit as a Remainer appeared as if it could finally restore a broad cross-class coalition for the party. But once the spectacular failures during the second half of that campaign exposed the near complete absence of Conservative voters among not just millennials, but younger Generation-Xers, a spectre of medium-term demographic obliteration began to form.

Soon, May’s erroneous post-election assumption that, despite all evidence to the contrary, she could borrow Labour votes to get a weak Brexit through the House of Commons administered a more immediate near-death experience for the Conservatives. Johnson temporarily resurrected the party by his willingness to deliver a general election and put Brexit to a second democratic test. Yet it soon became apparent that many in the party assumed that, having pocketed the votes of the cross-class coalition of 2019 Conservative voters, they could govern as if nothing had changed.

Of course, the pandemic was an unprecedented derailment for any new government. But mostly what went politically wrong was born of a party that did not adapt to its good fortune. The “Levelling-up” agenda required an industrial strategy to have any chance of success, but the economic need for one seemed to Johnson’s Chancellors, especially Rishi Sunak, to cede too much political territory to Labour. Keeping both Red Wall and Blue Wall Conservative voters on side required reducing migration, but Johnson’s rule changes propelled it to record levels. Building new houses required planning legislation, but swathes of backbench Conservative MPs, including Theresa May, objected. When Johnson’s premiership then imploded on his character in the very year inflation returned, most Conservatives MPs were ready to grasp at any rhetorical promise of growth, however loftily conceived compared to the economic facts on the ground.

In crashing her premiership in a confrontation with the financial markets and the Bank of England, Liz Truss destroyed what little remained of the Conservatives’ claim to comparative economic competence over Labour, especially since the turmoil hit first-time house buyers. Crucially, by swiftly restoring the prospect of Labour winning a majority of English seats, she cost the Conservatives any chance of tactically falling back on the Union card. Sunak’s attempts to compensate elsewhere by shifting Rightwards on migration and Net Zero have failed because Boris Johnson had already sailed too hard in the opposite direction.

No other party has simply gifted power to the opposition simply by so repeatedly demonstrating what has become its essential narcissism. Not only has it offered no remedy for the problem of aristocratic excess, it has come to exemplify it, abandoning almost every kind of voter who gave it power and — from Partygate to Cameron’s lobbying for Greensill Capital to the election-date gambling scandal — visibly indulging in the notion that rules and restraint don’t apply to the powerful.

There is a scenario in which the Conservatives’ most self-defeating legacy is still to come. Labour appears to have learned the one thing that, for conservative reasons, must and can be done to stop the further descent of British politics into fragmentation: build houses. But when it is so hard to govern, the political furies are indiscriminate. Beyond housing, Labour is economically committed to the same blueprint of Net-Zero-led economic growth that Boris Johnson found could deliver neither levelling up nor a manufacturing renaissance.

There will be no repeat of the Liz Truss moment. But when it becomes clear that most of Britain’s problems these past 14 years were being presided over by the Conservatives, rather than caused by them, the implosion will quite probably overwhelm British democracy as we know it.

In five years, the Tories have transferred their 80-seat majority to Keir Starmer’s Labour party and then let them double it. No government since the war has been rejected in such a manner. But even this doesn’t do justice to the upheaval. In 1997, the Tories seemed similarly broken, facing an opponent in Tony Blair far more adroit than Starmer. And yet, the party still emerged with 165 seats. In 2001, under the leadership of William Hague, it finished with 166. On both occasions the Tories retained swathes of England considered “safe” from which they could replenish their forces. Theresa May arrived in parliament in the landslide defeat of 1997. David Cameron, George Osborne and Boris Johnson all followed in 2001. Today, much of that old Tory England lies in ruins, captured by the enemy which is now the national party of Britain, stretched far and wide — if not particularly deeply.

Overnight, the Conservative Party didn’t just lose Penny Mordaunt’s seat in Portsmouth and Jacob Rees-Mogg’s in Somerset, they lost Welwyn Hatfield, Chichester, Cheltenham and worse still: David Cameron’s old seat of Witney, Boris Johnson’s Henley, Margaret Thatcher’s Finchley and, perhaps most symbolically of all, Liz Truss’s in Norfolk. Accepting defeat, Rishi Sunak admitted the British people had delivered “a sobering verdict”. Sobering for the Conservatives perhaps. And it was one delivered with cold, calculated fury too, not some wild act of drunken abandon. This was calculated to hurt.

Meanwhile, a new band of cavaliers under the leadership of Nigel Farage has emerged on the scene, slicing through the grinding dullness of the campaign to claim a few small corners of England for itself — and a lot more votes — much as Ed Davey managed for the Liberal Democrats. Despite Davey’s startling success, at least in the number of seats he managed to win from an overall vote share of just 12%, Farage remains the personality who imposed his will on the race, a cavalry showman whose rearguard raids on the Tory backlines helped secure him the parliamentary breakthrough he has craved for so long — and just in time to lead the peasant’s revolt he has been building for decades. The reality this morning is that few people now doubt him when he warns that the result is “just the first step of something which is going to stun all of you”. As recently as 2017, Marine Le Pen’s National Front had just two MPs. Today, she stands on the brink of power, the Gaullist Republicans little more than a shell. For Keir Starmer, a warning — as Boris Johnson and Emmanuel Macron can attest: revolutions have a habit of eating their own.

This in many ways is the most curious of election results. Labour has won a landslide with 34% of the vote — this is less than Tony Blair in 1997, 2001 and 2005, David Cameron in 2010 and 2015, Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn in 2017, and Boris Johnson in 2019. Two factors of huge significance secured Labour its landslide. First, the collapse of the Tory vote to just 24% — far less than Jeremy Corbyn in the last election, Gordon Brown in 2010 and even Michael Foot in 1983; a historic rejection of the government. And second, the extraordinary performance of Reform, which won 14% of the vote, but only four MPs — more votes than the Lib Dems for far fewer MPs. Today, however, Farage’s massed forces lie in second places across swathes of England — the new natural opposition to Labour. As Farage was right to point out, this may well prove to be one of the dominating facts in British politics over the next five years. Can you really imagine Labour daring to get too close to the EU given this new vulnerability? Farage may only have three colleagues with him in parliament, but his influence in British politics is about to explode.

Dig a little deeper into the result and there were disconcerting signs for Labour: Jeremy Corbyn winning in Islington, the expelled Faiza Shaheen denying the party another seat in Chingford, Jonathan Ashworth losing in Leicester and Wes Streeting coming close to losing his in Ilford. Yet, overall, such footnotes are just that — footnotes. The victory is Labour’s.

Over the past six weeks, I have travelled across the country speaking to ministers, candidates, party insiders and the campaign generals on both sides to understand what was happening and why, peering deep inside the bellies of both party machines. During this time, I saw a contrast of startling intensity: between one party ruthlessly committed to victory and another which had long ago lost the discipline necessary to govern and therefore even to command the respect of the country.

For Labour, the machine was manned by those entirely focused on one thing: power. These were the men and women who began 2021 on the sodden, boggy land of unpopularity only to suddenly discover their route to higher ground had been cleared by the grotesque incompetence of a Tory party. In contrast, I saw a governing party bewildered by the predicament in which it had found itself, lost to the point that it was unaware of why it was losing so badly; a desperate party playing a desperate hand and failing with every gamble it made, led by a prime minister who managed to be even more arrogant about his political ability than his predecessors. For four general elections in a row, Britain had voted for the Tories to stop something else: Gordon Brown “bankrupting Britain”, Ed Miliband being in the pocket of Alex Salmond, Jeremy Corbyn blocking Brexit. As soon as the Tories stood no chance of defeating anyone or anything, voters deserted them in their droves, their raison d’être having disappeared.

The campaign we have just witnessed was ultimately a battle between a party that was willing to make the sacrifices necessary to attain power, and another which had long ago given up the organising discipline to retain it. It was a campaign launched out of desperation by a prime minister who seemed so disoriented by his own failures in government that he was unable to see the folly of his reckless gamble. Much of the result, then, has to be on Sunak, a man who proved incapable of the task in front of him. But not all of it. The truth is, Sunak inherited a Conservative Party that long ago lost the will for power, and has been shattered as a result.

The day after the election five years ago, Boris Johnson travelled to Sedgefield to declare himself the Lord Servant of the North. Rishi Sunak travels to Buckingham Palace today having lost not only the North, but most of the rest of the country with it. The Tories were once the national party: the party of England and the Union, town and shire. Today, they are a party of national rejection.

***

The Tory calamity is epitomised in the manner of its departure. The Labour Party knew the campaign had begun six hours before Sunak called it at 6pm on 22 May. The previous day, McSweeney had received a text message from a friend who monitors the betting markets and had noticed a flurry of activity from people placing money on a 4 July election. By the time McSweeney arrived in Parliament the next day and bumped into Starmer preparing for Prime Minister’s Questions, speculation was rife that Sunak was about to make his move. But McSweeney felt the sheer volume of bets was enough evidence to begin preparation. When he got back to Labour HQ at around midday, he authorised Labour’s head of digital, Tom Lillywhite, to start buying digital advertising space on YouTube and elsewhere, while also giving the go-ahead to staff to order the party’s “Change” logo to go on the lectern Starmer would speak from later on. As one senior figure put it to me, it never occurred to them that they might try to make some money from the information they had. The Tory rot was already evident.

McSweeney and his closest team had planned the first day of the campaign repeatedly over the previous few months, acutely aware that the most value he could bring was at the beginning. This head start, then, was doubly significant. For Isaac Levido, the battle-hardened campaign veteran entrusted by Sunak with the Tory campaign, the opposite was true. Not only had he lost the element of surprise, he did not know that this was the case, his trust broken by those who had lost their heads. More importantly, Levido was also being asked to fight a campaign from a position he had advised against.

Levido, who had already played a prominent role in the previous three elections, knew that the main benefit of incumbency lies in the ability to call the election at a time of your choosing — and on your terms. Given this, Levido had advised the Prime Minister to wait until the Autumn, arguing that the party’s best — and perhaps only — chance lay in going long. As inflation fell, so the argument went, so too would interest rates, helping to create an environment in which people might, just might, start to feel better about the country’s prospects. In a game where vibes and emotion are as important as facts, waiting was simply the sensible thing to do.

Yet robbed of his strongest message, Sunak had to deliver a different one in the pouring rain outside No. 10. “It might still be hard when you look at your bank balance, but this hard-earned economic stability was only ever meant to be the beginning.” It is hardly the best pitch for re-election. No longer “the plan has worked, don’t risk it” but “the plan will work — trust me”.

Ever since Sunak became prime minister, Levido had been urging the party to stick to its core message to voters: that it had a plan and it was working. Sunak had launched it on 4 January, 2023, just a few months after taking office, setting out five pledges that could be repeated in 13 words: “Halve inflation; grow the economy; reduce debt; cut waiting lists; stop the boats.” Levido had worked with Lynton Crosby in January 2014, when David Cameron had similarly sought to frame the next election with more than a year to go, unveiling his “long-term economic plan”. But after the calamities of Johnson and Truss, voters would no longer accept another slogan, Levido argued. They needed commitments they could be held to. And so the five pledges were born.

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The problem for Sunak was twofold. The first was that the party was no longer disciplined enough to rally around this message — or even appeared capable of delivering it. At a Tory “away day” last year, MPs complained to Levido that they could not be expected to remember all the pledges. Levido was left exasperated.

The bigger problem, however, was that Sunak could not actually deliver on them, falling on all but the first two. And the longer he waited, the worse it got. Not only was he failing to get a grip on the NHS and the small boats crisis, but the country’s prisons were falling over, the flights to Rwanda were unlikely to go anywhere, the junior doctors continued striking and, most alarmingly, the Conservative parliamentary party could simply not be counted on to maintain its discipline over the summer. Sunak had lost faith in his ability to govern.

It was in the face of such failure — and his loss of faith that he could do anything about it — that Sunak faced a choice between a slow death or a suicidal charge. Ignoring Levido’s advice, he chose the latter.

***

Ordered to lead the party into battle, Levido devised a strategy which would open with a blitz of campaign promises targeting potential Reform voters. This would force people to choose between Labour and the Conservatives in a straight fight. From here, Levido hoped the race would tighten and then the party would move to its central message: “Risk, risk, risk.” This, Levido believed, was the best the Tories had available. Denied the “stability” message that going long would have allowed, he was forced to pivot to a beware-Labour “security” message.

While Levido and his team expected a rocky first few days, as MPs raged against the Prime Minister’s recklessness, they did not expect to have to endure an succession of gaffes — Sunak asking a group of Welsh publicans whether they were looking forward to the European championships they had not qualified for; or appearing at the Titanic quarter in Belfast as his own campaign seemed to be sinking. Despite these, the plan showed some tentative signs of life. The announcements promising compulsory national service and a new “quadruple lock” for pensioners successfully differentiated the party from Labour. Tory internal polling showed the party’s favorability ratings starting to pick up. It helped that MPs were no longer at each other’s throats, while Labour was having to deal with a series of candidate selection headaches.

But, then, two catastrophes. First, Nigel Farage announced he was taking over as leader of Reform and contesting the seat in Clacton. And then Sunak went to Normandy and, inexplicably, left before the D-Day commemorations had finished. Back in London, the most senior campaign officials suddenly realised with horror that the leaders of France, Germany and the United States were all there on the beach together — alongside David Cameron, not Sunak. “What the fuck is this?” shouted one senior Tory, looking up at the TV screens. Levido advised the Prime Minister that the only option was to apologise, cauterise the wound and move on, but no-one was under any illusion about how bad it was for the campaign. Any hopes of an early poll tightening vanished.

McSweeney, however, believed Sunak’s campaign strategy was always doomed: he maintained it simply was not possible to appeal to Reform voters in this way without making the Tory campaign seem marginal to everyone else. Sunak’s cardinal sin, in McSweeney’s view, was his failure to deal with his Reform problem earlier: he could have tacked Right to crush the party; or he could have defined himself as a strong centrist by publicly taking on the recalcitrant MPs who had supported Liz Truss or were flirting with Farage. By doing neither, Sunak was fatally exposed.

Worse, his party looked out of touch. Why talk about national service to people who were drowning under the expense of their food, energy and childcare bills? They could only afford to make such specific pledges once they had established a strong campaign message, which they were unable to do. “They needed to get the plane off the ground first,” one senior Labour figure told me. But it wasn’t just a case of the policies being counterproductive; in McSweeney’s view, the very fact that Sunak suddenly tried to catch everyone off-guard with his election gamble also reinforced the narrative of Tory chaos.

Privately, I understand Levido is frustrated that his strategy for the start of the election was not successful. It failed, he believes, because, ultimately, voters had just stopped listening to the Tories. They were done. But starting 20 points behind in the polls did demand a riskier strategy than the one available to Labour. Levido was right to believe that closing the polls was the only way he could change the campaign narrative. Indeed, the reality is that from the moment Sunak called the election, the Tory campaign was not about winning, but stemming the scale of the defeat. Still, by mid-June there was still hope within the party that the Conservatives could finish with more than 200 MPs. It finished today relieved that it was the main party of opposition. Unless it gets its house in order quickly it won’t be so lucky next time. Remarkably, this defeat is both a punishment and an act of clementia. There is now an executioner’s blade hanging over the Tory Party.

Where McSweeney and Levido ultimately agree is the fact that much of the Tory problem — and Labour’s success — is because of decisions taken long before the election was called. Today’s Tory failure was baked in long before Sunak stood in the rain outside Downing Street and sealed his fate.

Indeed, those who know both McSweeney and Levido are struck by how similar they are as operators — quiet, softly spoken and no-nonsense. Sunak and Starmer are also remarkably similar in the tasks presented to them as leaders. Both had come into parties which had shown themselves unfit to govern. And both tried, at first, to hold their parties together, rather than take on those who had brought the party to the brink of ruin.

At first, in truth, Starmer and McSweeney had been quite concerned about Sunak. He was young, energetic and seemingly capable in the Covid era. But, then, he showed his essential weakness. In McSweeney’s view, Johnson’s great success in 2019 was persuading voters he was serious about change by purging the MPs standing in his way — including his own brother. Sunak convinced himself he didn’t need to do this or perhaps that he couldn’t. For McSweeney this was his original sin. As one Labour official put it: “He had a tiger at his front door and he had to go out and either shoot it or try to bring it into the house to domesticate it. He did neither and ended up being chased out of his back door.” By 2022, the options for displaying strength were extreme: expel Truss; condemn Johnson; launch a war against Farage. As the unelected head of a divided party, such options were not available to him. Nor was the opposite: inviting Farage to become a Tory. The task of weighing up such options now falls to the next Tory leader whoever that may be.

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Those who have worked with both Sunak and Johnson tell me that the fundamental difference between the pair was one of “animal instinct”. Sunak was serious, decent and good to work for, driven by an optimistic conviction that had stood him well throughout his life: because he is usually smarter than everybody else in the room, he only needed to work harder than everybody else to win. Johnson, meanwhile, appreciated that politics was far more mediaeval: a game of power and theatre in which displays of authority mattered. It was Starmer, though, who learned Johnson’s lesson, not Sunak. And he is unlikely to now repeat Johnson’s mistakes in government, though may quickly find he is just as unpopular for a host of other reasons.

If there were ever any tigers at Starmer’s door, few now doubt McSweeney would have shot them. He knew that the very fact Labour had put forward Jeremy Corbyn for leader risked disqualifying the entire party in the eyes of voters. Given Starmer had served under Corbyn for almost all of his time in government, this was potentially deadly in a campaign. Yet, McSweeney and Starmer moved to deal with this weakness by not only sidelining Corbyn but expelling him from the parliamentary party and stopping him from standing for Labour. McSweeney and those close to him maintain this was a prerequisite of today’s result. He also moved to exile Labour’s Corbynite leader in Scotland, Richard Leonard. Without this other act of ruthlessness, today’s crushing defeat of the SNP would have been impossible, McSweeney believes. The man from Cork who saved the Union — it is some story.

Even after the campaign began, Starmer’s top team showed a ruthlessness in their insistence that any Labour candidate who risked causing them trouble in the future would not be allowed to stand. This has cost them in Islington and Chingford, but it will be seen as a price worth paying. Starmer’s missteps on Gaza — principally that LBC interview — were just as costly. Where this Muslim rage at Labour now goes is another current in British politics which could yet build into something important. But it wasn’t only the decision to rid Labour of its troublesome priests of the Left which showed McSweeney’s ruthlessness. Before the campaign, both he and Starmer’s campaign coordinator Pat McFadden — now nailed on to be one of the very biggest beasts in the incoming government — had also moved to shut down every potential weakness imaginable, not only with Corbyn but on tax, spending, the green energy transition, Brexit, immigration and gender. The party war-gamed all the different campaigns the Tories might try to fight, including the one they eventually did: tax. None of the leading figures strayed from that message. Even the trade unions, unhappy with Labour’s general direction, played their part. Here was a movement determined to seize their moment, the lure of power proving as much of a disciplining force as the weariness of power has proved disabling for the Conservatives.

Brexit will of course remain the defining legacy of the Conservative era. This was a government elected to Get Brexit Done and did so, no matter how dishonourably. Yet the Brexit they delivered is now deeply unpopular, neither close enough to the EU to have avoided the inevitable friction of withdrawal, nor distinctive enough to have proved to voters there was much good gained from all the pain. More importantly, it does not feel like it has worked for many voters whose grievances were not really about the EU so much as the powerlessness they felt over their own government. The twin issues of immigration and the European Court of Human Rights will now step into the hole once filled by the EU, the fuel which will turbocharge Farage’s new army. The irony now is that the challenge of Making Brexit Work now falls to Starmer, the man who tried to stop it. What he does with it is now up to him. The party of England has lost control of its own revolution. In Richard II, John of Gaunt lies dying, lamenting the rule of his King: “That England, that was wont to conquer others, Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.” We can say the same of the Conservative Party.

And as it dies, there is little to be gained for the Conservatives, nor the Liberal Democrats or Reform, in claiming Keir Starmer does not have a mandate for revolution because he only won 34% of the vote. They handed him the keys to No 10. In raw power terms, his achievement is more impressive than Clement Attlee’s, Harold Wilson’s or even Tony Blair’s, having required a swing of 1997 proportions simply to become the government. Instead, he turned the biggest Tory majority since 1987 into the biggest Labour majority since 2001. He is now our Puritanical Lord Protector, master of Parliament. With Sue Grey running Whitehall, Starmer controls Westminster in a way Boris Johnson never could. The machine is his.

As Labour leader, Starmer has shown two principal traits, discipline and ruthlessness, which has not been in evidence on the Conservative side since before the last election. Yes, Starmer is now bound by a manifesto of such rigid discipline it will make his life harder in government: he will be forced to manage the same creaking infrastructure, funded by the same creaking economy. But if he is anywhere near as ruthless in the application of power as he was in his pursuit of it, the manifesto won’t bind him for long.

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The scale of his victory is so unique that in some ways it is harder to predict where the challenges to his authority will emerge — from within his cabinet, perhaps? Or from Farage’s new band of Reformers? Maybe even, somehow, from the bloodied corpse of the Conservative Party. All we do know is that the challenges will come. McSweeney and others were sanguine about the danger posed by Reform during this election, correctly calculating that the party damaged the Tories far more than Labour, but they are already conscious of the danger Farage will soon pose in swathes of small-town England which voted Labour this year but left Reform in second place. It is also the case that while Labour has shown discipline on issues where it is not comfortable, it remains vulnerable to any serious political party on the politics of gender, immigration and culture issues in particular.

However disciplined the Labour party has been over the past few years, the moral of this story is ultimately one of crime and punishment; a governing party driven mad by its failures of character, like Raskolnikov, unable to control itself, unable to govern and ultimately, at the death, unable even to think straight and maintain its dignity. The party has been sent into exile, not quite dead, but broken. It will take a long time to live down the dishonour of its defeat. “Ah, would the scandal vanish with my life,” John of Gaunt declares, hopefully. No such luck for Sunak, Truss, Johnson and the Conservative Party.

For today is Keir Starmer’s day. And Morgan McSweeney’s. Politics is the pursuit of power and they pursued it better than anyone else. Now they must now wield it. Becoming King is no guarantee of safety after all. Just ask Richard II.

In one sense, the road where Starmer grew up — Tanhouse Road — bathes contentedly in this tranquil Surrey slumber. It is a pleasant land preserved like some vision of Danny the Champion of the World by the socialism of Clement Attlee. There is a stream at one end and a pub at the other, as well as a local “gypsy camp” crouching on the hill behind.

It was here that I found myself earlier this week, traipsing around in the heat of the British summer, trying to understand the agonised soul of Tory England as it contemplated its own annihilation. Trapped between the barbarian tribes of Reform, Labour and the Liberal Democrats, it is unsure whether to wave the white flag or to launch a final quiet fight for salvation at the ballot box on Thursday.

And yet, today, you don’t have to walk far from Starmer’s old front door to be shaken from this daydream. The Haycutter, the pub at the end of Starmer’s old road, is a case in point. Though the name nods to the area’s not-so-distant past — the land behind Tanhouse Road, once owned by the Starmers and used as a Donkey Sanctuary, is still used for haymaking by a local farmer — The Haycutter is no drinking hole for farm hands, if it ever was. Instead, it is a place of derivative country chic, all gins and faded wood, Asahi on tap and the obligatory burrata and truffle fries for “starters and nibbles”.

It was here that I found a group of retired women, florally Tory and on the rosé. I mentioned that Starmer had grown up just a few doors down. “Well he should’ve known better, then,” quipped one with an authoritative grin. At the mention of Tony Blair, the same lady hissed. All were dismayed at the state of the country and the idea of a Labour government, but greeted the prospect of Reform becoming the opposition with horror. And yet, they have still not made up their minds who to vote for. “There definitely needs to be a change,” said one. “But frankly there’s no one to change to.” If Sunak had lost these ladies of Surrey, the game was surely up. But had he?

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By Tom McTague

Travelling through the North Downs and into the Kentish Weald beyond — a land now teeming with vineyards rather than hops (for shame) — I encountered this same message of agonised indecision again and again. Even on Tanhouse Road, one woman stopped me as I went poking around looking for clues for the life Starmer once led, and told a similar story: she was unsure who to vote for, and desperately disappointed that, at that moment, no-one had come knocking on her door to persuade her. And she once knew and liked the Starmer family.

For many, it seems, the election has barely even begun to penetrate their lives. There seems to be a hesitation about what to do about it — a bewildered apathy. Most I spoke to wanted the Government squashed, but beyond that were unsure. And this feeling seems to be felt particularly strongly by women.

For Rishi Sunak, however, it is these quietly fuming Tory women of the shires who may now decide the difference between respectable defeat and total humiliation. That at least is the conclusion of a number of Tory pollsters and candidates staring into the abyss.

The pollster Andrew Cooper, for example, who grew up in Surrey and went to school with Starmer before going on to advise David Cameron, told me that these hesitating women were the last great hope for the Conservatives: the new “shy Tories”, as he put it. “Having lived through the 1992-97 period when the polls were wrong because of what became known as the shy Tories,” he said, “I think all of the conditions are there — that we may have shy Tories again.”

And the figures certainly seem to back up his analysis. Even with just a few days to go, a poll shared with UnHerd shows that some 16% of those who voted Conservative in 2019 still don’t know who to vote for. Of these undecideds two-thirds are women. And of these, 70% are over 50, 80% voted Conservative at the last four elections — and the vast majority voted Leave in the EU referendum. They are also disproportionately concentrated in the south of England, with 44% living in the shires around London, while hardly any actually live in the capital itself. Of these women, just 10% say they have ever been tempted to vote Labour and even fewer have thought about backing the Lib Dems. And yet they are still apparently undecided.

So, why the “shyness”? Certainly, the women in the pub could not be described that way. One explanation is simple: like much of the rest of the country, they don’t like the Government — and, even more to the point, they don’t like Rishi Sunak. According to Cooper’s polling of 1,000 one-time Tories, only 5% thought Sunak was strong and only 4% thought he “shared my values.”

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For the Conservative campaign, this leaves Sunak in a particularly difficult situation. For these undecided shy Tories, they simply do not want to hear anything about why the Government deserves another chance — because they don’t think it does. “The only thing you can say to them,” Cooper said, “was ‘look, we’re going to lose anyway, and people like you do not want a Labour government with a huge majority, and the only way to avoid that is, is hold your nose and vote Tory again’.”

He points out that, contrary to some arguments that there is nothing Sunak could have done to turn around the Tory party’s fortunes, there has been a steady decline in the proportion of 2019 Conservative voters saying they intend to vote Tory again at the next election. Before “Partygate”, the proportion sticking with the Tories had dropped to 84%. By the height of that crisis, the proportion had dropped significantly into the mid-60s, before falling into the low 50s after Truss’s mini-budget. Since Sunak took over, however, the proportion of 2019 Tory voters who say they will vote Conservative again has plummeted to 44%. “And that’s on Sunak,” as Cooper put it to me.

But as the election draws to its conclusion, how many of these “shy” Tories will actually hold their noses to save the party? One Tory candidate in the Blue Wall told me the women he had spoken to “don’t want their friends to know they are voting Conservative”. Their husbands were grumpier, he added, and more likely to vote Reform. Another Tory candidate from the Home Counties told me she had certainly noticed women were more undecided in her canvassing: “Definitely.” But why? “They worry about public services [but] they’re not inspired by Keir — they’ve been too equivocal about women’s rights.” From a Tory perspective, J.K. Rowling’s attack on the Labour party last week could not have been better timed.

And yet, there has been little change in the polls. Indeed, there is no guarantee these women and their grumpy husbands will actually turn out to save the Conservatives. In fact, the reality could even be worse. In Tunbridge Wells, half an hour or so away from Hurst Green, I met one elderly couple who, at first, seemed to neatly match Cooper’s analysis of 2019 Tory voters. Yet, in this case it was the husband who was still, reluctantly, planning to vote Tory while the wife was still so furious she had not made up her mind. She might even turn up and spoil her ballot by drawing “a pretty picture” in protest. The shy Tories of 2024 might actually be a mirage — they’re just angry ones.

What is so remarkable about this election is that, just five years on, from Johnson’s triumph in 2019, we are contemplating not only the Conservative Party losing control of the Red Wall in the north, but also swathes of the Blue Wall which has for so long stood around London. Is this a part of a permanent change in British politics, the suburbs spreading into the former Conservative heartlands just as urban sprawl of the big Democratic cities of the United States is turning once-safe Republican states like Georgia and Virginia purple?

In private, I was told that Starmer’s campaign director Morgan McSweeney has been warning people that it would be wrong to draw any long term forecasts from the results this Thursday because of the volatile nature of modern politics. The reason for this is that, during the Eighties and Nineties, the vast majority of people always voted for the same party. People tended to have a clear sense of which party protected their interests, making it harder to persuade people to switch. As a result, relatively small swings were required to win elections. In 1979, for example, Margaret Thatcher won with a swing of around 5%. Today, the polls are suggesting Labour could win with a swing four times greater than this. The number of voters each party can count on has shrunk dramatically.

Underneath it all, then, is a new volatility spawned by the confusion voters now feel about which party represents people like them. Are the Tories for the rich or the “left behind”? Are they for the establishment or the Red Wall? And what of Labour? Are they for the forgotten small-town folk or the urban liberals? In Surrey and the Kentish Weald people seemed confused. Among the ladies of the Haycutter, one half-joked about how “common” it was that one of her neighbours was displaying a Vote Labour sign in their front garden. Yet, among the great middle-class sea of urban professionals spreading out from the cities of England, the sentiment is now entirely the other way around. Voting Left is a display of middle class distinction; only the old and the suspect vote otherwise — the sort who still drink in pubs that do not offer burrata.

According to the latest MRP polls, this sea of liberal voters is on course to wash away the last Tory tribes of old England. The great irony, however, is that this wave of Starmerite red may finally wash up on the high ground of Starmer’s conservative Hurst Green. Unless, of course, the angry women of the old world decide, reluctantly, that they must do their duty to save their tribe.

It’s a small world, populated primarily by LBC, Talk Radio, Times Radio and GB News (an audio simulcast of the TV channel). These are the radio equivalents of a rolling-news television channel, and are similarly hamstrung by the fact that there simply isn’t enough news to fill 24 hours in a day, especially if you don’t have the BBC’s budget. So, the format is essentially that of comment and discussion, and there’s little variation: you can either have a phone-in with a single host, or a pair of presenters who chat between themselves. In either case, they want your emails, texts, tweets and, in a recent development, WhatsApp voice messages.

The combined listenership of these four stations is, according to the latest Rajar figures, just under 5 million, two-thirds of which is accounted for by LBC. Together, they’re a little way behind BBC Radio 5 Live (on 5.25 million) and nowhere near Radio 4 (9.63 million). Still, 5 million is not to be sniffed at, and the sector is growing. At the time of the last general election, two of those stations — Times and GB News — didn’t exist.

So, what are they saying in this election? Not a great deal, as it happens. The problem is that the campaign isn’t what you’d call exciting. It’s hard to care when the winner is so certain, and when the cast is this dull. Keir Starmer is, as Willie Whitelaw said of Harold Wilson 50 years ago, “going around the country stirring up complacency”.

On Talk’s Sunday morning show, Peter Cardwell (“The Westminster Insider”) started off wanting to discuss the election — “Lots happening politically,” he said, inaccurately — before having to concede that most listeners were far more concerned with the story of a police car deliberately driving into a cow in Staines-upon-Thames. Come Monday afternoon, and Talk’s Jeremy Kyle was still on the cow. “I would move on,” he wailed, “but the calls are obsessed with it.” And on Tuesday morning, Mike Graham, also on Talk, returned to the theme. There was, he said, “a fascinating amount of interest”. The election, on the other hand, not so much.

In the absence of anything more substantial, most of the attention has been on opinion polls. Too much so, according to Andrew Neil on Times. “Another day, another poll,” added Matt Chorley, also on Times: “Should we ban opinion polls?”

And that’s a perfectly decent subject for a phone-in. As are, to take a couple of examples from recent days: “Should pop stars stay out of politics?” (GB News), and “Should we be giving pigeons contraceptives?” (Talk). What do you think? Call us now.

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By Alwyn Turner

It’s easy to mock, of course. Not so easy to fill a three-hour programme, when the previous three-hour programme, and the one before that, have also been raiding the same newspapers in search of stories. And definitely not easy when everyone is drawing on such a small pool of guests.

Because if you listen long enough, the same people come round and round again. This is obviously the case with the politicians sent out to do the media; if it’s a day for Wes Streeting to speak for Labour — as it so often seems to be — then you’ll hear him on every station. But it also applies to the pundits. On Monday morning, Lord Hayward (a Tory MP, until he lost his seat in 1992) talked about the likelihood of a low turnout with Julia Hartley-Brewer on Talk. An hour or so later he was to be found chatting about Reform UK with Andrew Neil over on Times.

“You present a show on GB News,” Neil said to Tory MP Philip Davies, which isn’t actually true anymore, but does give a flavour of the media carousel. And, of course, Neil himself helped found GB News and was once a (very good) phone-in host on LBC. “I wonder whether we’re going to hear from a wider range of people,” reflected Times’s political editor Kate McCann. It seems unlikely.

The calls are mostly predictable as well. Julia Hartley-Brewer asked listeners to say what the election is all about, and the answer turns out to be immigration. As Bev Turner put it on GB News, asking for comments on yet another silly and self-indulgent stunt by Just Stop Oil: “I think I probably know what you’re going to say about this.”

The one episode that has really stirred the blood thus far was Rishi Sunak’s D-Day snafu, which provoked a torrent of calls, virtually all hostile. And then there’s been the late arrival of Nigel Farage, the one genuine star in contemporary British politics, and very much of this world: he’s had his own shows on LBC and GB News in the past. His intervention has given his sympathisers something to get their teeth into, and, even more, has been a godsend for those who see Brexit as the first step towards fascism.

This latter camp is primarily represented by James O’Brien, a former showbiz reporter on the Daily Express who now does the weekday morning show on LBC and is very important indeed. Not my words, Carol… “According to the Press Gazette, I’m the most influential journalist in the country,” he said on Monday. Then again, he added the next day: “I’ve known everything since 2016.” (He did admit that “It sounds a bit conceited”.)

O’Brien has a tendency to lump together all his hate figures, so that any mention of Farage or Boris Johnson — and there are very many such mentions — is likely to be accompanied by a cry of “Look at Trump”. At times, these word-association asides are decidedly odd. When Farage said that not all Reform candidates went to public school, O’Brien spluttered: “Oswald Mosley went to Winchester, the same school that Sunak went to.” (Full disclosure: O’Brien went to Ampleforth, the same school as David Stirling, founder of wannabe coup-makers Great Britain 75.) “This is a grown-up programme,” he insisted.

LBC argues that it doesn’t need to do impartiality within programmes; it can achieve balance across the schedule, with presenters representing different viewpoints. And the station does have its Right-wing stars. Early-evening presenter Iain Dale even tried to become the Conservative candidate for Tunbridge Wells, though it didn’t work out and he was soon back on air. The difference is that, unlike O’Brien, Dale has guests and callers from across the political spectrum; he’ll air his own views, but isn’t snitty about those who don’t share them.

There’s also Nick Ferrari, formerly of Talk and now hosting breakfast on LBC, the most accomplished broadcaster in this whole sector; on the Right but consistently courteous and mostly tolerant of other perspectives. He’s had hour-long phone-ins with both Starmer and Sunak, which were billed as election specials, though they’re nothing new. Ferrari started this format with Nick Clegg, back when the Lib Dem leader was deputy prime minister. Call Clegg was a regular feature for years, followed by Ask Boris and Phone Farage, before Call Keir debuted in 2020. On these shows, Ferrari puts himself on the side of the callers, amplifying and clarifying their points, while also keeping them on-subject.

It works quite well, and Starmer has got better at it over the years, in that he’s learnt how to deflect difficult questions. Asked about single-sex spaces, he says he’s all in favour of them, and that this doesn’t conflict with Labour’s manifesto commitment to “modernise, simplify, and reform the intrusive and outdated gender recognition law” (the one introduced by the last Labour government). He doesn’t explain quite how the potential conflicts will be resolved, and instead veers off onto mixed-sex hospital wards, where the problem, he insists, is not trans but the Tories: “The government’s lost control of our hospitals.”

Sunak isn’t as good, but he does work better in this environment than elsewhere. Even the dumb questions are handled reasonably well. A caller denounced him for saying that he likes chocolate bars and sweets at a time when children’s dental health is so poor. Rather than snorting with derision at the idea that five-year-olds are looking to the prime minister as a role model, he stood by his vices: “I can’t apologise for eating Twixes or Haribos.”

The best angle of all has been to look back, rather than forward. There’s a whole talking-shop of recognisable MPs leaving Parliament, which gives these stations the opportunity of interviewees who are more relaxed and less concerned with toeing the party line. So Andrew Neil had the double-act of Michael Gove and Harriet Harman on to talk about the election, and the result was an intelligent and entertaining discussion, even if it felt like it came from an era that’s fast disappearing. Gove dismissed Reform as a “Potemkin party”, and said that the British electorate preferred “authoritative sensible administrators”.

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Better yet, Matt Chorley has been running an excellent series of Exit Interviews (theme music: “Go Now!” by the Moody Blues), in which he talks with departing MPs. On Monday it was Andrea Leadsom’s turn, giving one-word summaries of the prime ministers she has known: David Cameron (“charming”), Theresa May (“honourable”), Boris Johnson (“optimistic”), Liz Truss (“tough”), Rishi Sunak (“smart”). She still has some odd delusions — “A lot of people say to me, ‘We wish you’d become prime minister’” — but she was superbly vitriolic about the former Speaker, John Bercow, letting loose with end-of-term freedom. “It’s great to be saying this,” she exulted.

Two other adjacent stations should be mentioned. BBC Radio 5 Live (“The Voice of the UK”) continues to straddle, ever more awkwardly, sport and politics, as well as supplying showbiz gossip and chats about what was on telly last night. Its biggest star is Nicky Campbell, who is very good at phone-ins, though not always deployed very well. On Tuesday he was soliciting “Your questions for Adrian Ramsay” — that nice young man who’s the co-leader of the Green Party of England and Wales.

And then there’s Talk Sport, sister station of Talk Radio and Times Radio, which has a bigger listenership even than LBC. Its presenters have been instructed not to mention the election, a fact that Charlie Baker probably wasn’t supposed to mention live on air. They don’t seem to be too worried by this prohibition, since they have the Euros, the T20 World Cup, the US Open, Royal Ascot, Wimbledon and the Olympics to keep them busy, but it’s still a shame. What remains of political interest is the selection of news headlines that non-obsessives might notice. And that, again, means Farage. On the launch of the Reform manifesto, they opened their bulletin — without introduction — on a clip of his new catchphrase: “Guess who’s back?” There was no time for discussion of the contents.

What do we learn from these stations? Mostly that the election hasn’t caught alight. TV debates have lost their novelty; pledges haven’t been carved in stone; Sir Ed Davey’s habit of falling over and getting wet hasn’t sparked a new version of Cleggmania. For all the talk of this being a seismic moment in political history, bearing comparison with 1906, 1945, 1979 and 1997, the public aren’t much engaged. Times bills itself as “Your Election Station”, but Matt Chorley is probably closer, as he jokingly trails an upcoming report from a hairdressing salon in Rochdale: “We are the election station — and we take the election very seriously.”

In that battle to replace Macmillan, the big guns Rab Butler, Quintin Hailsham, and Reginald Maudling were all spoken about as successors. But nobody really knew who had the best chance and the public were left in the dark. Because in 1963, no high street bookmaker would lay odds on political events. 

It was the legendary Ladbrokes odds compiler Ron Pollard who would change that. Sensing immense public interest in the outcome of the contest he advised his bosses to run a book on it to gain some added publicity for the bookmaker. 

Prior to that, in the 1920s, political betting had been confined to city traders who would bet on “majorities” — what we now call spread betting — where seat totals would be calculated, and traders would buy/sell above or below the line. 

At the 1931 election, speculators traded over £750,000 on the election and severely under-estimated the prospect of a Labour collapse. The losses of one punter led to a much-publicised court case when a trader refused to pay up, citing the Gaming Act as his defence. In the aftermath, election gambling was outlawed.

Yet, after the war, gambling became a huge part of everyday life for the public. Better job security, higher wages and more leisure time were all themes of the time. The rise of football pools, premium bonds and bingo offered working-class people an outside shot at a huge windfall. Viv Nicholson, a liquorice factory worker from Castleford, won £152,000 (equivalent to almost £5 million today) on the pools with the promise to “spend, spend, spend”.

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Politicians, particularly on the Labour side, had feared the rise of gambling. Figures such as Ramsay MacDonald had described it in the Thirties as “a disease which spread downwards to the industrious poor from the idle rich”. But society was changing. In a speech in Dewsbury in 1956, Nye Bevan urged his Left-wing colleagues not to be “puritan” and that they should encourage people to “have a good time”. “I do not mind a man putting a shirt on a horse so long as he does not put someone else’s on.” 

When it came to the 1963 contest, Pollard gained publicity from the media for offering the odds despite him pricing it completely wrong. As many commentators and journalists had assumed, he decided that Rab Butler was the clear  frontrunner at 5/4. However, it was the 16/1 outsider Alec Douglas-Home who took out the prize in the end. 

Not everybody was impressed by Pollard’s decision. In a highly hypocritical statement, the Left-wing Labour backbencher Ian Mikardo used a speech in Poplar to criticise Ladbrokes. ”It is a sad day for Britain when the bookmakers turn aside from horses and dogs to make a book on who is going to lead the nation”. He accused the Tories of “dragging the premiership down to the level of the ‘Donkey Derby’”.  

Mikardo would radically change his view in the next decade as he became the semi-official Commons bookmaker, taking bets on political events for the rest of his career. Soon, politicians saw it as a chance to make a quick buck. Before the rise of online betting, if you went to the William Hill shop on Horseferry Road, the nearest one to the Commons, you would often find rogue MPs gambling on football, racing, golf or their own electoral prospects. 

Others won big by backing themselves against the odds. The now-disgraced Liberal MP Clement Freud — who was investigated by the Met in 2016 for histroic child sexual abuse claims — was once notorious for being the shrewdest punter in Westminster when he was the candidate in the Isle of Ely by-election in 1973. Having begun as the 33/1 outsider, he managed to place £1,000 on himself — winning the equivalent of £340,000 in today’s money when he became the MP.  

In the mainstream, however, political betting was seen as a fringe activity in contrast to the big money that bookies took on football and horse racing. By the Nineties, it was still seen as a good way for bookmakers to promote their brand in the serious pages of the newspapers and gain some free advertising. 

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By Oliver Bateman

In 1997 the press tracked down the Durham taxi driver who had, in 1983, placed a £10 bet on one of his passengers, a young Tony Blair one day becoming prime minister. Again, in 2010, William Hill reported that it stood to lose £1 million after it emerged they had laid bets to two students in 1996 — Justin Tomlinson and Chris Kelly — that one day they would become prime minister. Both became Conservative MPs, but only Tomlinson remains in with a shout of netting a £500,000 windfall. 

In recent years though, political betting has become a serious business as the stakes have grown far higher. The emergence of more firms and markets, combined with the boom in online gambling, has created an increased interest. 

During the Scottish Independence referendum, one punter staked £1 million on the outcome — winning £193,000 over the course of a few hours on election night. Then, in 2016, over £120 million was wagered on the Brexit referendum, while the dramatic Trump/Clinton US contest a few months later was adjudged to have been the biggest single betting event — barring the grand national — the UK has ever seen. 

As of 2023, the industry is estimated to be worth over £14.3 billion and the big winners, beyond the bookmakers, are the Treasury who rake in huge tax revenues. Denise, John and Peter Coates, the owners of bet365, were the third-highest taxpayers in the UK last year, according to the latest edition of the Sunday Times rich list. 

With the 2024 election in full swing, the bookmakers are now readying themselves for what could be the biggest British election ever for punters. William Kedjanyi is the “man with a whiteboard” and Star Sports dedicated full-time politics guru who will be gunning across the country this month. “Political betting has now entered the mainstream,” Kedjanyi says. “Twenty years ago, it used to be just for political anoraks, but as there is more data and more polling companies, the public demand for a bet is increasing.”

Whereas the average sports punter doesn’t use data models to predict the outcome of an event, the political punters are more switched on to trends that are happening. These are, Kedjanyi says “stats people or political scientists with their own models.” All of which means that the bookmakers need to be attuned to what is happening on the ground. 

So far in this campaign, the big question that dominates the betting world is the same one that dominates the rest of the election; just how much can the Conservative vote collapse? 

Paul Krishnamurty is a freelance journalist and professional gambler who writes the Betfair politics blog each week. He has already advised his followers to back Labour and back them to win big. “If you look at recent wins in the mayoral elections in York/North Yorkshire and East Midlands, Labour are winning in places, easily, where they started miles behind. It all suggests these MRP projections and betting signals are accurate”. 

Since the campaign began, the bookmakers have seen money flooding towards Labour and the Lib Dem in their marginal seats. Krishnamurty argues that “tactical voting to help the Lib Dems is underestimated, especially in rural areas”. The flow of money so far suggests that the public have looked at Sunak’s campaign and decided that he is about to take them to their worst defeat in history. The odds of a Tory collapse are shortening by the day — and they are now favoured in some places to win between 50-99 seats.

The only glimmer of hope for Sunak is that the bookmakers, like the pollsters, have got it wrong before. History suggests that it can happen. Not only did they miss the Brexit vote and Trump’s 2016 victory, but they also laid 200/1 odds on Jeremy Corbyn to become Labour leader.

During an election campaign, events can change voters’ attitudes before the bookmakers have caught on. Take 2017 as a case study. The Tories were initially priced to be on course for a handsome 86-seat majority. But as the election unravelled for Theresa May, the chance of a hung parliament was still seen as a huge outside bet — priced at 7/1 with a week to go. On election night — the markets failed to react to the exit poll — and then overreacted by making Jeremy Corbyn the favourite to become the next prime minister. 

The problem for Sunak is events — symbolised in his decision to skip the D-Day commemoration — are now running against him. With each day that passes, the media and the public are searching for the next gaffe to undermine his campaign. 

History also suggests that bookmakers have missed the size of a party’s collapse on the assumption that there is a floor to their support. In 1983 they were slow to respond to Labour’s collapse by offering punters 28/1 on a Conservative victory by 97 seats or more (Thatcher won by 144). In 1997 the bookmakers also sensed that the Conservative vote would hold up with the seat line priced at 367 for Labour to the Tories 242. Sellers of Tory seats had a great night when the party chalked up just 165 MPs as minister after minister was humbled. 

As we approach the July poll, history suggests that the bookmakers could have overstated the Labour lead or actually underestimated a Conservative collapse. And just as the politicians are constantly calculating what risks to take and what they can do to turn things around, the punters watch every move in a campaign to see whether they can gain a new edge or spot the next trend before anybody else. In a world in which Westminster politics is increasingly unpredictable and voters are more volatile than ever before, the iron laws which once ruled politics no longer exist. And the more unpredictable it is, the more interesting it is for punters — just as Ron Pollard had suspected way back in 1963. 

This, essentially, is Labour’s message going into the election, and what passes as “idealism” within today’s modern polity. Politics in our broken democratic system, with its antiquated institutions, is relegated to pantomime fodder. The choice of leaders and parties is a rearranging-deckchairs-on-the-Titanic exercise, rather than a harbinger of the deep systemic change required to restore and extend a crumbling democracy. If one thing can be guaranteed in the coming general election, it’s that absolutely nobody will be inspired.

Granted, some visceral satisfaction will be gained through the supposedly inevitable toppling of the corrupt, silver-spooned charlatans who have systematically enriched themselves and their friends at the expense of the taxpaying public — at a time, ironically, when we most needed strong, engaged, selfless and compassionate leadership. Whatever these people are, they are certainly not public servants. But Britain, with its outdated class system, spearheaded by its elitist public schools, will always usher such scamming deadbeats into positions of power.

Fortunately, though I retain some nagging doubts about the outcome of the election being as conclusive as universally predicted, these disassemblers will be replaced — but by whom?

Keir Starmer has almost militantly made “business as usual” as his platform. But, then, we’ve long moved away from the political ecosystem in which Labour could at least pretend it was going to do something radical. Today, its behaviour is proscribed long before it gets there. Corbyn, in the way of white, middle-class socialists, was naïve in his associations with anyone deemed to be a member of an oppressed group. As soon as he was elevated to Labour leader, he paid a high price for that folly. The even-handed, mild-mannered, allotment-tending community activist of 40 years was ludicrously branded a Nazi.

Starmer replaced Corbyn, and his campaign is exactly as promised. We’ve had constant parroting about “change” — but what’s the substance of that change? “Vote for me; kick the Tories out,” seems to be the size of it. In the absence of any grand vision, all we’ve had is ruthless purging of anyone who seems to carry the awkward baggage of principle, while Tory rejects are welcomed with open arms. This is what centre-left politics looks like today.

And yet, the greatest devastation to British politics has not been the growing toxicity of the Right or Left, whatever such terms now mean in a world where an avaricious corporate-statist capitalism has destroyed both socialism and the free market. The fundamental sea-change has been neoliberalism’s radicalisation of the centre. Centrists used to be the cuddly toys of British politics, unshackled by deterministic doctrines, with their pragmatic social democracy and one-nation Toryism. But following the collapse of those pluralist reference points, they are now as ideologically blinkered as anyone on the polarities. And as easily duped.

As a result, millions of voters will have to choose between parties to whom they are at best highly ambivalent, and at worst detest. Their only bet is business as usual, as they struggle through the cost-of-living crisis, made interminably worse by Brexit and lockdown, while idealistic youth watch their elected government and opposition support mass child-killing in the Middle East. This is the backdrop against which a public-school imposter, the serial failure Farage, can posture as a “man of the people” and “anti-establishment” in a windswept, down-at-heel Essex seaside town, and be seen as the best of a bad bunch.

Perhaps, if you buy into the zero prospects culture of Starmerism, and you boot the Tories out, you won’t be disappointed. Maybe — depressingly — Labour’s low-expectations merchants might even be the most honest politicians of our era. Perhaps they are simply holding their hands up and quietly declaring that they can do nothing against the machine.

Perhaps all we can realistically expect from our elected officials is for them to represent us to the best of their abilities in their constituencies, and not see the public purse as something to be divided up between themselves and their cohorts through bogus thieving scams. It’s possible that this really is now the extent of political idealism. What an unedifying spectacle this election is.

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By Irvine Welsh

The Tories in government have been so disgracefully venal, causing so much damage through corruption, austerity, Brexit and their mismanagement of the pandemic, that people will doubtless vote them out in reasonable — but perhaps not exceptional — numbers. But over the next five years, it seems likely that the Conservatives will be revitalised, rebranded and move farther to the Right. That’s when, with our goldfish spans of attention, the Tories will win a landslide, with nothing in the centre or Left of a soft Labour Party worth getting out of bed to vote for. To see how that will play out, it might be an idea to watch America in November.

Until something changes, politics will continue to be just another distracting circus. We’ll watch those huckster entertainers, laughing and sneering at each other, as we do the same to them online. Probably all the way up to the point where we lose our work and our homes; we starve slowly to death or succumb to mental disorders, though perhaps only killing ourselves when they take away our smartphones.

If we wanted something to change, we could start with properly taxing billionaires. After all, a healthy society needs absolutely no billionaires. It needs many more millionaires and multi-millionaires, to genuinely incentivise it to excellence, and the money they take out of the economy has to be put back: to build a social and financial platform for all our citizens.

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By Darren McGarvey

The Tories will never try to make this happen; they are either the rich beneficiaries of the system, or their suck-arse sycophants. Labour, meanwhile, is too frightened to even try. Their despondent fear, as we approach the election, is the pervading stink across Britain. It won’t go away afterwards.

What to do? Well, I obviously can’t support the Conservatives, and Labour is no mechanism for change. It’s about the only thing we can trust Starmer on. So I’ll be scouring my list for an independent man or woman of sound principle, who isn’t part of the lobby-fodder machine. Failing that, someone in a smaller party with a radical and independent spirit. They won’t get elected, but a big increase across the country for such candidates would signal that it might be the beginning of the end for the gravy train of power-hungry “professional” politicians.

If anyone tells me that’s a waste of a vote, I’d counter that voting Labour and expecting anything to be different is a bigger and ultimately more hurtful waste. The principled independent route seems like the least futile of a series of deeply inefficacious gestures. Listen to the new boss when he tells you he’ll be the same as the old one.

We rarely think about what it means to assign towns or neighbourhoods to the bottom of our moral geography; but those who live in them often feel ashamed, not because they have committed any wrong but because they know they are seen as lesser beings. They report feeling small and powerless, with their behaviour “painfully scrutinised and negatively evaluated”. Sadness, depression and a sense of isolation can often follow. The effect on the self can be devastating.

Curiously, this kind of humiliation becomes possible only when a society has, in its ideology, transcended ideas of natural difference, and convinced its citizens that they are due equal rights and dignity. For instance, when women and non-white people demanded equal rights and dignity, they rightly began to push back against the everyday slights and humiliations visited on them by dominant groups, who found shaming people on the basis of their gender or race increasingly frowned upon. 

In the great era of post-war social democracy, something similar began to happen in the case of social class. In the most wince-inducing scene of The Remains of the Day, set in the Thirties, the butler — Stevens, whose life goal is to serve his master with complete devotion and professionalism — is humiliated by the patrician friend of Lord Darlington who wants to demonstrate the lower class’s ignorance of global affairs and therefore the error of permitting them to have a vote. Yet, despite our own embarrassment and rising sense of outrage, the butler, played in the film by Anthony Hopkins, did not seem to feel the humiliation — because he accepted implicitly that he was of a lower social order and should not be expected to know these things.

Social shaming is by no means confined to the lower orders, whom today we refer to with terms such as disadvantaged communities and the precariat. In fact, shaming is a general phenomenon of stratified society, although its effect is much more apparent in some.

A survey of Australians we commissioned for our new book, The Privileged Few, found that half of young adults admit to having felt ashamed about where they grew up, the school they attended, or their parents’ employment. Shame is a strong emotion to admit too, even in an anonymised survey. We found that parents in households with children are much more likely to admit to feelings of shame than those in households without children, perhaps because adolescents feel shame more intensely than adults and memories of emotional wounds fade as one grows older. In our follow-up focus groups, some made poignant comments about how, as children, they thought they were normal until someone denigrated their suburb or their school or even their father’s low-status job.

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The side effect of this shaming is worryingly that people lower down the hierarchy say they conceal where they live or where they went to school, either by lying or becoming evasive when asked. One of our informants spoke of how “people would cringe when I mentioned the… suburb I came from, so sometimes I’d pick another suburb, so they don’t cringe”. Another said that when he mentioned his state school to a partner at the accounting firm where he works, “he visibly recoiled… He looked at me differently.”

In 2012, Owen Jones published Chavs, a powerful polemic against the demonisation of the working class, or at least the element of it characterised by the media and some politicians as “feckless, criminalised and ignorant”. But the extremes of condescension, scorn and even disgust directed at “chavs” should be understood within a broader distribution of “microaggressions” up and down the social scale and manifesting in feelings of embarrassment, humiliation, resentment, guilt, envy, arrogance and contempt. Unlike debates over the microaggressions of race and gender that have dominated the public domain in recent years, the microaggressions of class are often ignored. Yet they seethe beneath the surface, erupting at times when the privileges enjoyed by elites become too brazen, too egregious — justas they did during the pandemic. 

As the Covid virus spread in the early months of 2020, and London began to shut down, wealthy families fled the city for their sanctuaries in the country. Others took to their yachts or flew to Caribbean islands. Estate agents fielded inquiries from the super-rich for “mansions with bunkers”. Newspaper stories reporting the flight of the rich attracted a torrent of bitter and cynical comments from the public. 

We argue in our book that relations among those up and down the social scale are fraught with emotional effort and inner turmoil. Informants for our study (in “egalitarian” Australia) admitted that they pay more attention and respect to people they believe are wealthy or influential. Some look up to them even though they don’t want to and it goes against the grain of their moral code. One conceded that if someone pointed out a billionaire at a party then “I think you may afford them a bit more respect”. These comments were made bashfully, as if looking up to the rich and powerful went against some inner principle or entailed a small sacrifice of dignity.

At the other end of the spectrum, some from a higher position in the hierarchy may want to be respectful and congenial in their relations with those below, but risk being seen as condescending, disrespectful or unduly familiar. While one spoke of levelling-up by changing the way she speaks and carries herself in the presence of a higher status person, another, who had attended an elite school, commented that the adjustment can work the other way so that “you might come down a notch or two”. But he has also discovered that the gulf between the elites and the rest sometimes takes the form of disdain from below: “You get on really well with somebody and then they ask you that dreaded question ‘Where do you live? What school do you go to?’ And the instant you say it, their face drops.”

We are not suggesting an equivalence between disdain from above and disdain from below. The face drop does not have the social power of the cringe. As Kathryn Abrams observed, “a war of disgusts is one that those less socially privileged are unlikely to win”.

These injuries of social class are often felt most painfully in the schoolyard, among children yet to learn the rules of social inhibition or, indeed, respect for difference. In schools, interactions among students and between students and teachers are beset by the everyday slights and humiliations associated with social and economic difference. Yet the language of class, once a powerful tool serving the interests of equality and dignity, has fallen out of fashion. The words to parry the microaggressions of class are absent.

If you speak to 11-year-olds, they can call out sexism and racism, even ageism, but when it comes to discrimination or vilification on the basis of class or social status they are dumbstruck. Those students who intend to remain in the state system after primary school are often shamed by those whose parents are sending them to elite private schools. Public schools are “shit”, said one. How does an 11-year-old respond? With an explanation of the social benefits of the public education system? Or with an epithet such as “snob”, which has little rhetorical power in the neoliberal area of “choice” and getting ahead by whatever means possible. The absence of a language of class politics — as opposed to a vibrant language of gender and racial politics — means that shaming on the basis of social status or the school one goes to is taken in as personal wound rather than as an expression of social division.

Students at elite private schools in Britain as elsewhere are taught to assume the superiority of their position. As one graduate observed: “I joined Westminster School [in London] for sixth form. On my first day we were given a talk by the headmaster, who told us: “You are the crème de la crème of this country. Sitting around you are future leaders. Don’t you forget it.”

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These schools aim to imbue the offspring of the elite with certain higher moral and spiritual qualities, a process known as consecration, sanctifying these students as beyond the ordinary and moulding them into objects of power and influence; in short, elite. They are taught the dispositions of ease, confidence and entitlement appropriate to a world of privilege. 

The uncomfortable conclusion we draw is that elite privilege is best viewed as a set of everyday practices that sorts and reproduces social strata. Studying the alchemy of how privilege is done, whereby elites seek and are granted exclusive benefits, suggests that the privileges bestowed on elites are not a by-product of wealth but an organising principle used to enforce social difference. In the end, it is our collective compliance that makes elite privilege so deeply entrenched and “natural”, even though it is responsible for so many harms: economic harms, civic harms, and psychic harms, not least the everyday system of shaming and humiliation that is characteristic of a society of privilege. 

Still, it’s a dangerous game for the elites because shaming can congeal into resentment, a political anger that can break through in unpredictable ways. A political class that not only lacks an understanding of the problems of class demonisation but actively seeks to participate in it is doomed to face the reckoning of a vengeful electorate.

After all, Powell’s recollection of the newsreel footage of the time — of “close-ups of stocky demagogues, fuming, gesticulating, stamping; oceans of raised forearms; steel-helmeted men tramping in column; armoured vehicles rumbling over the pavé of broad boulevards” — could be a description of the Conservative Party’s first election broadcast. CCHQ’s offering looks like government propaganda from Children of Men: over images of missiles firing and a Chinese tank parading down a boulevard, we are assured our nation’s survival lies only with Sunak’s Conservative Party. The voters, it appears, do not share this conclusion.

As this week’s exclusive UnHerd poll revealed, 54% of voters believe that Britain will be at war within five years. If the majority opinion of the poll respondents is correct, Britain is about to elect a wartime Prime Minister, and have reluctantly chosen Starmer. Given a choice between Starmer and whichever Tory plotter next takes their turn on the throne, this is not an unreasonable decision. Yet in a general election driven by voter apathy, disenchantment and a widespread dissatisfaction, one of the strange lacunae so far has been the absence of any serious discussion of British foreign policy. The election is taking place in the shadow of a volatile international order, and yet the wars in which Britain has found itself embroiled have been sublimated, in the campaign discourse, into parochial domestic concerns.

The Gaza war, whose regional escalation has already seen British jets ineffectually bomb Houthi militants in Yemen and shoot down Iranian drones heading for Israel, has been transmuted into a culture-war debate about the policing of demonstrations in London. In Ukraine, Western allies have just crossed another long-standing red line over permitting Kyiv to use donated weapons to attack inside Russia, provoking a furious debate among security and international relations analysts — and yet the war itself has, for most people, long faded into the background. In the Far East, where Johnson’s ill-fated government committed the Royal Navy to a “Pacific tilt”, Chinese sabre-rattling against Taiwan is ramping up alarmingly. The rising costs of energy, food and consumer goods driven by geopolitical disorder — a mere foretaste of what is yet to come — have taken euphemistic form as “the cost-of-living crisis”, like a permanent shift in weather patterns to be grimly adapted to, rather than a consequence of political choices.

The drumbeat of war is growing ever louder, yet even as Sunak disastrously moots conscription for the young and Starmer pledges a triple lock on the nuclear deterrent, campaigning on the threatening international situation is either an afterthought or an opportunity to posture. Even in the first televised election debate, vital questions of national security were only discussed towards the end, as short soundbites tacked on to a question from a Muslim voter about Gaza. We are told, again and again, that we are living in a 1938 world, and then the dire warnings are overtaken by the usual Westminster gossip and dysfunction. Lobby journalists badger Starmer on whether, and even when, he will use Britain’s nuclear deterrent. Britain’s genuinely alarming security situation, a topic that requires urgent national debate over both the country’s preparedness and willingness to go to war, is just more fodder for the soundbite class.

It is alarming to observe on social media a growing conspiracy theory, notably stoked by the former Conservative MP Andrew Bridgen, that Britain will “reveal” at some point this summer that it is at war with Russia (why Putin would respect the needs of Sunak’s election campaign in obscuring this information has not been convincingly explained). Yet no doubt such anxieties spring from the simultaneous reality of the threats Britain now faces and the strange, cynical unreality of the political discourse surrounding them. It is genuinely irresponsible of Sunak to throw out half-baked plans for national service, which would do nothing to address the modernisation needs of Britain’s still-shrinking and under-equipped Army, purely as desperate bait for wavering conservative voters. In doing so, the entire discourse around national security is cheapened, and warnings about the genuine threats we face are rendered less credible.

Equally, it is irresponsible of Starmer to suborn Britain’s approach to the Middle East conflict to Labour’s internal psychodrama over Corbyn. By initially pledging his unflinching support for Israel’s poorly-planned punitive campaign in Gaza — which now looks set to end with Hamas still in power, tens of thousands of civilians dead, and Israel’s leadership facing war crimes charges — Starmer chose to exorcise Corbyn’s ghost and avoid any serious analysis of the war’s aims and likely outcome. Despite pledging to place country over party, when it came to the first serious test of his future foreign policy, Starmer placed his own intra-party feuds over Britain’s national interest. Had Starmer chosen the path set out here at the beginning of war, of entirely disengaging from the conflict — a policy, the new UnHerd poll reveals, that a majority of the country supports — he would be in a stronger position now.

Instead, just as the Conservative Party finds itself outflanked on the Right among its core voter base over immigration, Starmer finds the Labour Party, in essence a fragile coalition of southern liberals and northern Muslims, struggling to maintain the support of a demographic whose votes could previously be weighed rather than counted. Indeed, the growing antipathy to Israel’s very existence revealed by the poll, now the dominant opinion among the young, can perhaps be partly attributed to the country’s rapidly changing demographics, until now welcomed by Labour Party functionaries as both a desirable outcome in itself and a sure source of votes. Despite the Greens’ attempt to capture Labour’s wavering Muslim vote, the future of politics in Northern towns may soon enough look more like George Galloway’s vision of social conservatism and anti-Western foreign policy than the top-down Zionism of Starmer’s rightward revolution. Blair may have failed at exporting liberal democracy to the Middle East, but by radically transforming the country’s immigration policies, he was unintentionally successful in importing the Middle East’s deepest passions to Westminster. No doubt future analysts, observing the increased salience of Indian and Nigerian political passions in Britain, will make the same observation of Johnson’s most transformative contribution to British history.

Yet until the twin effects of both a rapidly changing world order and Britain’s changing demographics hit the Westminster system, British foreign policy careens down the road of path dependency. As David Lammy’s recent distillation of the Labour Party’s strategic worldview proves, there is no meaningful choice on offer in this election of what foreign policy to pursue, or serious discussion of what British national interests require: such matters are intentionally depoliticised, kept carefully away from debate in front of mere voters. The Tory rebel Robert Jenrick’s call for an “Anglo-Gaullist” foreign policy, ruthlessly focussed on British self-interest, is the majority opinion in the country, according to the UnHerd poll, but it is nowhere to be found in Whitehall: to even suggest such a thing would be an unforgivable offence against mandarin dignity.

Part of the problem, no doubt, is that British security and foreign policy is made in Washington: with our closed and inward-looking national caste of securocrats dedicated to the Atlantic alliance as a good in itself, the only decisions available to the two parties is how far to acquiesce to America’s strategic whims of the moment. Whether or not these whims, bitterly debated in the imperial capital itself, are in Britain’s interests are irrelevant: the choice we are given is only how best to interpret Washington’s confused and ambiguous desires.

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While the international situation looms like a threatening cloud over this election, the absence of any meaningful discussion of Britain’s strategic vision merely reflects the fact that, until we know who wins the American election, we cannot say with certainty what our foreign policy will actually be. Now Biden reigns, both parties’ Ukraine policy is to support Kyiv until Russia’s total defeat, no matter how unrealistic that now sounds. Should Trump win and seek peace negotiations with Putin, even at Ukraine’s expense, then that will automatically become Britain’s policy too — though there has been no domestic discussion of what that outcome would look like, and how Britain’s future relationship with an aggressive, aggrieved Russia can be securely managed. Whichever of America’s two gerontocratic rivals wins the election, Starmer will bend the knee and pledge Britain’s security and prosperity at his service. The great questions of strategy, even when they determine national survival, are after all a matter for great powers, not mere client states: as ever, the weak do what they must.

In his 1940 memoir Strange Defeat, the pioneering historian Marc Bloch, who had latterly served as a staff officer, and would later be executed by the Gestapo for his Resistance activities, ruminated on the causes of France’s sudden military collapse. The army was poorly led and unprepared; the country was bitterly divided. Yet Bloch reserved his deepest antipathy for “the parliamentary system [which] has too often favoured intrigue at the cost of intelligence and true loyalty”. In the France of 1940, Bloch wrote:

“Our party machinery had already begun to give off the smell of a dry-rot which it had acquired in small cafés and obscure back rooms. It could not even offer the excuse that it was strong, because at the first breath of despotism it collapsed like a house of cards… More often than not they failed even to determine who was to wield the power. They served merely as spring-boards for clever careerists who spent their time knocking one another off the top of the political structure.”

In the situation we now face, such immediately recognisable political dysfunction is a luxury Britain cannot afford: our nation’s security is a matter of far greater import than the Westminster rigmarole we sank into in safer times.

Yet the overriding theme of the election — from the Left-wing and Muslim discontent with Starmer, of which Galloway is now the sole Westminster incarnation, to Farage’s reinvigorated revolt against the Conservatives from the Right — has been a message from the electorate that Britain’s political system works against the British people’s interests, and requires total root-and-branch reform. This is doubly true of our foreign policy, the shadowy presence looming behind every rote stump speech on this campaign. Domestically, and internationally, history has fated us to live at the end of one political order and the troubled birth of another. We cannot go on as we are: and for good or ill, soon enough we will not.

Tory Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is concerned. But fear not! He has a solution. After reading all the Left-wing think pieces, in which the cure for crime is always — yes — more youth clubs, he has decided this doesn’t go nearly far enough. What we need is, in fact, youth clubs but on steroids: “a bold new model of National Service for 18-year-olds”.

Are the young enthused? As the kids say: lol. The general sentiment is outrage: the Tories locked them in their homes for two years, stunting education and proliferating psychiatric distress. They mortgaged young people’s futures to pay for a fleeting (and, in the end, largely illusory) sense of safety for their elders, leaving behind a legacy of zero growth, crippled businesses, and swingeing taxes to service stratospheric borrowing. They hectored young people about duty, while breaking out the cake and champagne for birthday parties. And now, they propose to impose yet another obligation to Pride and Duty and Cohesion on the young.

Among younger Right-leaning individuals of my acquaintance, the talk is less of voting Tory than of annihilating them. The more vengeful call for “Zero Seats”: a coordinated plan of tactical voting, with the aim of ensuring victory for whichever candidate is most likely to defeat the Tory one. Others, from anons to mainstream journalists, wonder if Sunak has chosen so rebarbative a proposal in a deliberate attempt to throw the election. But I don’t think this is quite right. Rather, it’s a logical consequence of the Tories’ electoral bind, whose nature we can discern in the location he chose to announce the policy: the Mail on Sunday.

There, he told us cheerily that National Service would become a “rite of passage”. It would, he insists, “create a shared sense of purpose among our young people and a renewed sense of pride in our country”. We might, should we be so inclined, snort at Sunak’s delusional effort to reverse engineer a sense of national belonging, by reheating a policy that was only politically palatable in the aftermath of Second World War because that sense of national belonging already existed. We might gesture at the gulf it highlights between the majority-white and broadly patriotic Middle England retirees at which this dead cat — let’s not call it a policy — is addressed, and the increasingly multi-ethnic and post-colonial British Zoomer cohort now reaching maturity.

But what would be the point? Given the current state of polling, no one seriously imagines Sunak is ever going to have to implement this. It’s a fantasy proposal, launched in a newspaper whose average reader is 60, owns their own home, and lives in the South East. It’s addressed, with bleak cynicism, at an electorate whose likelihood of voting Conservative more or less rises in a straight line by age, with the 18-24 group least likely to do so. In other words: this policy is proof positive that Sunak has simply written off younger voters, and opted to speak over their heads to their boomer elders — the Conservatives’ steadily dwindling electoral base — as though the young were simply not there.

Nor, we’ve since learned, does this even represent peak Tory gerontification. Yesterday gifted us the “Quadruple Lock”: yet another guarantee for the state pension, clawed from the stagnant wages of Britain’s shrinking corpus of working-age adults. But if the Quadruple Lock is bare-faced clientelism, National Service is a wholly fake policy whose principal objective is to distract those boomers still solipsistic enough to vote Tory from the fact that, just as before Brexit, there’s little to distinguish the Conservative Party from the rest of the uniparty.

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This uniparty, which comprises every mainstream political representative of the zombie-liberal consensus, views the British nation-state as effectively obsolete. It’s content-free. It has no culture, no people, nothing to offer other than tourist tat, a flaccid trading zone, and some services that may be obtained on a gym-membership basis by just showing up.

Our foreign policy has long been set by the United States. Our immigration policy is set internationally too, by a mix of corporate interests and international regulations. As for economic policy, the brief and lettuce-like reign of Liz Truss demonstrated (no matter how bonkers you thought her proposals) that any deviation from the City’s preferred approach results in prompt defenestration. Even environmental policy has mostly become a smoke-and-mirrors mix of Davocratic posturing and corporate subsidies, as evidenced by the simultaneous moves to reduce aviation emissions through complicated regulatory mechanisms, while also nodding through expansions to every major UK airport.

Perhaps, in time, we’ll look back on the older nation-state system and shake our heads at its insularity and instability. Meanwhile, though, the emerging system (let’s call it Our Democracy) still has some teething problems. For one thing, it affords no obvious feedback mechanism for managing popular disapproval of truly hated policies. Nor does it offer any basis for larger-scale solidarity, other than identitarian special pleading by “communities”: in practice, an engine for accelerating sectarianism, whose benefits are (to say the least) unevenly distributed.

As such, whenever these shortcomings become too obvious, Our Democracy has a tendency to fall back on invocations of solidarity in the older nation-state style. Here you’ll find the phantoms of “solidarity” or “patriotism”, usually invoked to stifle objections or to wring a few more drops of tax from what’s left of the faltering middle class. The first and starkest case in point was the international decision, after the Global Financial Crash, to use Quantitative Easing to nationalise the unsurvivable losses of “too-big-to-fail” banks that had spent the previous decade privatising the upside of their casino-finance practices. There have been many more since, of which the most recent and egregious is surely nationalising the costs of Human Quantitative Easing, in the form of crumbling infrastructure, GP appointment scarcity, escalating rents and ill-tempered public spaces, all while privatising the increasingly negligible gains in GDP growth.

Are we a nation, or are we not? We aren’t a nation, when there’s any question of preferential treatment based on shared history, heritage, culture or ancestry. We are, though, when it’s a question of coughing up to bankroll whichever set of client-group subsidies this iteration of the uniparty would like to prioritise. Perhaps you think I’m being cynical here, and perhaps I am a little. But the point is a serious one. Were Sunak’s National Service proposal a serious policy, designed to be implemented rather than simply fulminated over in the press, it would be crippled from the word go by a profound structural problem. That is: you can’t de facto abolish the nation state and then demand the yoof all do National Service.

National Service both presumes a nation and also a sense of belonging and futurity, such that “service” feels like paying it forward. But it’s being proposed by a government which recently locked young people in a cupboard for two years, then deflated the value of their degrees and increased the price, then capered about making nativist gestures while starving public services and stoking a housing crisis via mass migration. Given this, young voters might be forgiven for thinking that they have neither a nation nor much future to speak of, and react with derision to the proposed inculcation in their breasts of “renewed pride in our country”.

But what is Sunak to do? He cannot escape the electoral death trap that is the Tories’ ageing base of Middle England homeowners: the Mail readers who will nod at the prospect of making all those scruffy bus-shelter loiterers with their pronouns and weird little videos stand up straight and contribute to society through some gratifyingly coercive state intervention. And given everyone knows the Tories are going to lose, and that it’s really just a question of how badly, nuking an already written-off youth vote for a few more boomer X’s is — albeit in a short-termist way — grimly pragmatic.

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So I doubt Sunak is trying to throw the election. This policy is less deliberate self-sabotage than a tragedy in slow motion: yet another sign, lest we needed one, that the Party of House Prices is circling the drain. And with each orbit of the abyss, his party grows more resigned to the death spiral. With each orbit, the young, bellicose, underground Right turns ever more bitterly away. What, after all, would be the point of trying to reform a party that doesn’t even seem to be aware of your existence, save as a fantasy bloc of doomscrolling skivers in need of improvement via Mental Elf, bans on TikTok and tobacco, and maybe a government-mandated stint wiping bottoms?

Meanwhile, beyond the event horizon of Tory annihilation, a new world beckons. It’s one in which One Nation Tories are no longer the gatekeepers of the Right. One in which the 30% of the youthful electorate who no longer believe in liberal democracy are old enough to wield real power. One in which, perhaps, we’ve stopped pretending that a now comprehensively post-national Britain is in any meaningful sense continuous with the pre-war entity of that name. And one in which we’ve resigned ourselves to a public life whose basic components are NGOcratic hectoring, trading-bloc standoffs, and multipolar post-liberal ethno-narcissism.

What politics will look like at that point is anybody’s guess. But somehow I doubt it will be as preoccupied with nostalgic clickbait.

Pretty much as soon as the first results were announced after the 1983 election, any well-informed person could tell where the country would be by the time of the next election. Large-scale privatisation was promised in the Tory manifesto and, in more general terms, private enterprise was obviously going to get stronger. With the exception of Arthur Scargill, everyone understood that trade unions would be weaker.

But where will Britain be in four years’ time? The next government will come to power staggering under the weight of its self-denying ordinances. Starmer has made more promises about what he will not do — reverse recent tax cuts, abolish the triple lock on pensions — than promises about what he will do. Positive proposals are remarkably vague — “Great British Energy” sounds more like a slogan from a Seventies advertising campaign than a policy.

Partly, of course, the problem lies in the practical constraints that will face the next government. The Covid pandemic and lockdown will make themselves felt for decades more. Just before the election was announced, the compensation scheme for those who were infected by blood transfusions brought the prospect of another £10 billion on the national debt. The fact that Labour has been so far ahead in the opinion polls for the last few years has produced an odd situation: the official opposition — which expects to be in government for several years — has worried about public finances more than the government. Once he had headed off the crisis of crashing bond markets in 2022, Jeramy Hunt has not had to do much except ensure that the government did not actually go bankrupt until it had staggered over the finishing line of electoral defeat — at which point he can arrange lunch with a head-hunter and start talking about how to restore his own finances.

Being in opposition — even when the opposition is heading for defeat — can be fun. Think of Neil Kinnock appearing in a Tracy Ullman pop video or William Hague knocking nine bells out of Tony Blair at PMQs. Starmer and his team look miserable. Not since 1945 has a ministerial team looked so exhausted on the cusp of victory. The desperate concern to avoid mistakes make the shadow cabinet appear as if they are at the end of a marathon egg-and-spoon race rather than sprinting to victory.

What happens after the election will depend, in part, on the scale of a Labour victory. Psephologists insist on the size of the swing that would be required to give Labour an absolute majority. But in a strange way, not getting a majority might be useful for Labour. It would give them a means to escape from the straitjacket that they have squeezed themselves into. A government dependent on the votes of Liberal Democrat or Green MPs would be able to blame policy shifts on other parties. It would, to take the most obviously example, be much easier to take Britain back into the European Single Market if this could be presented as the price that Labour had to pay for Liberal Democrat support.

All the signs suggest, however, that Labour will get an absolute majority and probably a large one. I can imagine lots of things that might go wrong for the Conservative Party in the near future — presumably, they can too, which is why they have decided not to hold out for a later election. It is harder to see what might go wrong for Labour. Keir Starmer’s weaknesses are very different from those of Donald Trump but, in both cases, the weaknesses have been so obvious for so long that they are priced into the electoral market.

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In addition to this, Starmer is a pure-blooded Labour man. He does not like other parties and seems to have no more time for those of the Left than for those of the Right. In this respect, he is very different from Tony Blair, who learned from an eclectic group of what he would have called “progressives”. Mainly this meant Roy Jenkins and some of the other figures who had left Labour to form the Social Democratic Party in 1981 (an unforgivable crime in Labour orthodoxy), though he also picked up ideas from, for example, writers who had been associated with Marxism Today.

Starmer is also a traditionalist in his attitude to Labour voters. He seems to rejoice more in the return of prodigal sons from “Red Wall” seats than he does in the possibility that the party might build a different kind of support base among people who have not previously voted Labour — or not previously voted at all.

In a strange way, this traditionalism was accentuated by Jeremy Corbyn. The struggle between the two men felt like the last battle in the Labour civil war of the early Eighties. But now it is less obvious what Left and Right mean in the Labour party. Green politics cut across conventional views of industrial growth. Opposition to the European Union was a Left-wing policy in the early Eighties but now most of the Left opposes Brexit, and, though Starmer seems determined to ignore this fact, so does most of the electorate. Similarly, the use of allegations about support for terrorism or antisemitism against the Corbynistas seems a bit odd now that the United States is desperately trying to rein in Israel.

The most important question about the aftermath of the election, however, involves the losers. Elections produce seismic shifts when — as in 1945 or 1983 — the losing party recognises that they need to adjust their policies in the aftermath of defeat. Usually this has meant accepting some element of the policies of the winning party. It seems unlikely that the current Conservative Party will react in this way to a Labour victory. Many on the Tory Right have very safe seats; John Hayes, who heads the Common Sense Group, has the largest majority in the country. It is possible that tactical voting will take some of these down or that Tory voters will rebel against a former Home Secretary who slagged off the police and got herself sacked twice. But, on the whole, I would guess that the Tory right will be strong after the election. Indeed, Suella Braverman and Kemi Badenoch may be the only politicians looking to the near future with relish.

Will the Conservative Party survive? Some say that its instinct for power is its secret weapon. But this cuts both ways. What purpose does the party serve if it looks as though it may not be in government for a long time? Centrists may quietly join other parties or leave politics altogether — on the whole, the moderate Tories are the ones who stand a chance of getting a job in the real world. It is possible that the Conservative parliamentary party will eventually shrivel to a rump of rent-a-gob backbenchers who would be happy to trade the prospect of ministerial office for a regular gig on GB News. Nigel Farage is right to say that he and Jacob Rees-Mogg ought to belong in the same party, but that party is not going to be anything that would be recognised by Thatcher or Macmillan or, for that matter, the Third Marquess of Salisbury. The kind of grouping that might be formed by a merger of Right-wing Conservatives with Reform would attract a significant electorate but, without the brand loyalty that went with traditional Conservatism, that electorate would probably not be large enough to form a parliamentary majority.

Labour might also run into problems. I doubt if rebellion on the Left (mainly expressed in university towns and seats with large Muslim populations) will do it much damage at the coming election, and I would guess that Starmer can count on a very disciplined parliamentary party afterwards. But Gaza, green politics and opposition to Brexit are not going to go away. These are often the issues that the young care about most and also, curiously, the issues that are most likely to unite parts of the Labour Party with other political groups — including some who might, until recently, have described themselves as Conservatives.

Perhaps all this will eventually create a different kind of movement — not necessarily one that operates inside the Labour Party or even in any conventional party. Not only am I unsure which party will win the election after next, but I am, come to think of it, not even sure that I know which parties will be serious contenders when the time comes.

Wading through similar messages from Labour shadow ministers, aides and the like, I couldn’t help thinking of the scene in John Le Carré’s Smiley’s People as the disbelieving Foreign Office mandarin, Saul Enderby, questions whether George Smiley has finally discovered the great Soviet spy chief Karla’s one lethal vulnerability. “It’s not all a wicked Bolshie plot, George, to lure us to our ultimate destruction,” Enderby asks. “You’re sure of that?”

This seems to be the instinct which still lies deep in the Labour soul as it looks at the Tories with incredulity. Can they really be this bad? Surely it must all be some kind of wicked plot? “I’m afraid we’re no longer worth the candle, Saul,” replies Smiley, wearily, trying to reassure his political master. Something similar is true here. For Sunak and the Conservative Party, it seems the burden of power is no longer worth the effort to maintain it. Brexit, lockdown, Partygate and Liz Truss have combined to drain the party’s spirit. The challenges facing the country have simply proved too great. Exhausted and bewildered, they now stumble towards the end knowing they’ve lost, but unsure quite what to make of it.

For the Labour Party’s electoral strategists, the great danger in all this is a sudden loss of discipline. Keir Starmer and Morgan McSweeney do not want to become the great rope-a-dopes of modern political history, surging forward, arms swinging, looking for a knockout that never comes. And so, the strategy is to stick to the plan they have been working on for months. “Do not give the Tories the election they want,” Starmer’s campaign coordinator Pat McFadden likes to say. This, in other words, means do not make spending promises you don’t know how to pay for which will allow the Conservative Party to run “tax bombshell” headlines. But more than that — don’t allow the Conservative Party any attack line against you. Play it safe. Stand for “change”, but ensure it is not unfunded or unsettling.

The danger in such a defensive strategy is that it leaves voters feeling as though there is nothing to choose from. Introducing Keir Starmer at Labour’s first-day rally in Gillingham — Conservative majority, 15,000 — the deputy leader Angela Rayner revealed the party’s own concerns about this charge gaining traction over the next six weeks: “Politicians aren’t all the same,” she declared. “There is a choice at this election.” That is not the kind of thing you say if you don’t think it is what people are already thinking.

Labour is right to be concerned about this. In 2017, Jeremy Corbyn seemed to tap into a pent up desire for something different and almost swept Theresa May from power. In 2019, it was Boris Johnson who became the candidate best placed to take on the broken establishment, even if he was already prime minister. Rishi Sunak today cannot do the same; he is simply too much of an establishment creature. But what if some other figure manages to do so at the margins of this story? Richard Tice, say, or George Galloway. There are always sinkholes out there.

In one sense, this is not the campaign Starmer and McSweeney expected to be running when they secured the Labour party leadership back in 2020. Back then, they were facing a populist street fighter in Johnson who, in McSweeney’s analysis, was following the successful populist-right playbook, which “talked Left but acted Right” on the economy.

To deal with this, McSweeney believed the old Labour strategies — whether Blair’s “radical centrism” or Corbyn’s Left-wing populism — were doomed to fail. In one sense McSweeney’s answer was simply to do the opposite and talk Right but act Left. Traditional Tory aspirations would be adopted — home ownership, lower taxes and the like — but underneath there would be a much greater focus on boosting the incomes of the average worker and the real economy than was ever the case under New Labour. This, in effect, remains the Starmer-McSweeney strategy for government, should they get there.

Yet, the fact is the Conservative Party abandoned its “talk Left, act Right” Tory populism two years ago, when they removed Boris Johnson. Since then they have swung from madness to technocracy. Starmer’s sensible demeanour can no longer be contrasted against the wildness of Johnson’s or the recklessness of Truss, but must do so against the emptiness of Sunak. There is a charisma hole at the heart of this campaign and the danger for Labour is that something will fill it.

Writing a book about the 2017 general election, I remember being struck by the conclusion reached by one veteran campaign insider. “She’s not as good a candidate,” he said of Theresa May, as she struggled to cope with the demands of a national campaign. “She has never run for anything before other than her own constituency. No one could’ve been ready at such short notice, but especially not if you’ve never run before.” This is true for both Sunak and Starmer today. We will swiftly find out who can deal with the pressure.

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For the Tories, things can only get worse

By Tom McTague

The difficulty for Starmer will be to rebut the accusation that he really isn’t offering much of a change — for in the basic sense it is true. The Labour Party, after all, has accepted the Conservative Party’s spending plans and so for the first few years, at least, the “change” the party is offering can only be marginal: one of personality, competence, discipline, character. These things matter of course, but they are not structural. The house will continue crumbling, and Labour can only continue to plaster over the cracks up until it finds a way of earning more money.

But what if real change is impossible? Perhaps the Tories are stumbling, dazed and disorientated towards their annihilation, not because they are inherently incompetent and useless, though that may also be the case, but because the challenges we face are now simply too big for the tired old ideas of our political class.

It is hard for political parties to make this point, naturally. It’s not a comfortable message for any voter to hear. In Le Carré’s novel, Smiley notes how Saul Enderby “did not care to be reminded of the limitations of British grandeur”. But nor do many of us, beyond the usual superficial grumbles. No-one wants to hear, for example, that for deep structural reasons beyond our control we cannot ever be a rich country again.

Look at the challenge that a future Starmer government faces. Taxes, already at their highest level in decades, will have to rise because nobody believes the spending plans offered by either party are deliverable. But this isn’t the worst of it. Both parties are pretending that we can decarbonise our entire economy and re-industrialise it at the same time. In reality, of course, if we are to use the energy transition to re-industrialise our economy, it will require cheap polluting energy in the short term, protectionist tariffs against competition, and more government spending. And we could do all of this and still get blown out of the water by China.

We have been here before. In 1964, Harold Wilson came to power promising to sweep away the tired and out of date Conservative Party which had spent 13 years in power. Twelve years later, having won two elections, lost a third and won a fourth, he left power a broken man, tearful and spent. As he prepared to leave, he was asked about his plans. His answer was grimly revealing. He would retire to “think about the problems facing the country”.

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The McSweeney Project

By Tom McTague

Starmer and McSweeney believe that part of Labour’s problem since its last victory, in 2005, is that its leaders stopped “narrating the changes” that were affecting voters. The party stopped trying to explain the great trends in the world and how the government was reacting to protect people’s standard of living.

If this is the test of leadership, the most successful prime minister since 1945 is certainly Margaret Thatcher. She had a diagnosis of Britain’s ills, proferred a course of treatment, claimed to have the iron discipline to see it through, and owned the results she liked. Whether she actually transformed the economy and arrested the country’s decline, as her supporters believe, is far less clear. Another way of telling the Thatcher story is that she left office with Britain in recession, inflation again running too high, monetarism abandoned and the currency locked into the Exchange Rate Mechanism.

Something similar could be said of Tony Blair. Even his critics would admit that he “narrated the change” that was happening in the world, which lay beyond Britain’s control. Blair’s story was that globalisation was happening — and a good thing. The future was open and liberal and European. Some industries would die, but the free movement of goods, people, capital and ideas would leave Britain better off and the winners of this great global revolution would vote Labour. In the end, Blair departed a few months before the great financial crisis blew up the economic foundations of the political settlement he had constructed.

The likelihood is that whatever narrative Starmer alights on to explain the great changes happening today, they will at some point be shown to be inadequate. But no prime minister escapes this fate. Right now, the important thing for him is to win. And given the state of the Tory party, he probably doesn’t even have to explain what change he represents in order to do that come July 4.

“I want his body, George, hear me?” Enderby tells Smiley in the end. “Hand me a live, talking Karla and I’ll accept him and make my excuses later.” For now this is Labour’s instinct too. Kill the Tories and think about events later. But Enderby had a final warning for Smiley: “Don’t you ever go thinking they’ll go away.”

Just as Rishi Sunak has now pinned his electoral hopes on changing inflation figures, Prime Minister Harold Wilson saw a small window of opportunity to go to the polls. There was just one problem: as Wilson himself recognised, “the conflict with the World Cup had to be considered”. If England were defeated just before polling day, the Government would surely suffer. But when the “mystical symbiosis”, as Roy Jenkins described it, of Labour and the England team winning in harmony was put before them, they had little option but to take it.

Wilson understood the fortunes of the England football team mattered more to people than the fortunes of his government. He had tried to use it to his advantage in 1966, when he ensured he was the keynote speaker at the launch of the tournament and made a rapid dash back from Canada on the day of the final to make sure he could bask in the glory of victory. Later, he joined the team at the Royal Garden Hotel to celebrate.

Some in the government believed victory in 1966 could turn the British economy around. Richard Crossman hoped it would “be a decisive factor in strengthening sterling” with the banks inspired by England’s “gallant fight”. But as the government continued to lose standing in the country and the polls, it proved to be a false dawn.

Rishi Sunak is the only other Prime Minister in half a century to pitch his hopes against the backdrop of an England campaign. Just like Wilson in 1970, he has been waiting for the first glimpse of economic good news to call it. And just like the England team in 1970, our boys head to Germany this summer as the favourites to win.

Had Sunak’s team looked at the Wilson campaign, however, they would have seen how quickly events on the football pitch can shape the feel of a campaign. And the omens do not look good.

Back in 1970, things started badly for the government when the arrest of England captain, Bobby Moore, in Colombia — for allegedly stealing a bracelet from a jewellery shop — derailed the launch of their manifesto. Politics was knocked off the front page for days, while Wilson attempted to intervene to release him. When Moore was eventually let off without charge, Wilson was quick to claim credit. He even accused the Conservative leader, Edward Heath, of wanting England to lose. “Is there no triviality to which this man won’t descend?” replied Heath.

On the ground, it was clear that World Cup fever had gripped the nation more than the election, as MPs wondered why people were not turning up for their meetings. Roy Jenkins even moved one rally to accommodate England’s fixtures but was furious when only a “hundred or so people” turned up. The buzz around the tournament even reached the orbit of Tony Benn. After a hard day’s campaigning, he reflected in his diary that the mood in the country was changing after England lost to Brazil and that the “political effect, can’t be altogether ignored”.

The slow-paced nature of the group stages allowed the public to dip their toe into some of the election arguments — many of which will again play out this summer. On housing, Wilson “bitterly regretted” that his government had failed to meet demand. Meanwhile, rising immigration was put on the agenda by Enoch Powell who issued his own manifesto to “halt immigration now”. Tensions boiled over at one meeting where Powell was met with 300 protestors; it was reported that “punches were exchanged” between stewards and demonstrators.

Wilson advised his Labour ministers not to engage with Powell, who had huge appeal to working-class voters in the Midlands. Tony Benn took the bait but, by and large, Labour focused on the economy. “The biggest challenge facing any industrial nation today is how to expand the economy without pushing up its costs,” read its manifesto. “The answer lies in increasing our productivity.”

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By Brad Evans

At first, Wilson’s safety-first approach appeared to be working. Crossman noted in his diary that the country was ready and willing to accept another six years of Labour that would allow them to firmly establish themselves as a natural party of government. England’s football team also appeared to be dominant. On the day they were due to face West Germany in the Quarter Finals, the Liberal leader, Jeremy Thorpe, made a speech in Devon where he all but conceded defeat: “It is now clear that nationally the Labour Party is romping home.”

And as Harold Wilson settled down along with 20 million others to watch England race into a 2-0 lead against West Germany, everything appeared to be going to plan. But in a moment that would enter political and football folklore, Sir Alf Ramsey took off Bobby Charlton to preserve his energy whereupon England slumped to a crushing 3-2 defeat. In an instant, England were no longer world champions; the nation’s pride had been shattered.

On the campaign trail, MPs reported back that few seemed interested in politics; people only wanted to talk about England’s poor performance. The heatwave ended and the reality of the team’s defeat sank in. Undermining his campaign, new trade figures showed that the economy was not doing as well as Wilson had thought. Just 48 hours before the polling stations opened, the Board of Trade announced that export-import figures were £31 million in the red. The shadow chancellor, Iain Macleod, argued that it showed exactly why Wilson had wanted to cut and run. “The honeymoon after devaluation is over,” he declared.

But Heath confounded the pollsters to pull off a stunning upset. In the aftermath, people wondered whether England’s defeat had led to a change in morale that altered the outcome of the vote. And while it is impossible to pinpoint the exact causes of late shifts in voter behaviour, David Butler and Michael Pinto-Duschinsky concluded in the British General Election of 1970 study that England’s defeat “may have contributed to a switch in mood”.

Since 1970, politicians have increasingly sought to use football to create their own narratives about patriotism and national renewal. In Euro 96, as the tournament opened in England, John Major declared that the “economic prospects are bright” and that “we have a lot to be positive about in this country”. Tony Blair tried to link the success of the England team to his aim of developing a winning mentality within Labour. “Second place is not the goal,” he wrote. “The high of watching success is incomparable. In sport as in politics, a well-fought campaign for second place means nothing.”

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By Euro 2020, however, supporting England had become a contested political issue. Conservative figures such as Lee Anderson boycotted the team after players took the knee in support of Black Lives Matter protests. Recent Labour convert Natalie Elphicke, suggested Marcus Rashford should have spent more time “perfecting his game” rather than “playing politics” over his free school meals campaign. By contrast, leading Labour figures such as Keir Starmer and Sadiq Khan tried to claim Gareth Southgate’s “progressive patriotism” as their own.

When England kick off their Euros campaign next month, both Starmer and Sunak will look to tap into any feel-good factor that emerges in the wider country. Yet in truth, the timing of the “Euro’s election” is a bizarre one. By holding the election on 4 July, England will have only played their three group games and one Round-of-16 match by the time the voters head to the polling stations. The really big games will come afterwards, leaving the next Prime Minister with a potential golden run of a Quarter, Semi, and a Final in a frantic two-week period. Back when Euro 96 fever gripped the nation, England beat Scotland, the Netherlands and Spain in a week. One journalist observed that in the days after, you could “plunge your thermometer anywhere in England’s psyche today, and it emerges glowing red with patriotic fever”.

If history were to repeat itself, Sunak’s final act could be to gift Starmer the opportunity to spend his first few days as Prime Minister overseeing scenes of national celebration not seen since 1966. Starmer would have a free shot at pinning his arguments about a decade of national renewal to the success of a young and vibrant England side. In other words, Sunak would have scored an own goal.

And just as Wilson could always say that only under Labour have England won the World Cup, Starmer could say the same about the Euros. Faced with such a scenario, downtrodden Conservatives could be forgiven for feeling left with only one choice: hoping that England fail miserably and are out of the competition before they are out of office.

Political historians are wont to point out that there are occasions when a public becomes so dissatisfied it simply wants change. When this happens, the policies and electable candour of the opposition become less relevant. With Labour following the golden rule that it is better to let the government author its own demise than say anything meaningful, it certainly feels like we are in such a moment now. Whatever we thought of Johnson vs Corbyn, at least there was clear water between what they stood for.

Yet if we were to dig deeper into those feelings of dissatisfaction, we would see just how low the public mood is. Indeed, rather than turning a corner, as Sunak would have us believe, the nation is at a crossroads — with one path leading to continued misery and another to other abject disappointment. Who is to tell whether we have chosen well or not?

There will be a lot of bluster and promise over the next few weeks as both parties try to tap into that crucial insight first understood by Tony Blair: that elections are won just as much on feelings as they are substance. In the coming weeks, all parties will speak in the promissory rhetoric of better prospects, better policing, better regulation of borders, better health care, better education, and a better betterment. But we are a world away from the Nineties. The national mood is positively pessimistic, despite the interjection of D:Ream’s “Things can only get better” during Sunak’s big moment.

As we enter campaign season, we ought to remember another rule of British politics: that while London and privileged parts of the South may be basking in the sun, at the same time, communities in the North East of England or South Wales are being continuously rained upon.

Take the valleys of South Wales, an area I know intimately well. Whether we consider the lasting unemployment, the child malnourishment, the widespread addiction, or the disturbing levels of depression, suicide and domestic abuse, these communities are a melting pot for Britain’s most pressing social concerns, which statisticians show are only getting worse. And while these “pockets of poverty” may appear more afflicted than most, the picture for much of post-industrial Britain — from Durham to Derbyshire, Kellingley to Kirkcaldy — has taken on the dejected look of a tragically updated series of Lowry paintings. Placed in sequence, they offer a damning depiction of want and destitution: nationwide, levels of poverty are around 50% higher than they were in the Seventies.

But the growing sense of despondency that follows doesn’t just affect the poorest of this nation, even if their existence is markedly bleak. Since the times of Thatcher and her social revolution, free marketeers have been fond of talking about the logic of trickle-down economics, which hold that the poor will eventually reap the rewards or the lucky few. Today, however, the sand timer in Britain has been inverted, as the fading optimism of the poor now seeps into the emotional economies of the middle classes, who are equally beset with a non-committal sense of political dejection. Turnout, one suspects, will not be high come July.

Nowhere has this been better illustrated than with the widespread embrace among the middle classes over the past decade with the doctrine of resilience. It is impossible to turn on any news item, educational or cultural programme today and not hear the term being deployed. Resilience, however, is nothing more than an acceptance that things are fundamentally insecure by design. Translated into politics, it means that we should no longer expect the state to provide any measure of security, whether it comes in the form of social security or security from existential threats.

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In security’s place, what has been served up is a banal shift towards a desire to apply a therapeutic model to everything, and the necessity to learn to “bounce-back” from inevitable crises. While Chancellor Jeremy Hunt consistently speaks of the UK’s “resilient economy”, for example, the Labour Party launched into own Resilience Framework in 2022, and placed the doctrine at the heart of its policymaking. While we don’t know what that looks like, it invariably includes words such as “robust” and an acceptance of “vulnerabilities”. Yet what resilience really points to, by contrast, is the utter failure of the political imagination. Who, for instance, really found anything to be inspired by in Labour’s new pledge card?

There once was a time when politics seemed to matter; when the future direction of nations was held in the balance. Hope, back then, couldn’t be ignored, and neither could our political decisions. Looking at the lived reality of so many in our country today, it’s hard to locate anything similar. All we face is an impending choice, which, in the end, will only lead to further apathy. And as history shows, it is precisely in such wells of apathy that monstrous political ideas can start to take hold — which, maybe not this time, or the next, but sometime in the future will properly throw up a political choice that is as seductive as it is devastating.

Needless to say, the British people deserve better. They deserve a serious choice that’s not painted for the many in the light grey of insecurity — and for a growing few in a far darker and grimmer shade.

Regardless of Sunak’s message that the country has turned the corner, and that he can be trusted to finish the job, a prime minister who genuinely believed the country would be noticeably better off in a few months’ time would surely wait until the end of the year to go to the polls. Sunak, by contrast, has got nothing to bank: he is 23 points behind and has calculated that today’s conditions are his best shot at remaining in power.

And, yet, our prisons are now so full that criminals are being released early and police are being asked not to make so many arrests; NHS waiting lists are at a record high; privatised water companies are poisoning people; prices have gone up more in the past two years than the previous 11; and interest rates on people’s mortgages are at their highest levels in 16 years. Oh, and taxes are also at an all-time high. “Very brave, Prime Minister,” you might say.

In one sense, then, we are now about to witness something unique, an experiment in electoral politics: what happens to a government that has made its voters poorer than when it took over? This has never happened before. Real disposable incomes have never fallen over the lifetime of a parliament — until now. So what was he thinking?

The truth is, the PM had no good options left. Over the summer, the small-boat crossings may well resume with an intensity that could overwhelm the Government. The Bank of England expects inflation to start rising again towards the end of the year. And the chances of a June interest rate cut have now been slashed.

By going early, you might argue, the Prime Minister will be able to boast that inflation is back under control. He might also see the first flights loaded with illegal immigrants take off for Rwanda during the campaign — before the inevitable summer rush of boats from the continent. His plan may have been painful, he can argue, but it is working — don’t let Labour ruin it.

“I recognise that it has not always been easy,” Sunak declared outside No. 10 in a speech that was as turgid as it was sodden. “Some of you will only just be starting to feel the benefits and for some it might still be hard when you look at your bank balance. For this hard-earned economic stability was only ever meant to be the beginning. The question now is how and who do you trust to turn that foundation into a secure future for you, your family, and our country?”

This, it seems, is the best he’s got. And as he struggled through his speech, all of his political flaws were on display. The language was ponderous and technocratic, a jumble of sentences without any killer line or theme. Campaign slogans don’t get much weaker than: “I will forever do everything in my power to provide you with the strongest possible protection I can.”

Sunak did recover some form when he got to Starmer. “If he was happy to abandon all the promises he made to become Labour leader once he got the job, how can you know that he won’t do exactly the same thing if he were to become Prime Minister?” Here is the Labour leader’s Achilles’ heel. Very few people think he is dangerous or corrupt or incapable or malign. But quite a few think he is untrustworthy.

And this, I’m told, is where the Conservative Party will initially aim its campaign: it will try to throw the Labour Party off balance. “You’ve got to start making stuff up,” said one experienced campaigner. ”You’ve got to declare that they haven’t ruled out this or that policy that the Labour base wants to see, in order to force Labour to rule it out, upsetting their campaign.” He continued: “It’s not a lot and probably won’t make any difference, but you’ve got to try.”

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By Tom McTague

The great question at the heart of this election, though, is not how much enthusiasm there is for Starmer and the Labour Party — it’s how desperate the country is to see the back of this Conservative government.

If there were a concerted attempt by voters to destroy the Tories — voting tactically or moving en masse towards Labour — I’m told the party could be looking at a reduced rump of 100 seats; a catastrophe worse than 1997. But even if the party were to run an effective campaign, and voters did not move en masse, a best-case scenario would see them hold 220 seats — most probably handing Labour a majority beyond that won by Boris Johnson in 2019. And one insider tells me they are already moving resources from battleground seats to protect those in the Cabinet.

The damp and depressing truth is that by going for an election now, Sunak was hoping to project an image of strength. In reality it is an admission of weakness.

Labour’s current lead has a very wide range among pollsters, from 15 points (J.L. Partners) to 27 (YouGov). And yet, this does not tell the entire story: at the local elections, the BBC’s Projected National Vote (PNV) share pointed towards a single-figure lead for Keir Starmer’s party. So, as we stare down the barrel of a new election campaign, what explains these large gaps — and what is Labour’s “true” lead?

To answer this, Focaldata used this month’s local elections to project a general election result. And our findings may surprise you. They suggest that, for all the excitement emanating from Labour quarters yesterday, their popular vote is much lower than national polling estimates. However, thanks in large part to the efficient nature of the party’s current vote distribution, we believe Labour is still on course for a large parliamentary majority: we estimate that Labour needs a 5-7% vote-share lead to win, the lowest the party has needed to clear since 2010.

What is Labour’s “true” lead?

In the recent local elections, Labour’s lead over the Conservatives in the PNV share was nine points, with Keir Starmer’s party on 34% and Rishi Sunak’s on 25%. This is a much smaller lead than estimated by national polls.

However, local election PNVs are not necessarily a useful metric for assessing how the country might vote in a general election. There is, history shows, very little relationship between the PNV in the set of local elections preceding a general election and the subsequent result. Our analysis of the past 10 general elections shows no provable relationship between local election PNV lead and final popular vote margin.

That being said, we think that the PNV is likely to be much closer to Labour’s “true” lead. National vote intention polls are “nowcasts” — glassy snapshots of current opinion — rather than forecasts of actual voting behaviour in a general election. Many assumptions that pollsters make to turn their polls into forecasts, including how they treat “don’t knows” and handle turnout effects, could be playing up Labour’s lead. In the month leading up to the local elections, for example, different pollster methodologies accounted for a full four percentage point difference in Labour’s vote share.

To better understand Labour’s “true” lead, FocalData, inspired by the work of Dylan Difford, compared the local election results to historic data on local-to-general election voting behaviour from the British Election Study. For the seats where we did not have a complete picture from the locals, we used the results from the latest public MRP polls.

As you can see from the table above, a significant chunk of Liberal Democrat and Green local election voters said they intended to vote for Labour in a general election. We thus allocated 30% of Lib Dem voters and 34% of Greens to the Labour column in our projection.

This locals-to-general election transition model produced a Labour lead of 12 points in Great Britain, with the party on course for a majority of around 140 seats (394 seats for Labour vs 160 for the Conservatives). At the national level, our projection puts Labour on 38%, the Conservatives on 26%, the Lib Dems on 13%, Reform on 7% and the Greens on 5%.

The efficiency of Labour’s vote

The second important story that emerged from the local elections relates to vote efficiency: the likelihood of a supporter to actually vote. If we take our local-to-general election projection and group Conservative and Labour-held seats based on their partisanship compared to the national average, we find that the Conservative-to-Labour swing is much higher in Conservative-held seats. In other words, Labour are winning votes exactly in the places it needs to form a majority government.

To examine vote efficiency in more detail, we started with Colin Rallings and Michael Thrasher’s estimates of the notional results for the 2019 general election on new constituency boundaries. To estimate the outcome if the national popular vote was tied between the two main parties, all seats not held by the Conservatives or Labour were removed and each constituency was adjusted via a uniform national swing. Seats with a more than 25-point gap between the two parties were designated as “safe” and those with a 10–25-point gap were designated as “lean”, with all others marked as battleground seats. As you can see below, Labour appears to be winning over voters exactly where it needs to, with proportionally larger swings projected in the safest Conservative seats.

An important side effect of better-distributed voters will be a huge increase in the number of marginal seats at the next election. The chart below shows all seats ordered by marginality in 2019, along with our 2024 locals projection. The number of seats with a winning margin smaller than five points has more than trebled, from 56 in 2019 to an estimated 175 in 2024. While we expect some of this tight distribution to be an artifacts of MRP modelling, there is no doubt that this election will see seats in play that have not been in more than 20 years.

The implication of this is that any movement in the polls between now and the election is likely to have an outsized effect on the number of seats won by each party. While we project a sizeable majority for Labour, the window of possible outcomes is wide.

What does Labour’s lead need to be?

As a result of its increased vote efficiency, it seems unlikely Labour will need a double-figure popular-vote lead for a majority. Even so, the exact size of the necessary Conservative-Labour gap remains a point of disagreement among analysts and commentators — and with good cause. The popular-vote lead needed for a majority, for either party, has changed dramatically over the last 45 years.

So much could be written about the graph above. Looking at the 1992 election, Labour needed a popular-vote lead of only 0.6 points to govern (which is what the polls were showing), but the Conservatives needed a large 6.7-point voting gap. By contrast, in 2001, Labour could have governed the country with a majority despite being three points behind the Conservatives. The Blair years saw some of the most unequal, unrepresentative governments to have been elected in Britain, on increasingly depressed turnout levels.

As for what it needs to be this time, there are a number of factors that benefit Labour: from their advantageous distribution in marginal seats to the likelihood of the Lib Dems taking seats off the Tories. In particular, tactical voting will be particularly significant: for there appears to be much more Labour/Liberal Democrat tactical voting under Starmer’s leadership than there was under Jeremy Corbyn. This is understandable when we consider that 2019 Lib Dem voters rated Starmer an average of 5.4 out of 10 in the most recent British Election Study survey, versus 2.6 for Corbyn — the highest gap between the two men of any party. In fact, 2019 Liberal Democrats are basically indistinguishable from 2019 Labour voters in their opinions on the current Labour leader (the latter rated Starmer an average of 5.5 out of 10).

How will this benefit Labour? The exhibit below shows the level of efficiency of the Labour/Liberal Democrat vote share. From our analysis, there is an increasing pattern of the two parties’ voters aligning themselves with the strongest anti-Conservative challenger in subsequent elections. This pattern has also emerged in by-elections over the course of this parliament, and would reduce Labour’s majority threshold even further if replicated at a general election.

And yet, despite this highly optimistic outlook for Labour, we must declare a word of warning: as mentioned, the window of probable electoral outcomes is large, and all the dynamics which are likely to propel Labour to a sizeable majority could become unstuck very quickly. Any combination of the Conservatives appealing to cultural Conservatives and older voters again, an SNP recovery, and southern free-market Liberal Democrat voters unable to cope with a period of high-tax Labour government, could cause significant problems for Keir Starmer. In today’s day and age, big majorities assembled at warp speed seem to look more like sandcastles than skyscrapers.

To grasp the scale of our national fragility, you have only to cast your eye across the Office for Budget Responsibility’s report. The basic reality, there in black and white, is as confounding as it is worrying: we are now set to continue to get poorer even as the economy gets bigger, while rising taxes will not fund more spending on public services.

At first glance this doesn’t make sense, but the reasons are simple. The economy will only get bigger because there will be a lot more people in it, rather than because we, as individuals, are getting richer. The OBR’s forecast for the overall size of the economy remained virtually unchanged from last time. Yet it revised down its expectations of GDP per person. In fact, from 2022 we have been getting poorer — a situation which will only start to change from the second half of this year.

But perhaps the most crucial line of all was this: “Economic and market conditions mean the Government needs to run a primary surplus… of around 1.3% of GDP just to stabilise debt in the medium term.” By comparison, the OBR went on, in the 2010s, “debt could be stabilised while running a primary deficit of 2.1%”. In other words, we now get less for more, literally.

To illustrate the point, take these figures: taxes as a share of GDP will rise to 37.1% in 2028-29, four points up on what they were before the pandemic. But spending will fall “steadily” as a share of GDP from 44.5% this year to 42.5% in 2028-29. All the while, national debt will rise. Put bluntly, the size of our debt — and the scale of the interest we are paying on it — means we are now much poorer than we used to be. And this is before we consider the economic burden caused by our ageing population and the crisis in Ukraine leeching more money for defence.

And so, facing this reality, even though we are just a matter of months away from the next election, Hunt had barely any room for manoeuvre. The 2p cut from national insurance and the increase in the threshold at which child benefit is removed eased the tax burden on middle-class workers, the voters the Conservative Party will need if it is to stand any chance of avoiding a wipeout whenever the election is called. But even these tweaks around the edges of the tax system required such fanciful assumptions as to be essentially worthless as a meaningful forecast.

To illustrate the point, the OBR states — with damning understatement — that the fiscal forecast is conditioned on the tax take “rising to near record highs, including through planned rises in fuel duty that have not, in practice, been implemented since 2011”. It adds that Hunt’s budget “also assumes the Government will stick to assumptions which imply no real growth in public spending per person over the next five years, despite committing to increase spending on some major public services in line with or faster than GDP.” In other words, get real.

As a result, the Government has essentially spent as much as it possibly could — leaving just £8.9 billion in “headroom”, as the jargon has it, which the OBR points out is historically small — and, perhaps worst of all, decided to put its head in the sand and avoid conducting any detailed department-by-department spending plans beyond 2024-25 because, well, because that would reveal what such a squeeze on spending actually means.

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Because of this small margin of error baked into Hunt’s sums, or what the OBR calls “the risks around that central forecast”, Britain is suddenly more exposed to events beyond our control which could blow up the Government’s plans at any moment. “Inflation could rebound and remain higher for longer if the conflict in the Middle East were to widen,” the OBR warns, “or if domestic wage pressures do not subside as quickly as we assume.” Immigration might not prove to be as high as currently forecast, meaning a smaller economy and fewer people to tax while the hoped-for increases in productivity might not materialise either. And most important, perhaps, “the fiscal forecast is highly sensitive to movements in interest rates which have been unusually volatile recently”. Because we are now so indebted, we are at the mercy of those we are borrowing from. The Government, in other words, is flying close to the sun, hoping its assumptions pan out because we can no longer afford to be more prudent.

T.E. Utley captured a similar mood at the fag end of a previous period of Tory rule in 1963, when he bemoaned the sense of drift and purposeless that seemed to have taken over the government. “The prevailing impression of Conservative policy over the last 11 years is one of extreme incoherence,” Utley wrote. “Essentially, we remain in much the same position as we were in 1951.” The same is true today, only worse.

By the time the Tories took power 13 years ago, the economic consensus that had been in place from 1992 — outside the Euro but inside the EU, with low debts and steady growth based on an ever larger financial services sector and booming house prices — had already blown apart. In the years that have followed, we have tried at least three different strategies to replace that old model. First George Osborne bet the house on resurrecting an export-led model of growth with an even more globalised City of London acting as China’s banker to the world. When this failed, Theresa May and Boris Johnson tried different versions of Big State Toryism to increase prosperity outside of the South East of England. When they fell, Liz Truss tried shock therapy only to spark a crisis which saw her kicked from office. Finally, we have Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt who have been left with an ever-decreasing set of options for how to pull the country out of its predicament.

Our grim reality today is that we have no money — and no strategy either. Good luck, Keir Starmer.

The chances are that Rishi Sunak won’t end up trading punches in the toilets with hostile MPs, but the atmosphere in the Conservative Party is taking on a familiar hue. Where once Labour was a byword for factionalism — with a dizzying array of Bennites, Tribunites and other “tendencies” — so the Tories today present a kaleidoscope of “New Conservatives”, “National Conservatives”, “Common Sense” Conservatives and self-styled “research groups”, all battling for control of the leadership. And where once a Social Democratic Party fought to “break the mould” of British politics, today the Right-wing Reform party proclaims a “realignment” intended to sweep the Conservatives from the electoral landscape. Over all this hangs the stench of electoral death, as the party contemplates defeat on the scale of 1983 or 1997.

But the Conservatives can still learn from Labour’s agonies in the Eighties. Then, Labour faced three interlocking crises. The first was electoral: from 1979 to 1992, Labour lost four general elections in a row — something that had never happened before in the democratic era. The fear was not simply that Labour was losing, but that its traditional electorate was disappearing. Deindustrialisation was shrinking the manual working class, trade-union membership was in freefall, while non-unionised workers seemed increasingly drawn to Thatcherism. The challenge for Labour was both to reclaim its old electorate and to build a new one, at a time of disruptive sociological change.

The second crisis was political, with the formation of a breakaway party by former Labour grandees. In David Owen, Shirley Williams, Bill Rodgers and Roy Jenkins, the SDP could boast the youngest foreign secretary in history, one of the most popular female politicians in the country, a skilled party organiser, and a former Chancellor, Home Secretary and President of the European Commission. Even under the pressures of First Past the Post, the SDP-Liberal Alliance won more than a quarter of the vote in 1983, coming only 2% behind Labour. In his first term, at least, the challenge for Kinnock was not to defeat the Conservatives. It was to stave off the threat from the Alliance.

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The third problem was intellectual. Parties do not often rethink their core principles, but the questions being asked of Labour during this period were genuinely existential. Was socialism still relevant, in a world where workers were buying their own homes and filling them with consumer goods? Could one talk meaningfully about “working-class solidarity” when the long-term unemployed were so distanced from those in work? Was parliamentary socialism still possible, given the cultural and media power of the Right, or did industrial action pose a surer route to victory? From the hard-Left to the old-Right, there was universal agreement that Labour must change. What was so disruptive was the direction of change, and the principles on which it should be based.

For the Conservative Party today, the challenges are slightly different. Unlike Labour, modern Conservatives are accustomed to winning elections, but that makes the prospect of defeat all the more terrifying. Three-quarters of the parliamentary party, including all but six of the Cabinet, have no experience of opposition, yet the party has now trailed in the polls for more than two years. Those voters who remain loyal are heavily concentrated among the elderly. Labour leads in every cohort below the age of 65; and even the next oldest cohort, from 55-64, has the Conservatives at just 20%.

As for party competition, Reform cannot match the polling figures of the early Alliance, which peaked at more than 40%. Nor has it drawn heavyweight defections of the stature of Jenkins, Owen or Williams. But if Nigel Farage were to return to the leadership, it would boast a consummate campaigner with strong support among Conservative voters: Farage now polls more strongly among 2019 Conservatives than the current prime minister.

Underpinning both these problems is an intellectual dilemma. What is the Conservative Party for? And what, if anything, does it seek to conserve? Under First Past the Post, parties have to construct broad coalitions to be electorally competitive. At its best, that is a source of strength, expanding the range of ideas on which a party can draw and bringing different interests into partnership. At its worst, it generates unstable compounds that can explode at any moment. While Labour struggles to hold together Fabians, Left liberals, ethical socialists, trade unionists and social democrats, those jostling within the Conservative coalition have ranged from free traders to protectionists, libertarians to moral conservatives, Atlanticists to Empire loyalists, and institutionalists to radical populists. The surprise, perhaps, is not that such fissile materials sometimes combust, but that they do not do so more often.

For most of the 20th century, Conservatives could rely on two gravitational forces to keep their centrifugal tendencies in check. The first was a shared hostility to socialism. At a time when the Cold War dominated political alignment, fear of a common enemy was a potent unifying force. The party was also anchored in a set of common institutions: the Church of England, the professions and the institutions of the party itself, which boasted more than two million members at its peak. It was no accident that the party lost coherence after the fall of the Berlin Wall, as its own institutions shrivelled, and as it became either detached from or hostile to the institutions of state and civil society. The effect was to leave the party both socially and intellectually unmoored.

More recently, in 2019, the party could deploy two unifying forces: the desire to “Get Brexit Done”; and a determination to keep Jeremy Corbyn out of office. Neither exerts much power today. Britain has left the EU, and Labour is almost neurotically averse to reopening the question. Those Brexit questions which remain live are as likely to divide Conservatives as to unite them: notably, the status of retained EU law; the future of immigration policy; and the Northern Ireland border. As for Corbyn, he is no longer even a Labour MP. The current Labour leadership defines itself as much against Corbyn as against the Conservatives, and attempts to present Keir Starmer as a secret revolutionary have gained little traction with the public.

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As its unifying elements weaken, other forces are driving the party apart. A tradition that once prided itself on its suspicion of “ideology” increasingly demands “true Conservatism” from its leaders, while disagreeing furiously on what that might be. Loyal newspapers that once catered to millions have become more sectarian as their readerships have shrunk, while new TV stations offer rich rewards for rebels and mavericks. The moderate, pragmatic MP who votes loyally with her party is unlikely to follow Nadine Dorries, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Lee Anderson and Esther McVey into the presenter’s chair at GB News or Talk TV.

All this puts a premium on skilled party management, yet there is little in Sunak’s past that has prepared him for this task. Jim Callaghan, who led a government with no majority at all for two years, had spent 30 years in Parliament, including 20 years on Labour’s national executive and a period as party chair. He had held four great offices of state and began his career as a trade-union official. By contrast, Sunak only entered Parliament in 2015, spent his short ministerial career at the Treasury and previously worked at a hedge fund. In a party that has disposed of four prime ministers in six years, even a majority of 60 has strained his powers of party management. Nor have the party’s strategists served him well, for the fashion for seeking “wedge issues” and “dividing lines” has inflamed divisions within the party, rather than establishing clear blue water with the opposition.

Yet as Labour’s experience demonstrates, division need not be terminal; and the Conservatives enjoy a number of structural advantages that were denied to Labour in the Eighties. That includes a largely sympathetic press and a donor base that can outspend their opponents even at the nadir of the party’s fortunes. The Right is in the ascendant across much of the West, and may soon take back the presidency of the United States. And in an age of short political careers, the Tory factions have no equivalent to Benn, Jenkins or Healey — household names with careers stretching back decades. The heavens do not tremble at the thunder of Sir Simon Clarke; nor do the mountains smoke at the voice of Robert Jenrick. That makes the party’s factions more volatile, but also less deeply entrenched.

Moreover, for a party accustomed to government, opposition may also have a galvanising effect. A Labour government would confront a grim inheritance: a public sector on fire, a financial crisis in local government, a stagnant economy and a perilous international situation — perhaps made more difficult by the return of Donald Trump. If there are good elections for the Conservatives to lose, 2024 may be one of them.

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But if the party wishes to restore its intellectual vitality, it will need to face some uncomfortable truths. If the tax bill has risen under five Conservative leaders drawn from across the party spectrum, that is not because they lacked conviction or were secret socialists. A party that wishes to cut taxation must wrestle honestly with the dilemmas of an ageing population, a stagnant economy, a surging bill for social care and pensions, and growing pressure on the defence budget. If younger voters are abandoning the Conservative Party, that is not because they have been brainwashed by their teachers or indoctrinated on TikTok. It is because Conservatism has offered them little but mockery at a time of decaying wages and an impossible housing market.

As the once-great Liberal Party could affirm, parties do not have a divine right to survive. Those that cannot contain their divisions, that look inwards rather than out, and that blame the electorate for their own misfortunes are rarely rewarded at the polls. Like Labour in 1979, the Conservatives may soon be out of office. Unless they learn the lessons of the Eighties, it could be some time before they return.

At the start of the year, Sunak set out what was supposed to be his response to this same question. The point of his government, he said, was to concentrate on “the people’s priorities”. And these, he claimed, were rising prices, NHS waiting times and illegal immigration. To show his seriousness, he then offered five pledges upon which he could be judged. He would halve inflation, grow the economy, reduce the national debt, cut waiting lists and pass new laws to stop the small boat crossings. “I will only promise what I can deliver,” he concluded in what was supposed to be a rousing peroration. “And I will deliver what I promise.” Here was Sunakian Blairism, where what matters is what works.

A year on, his record is decidedly mixed. His inflation target has been met and the economy has grown, albeit only just. But debt has also grown, waiting lists are up, and no new laws have been passed to stop the small boat crossings, even if the numbers have somewhat come down. If we really are supposed to judge him by results, he’s kept only two of five promises.

The thing is, though, this is not how government should work. Targets are not ends in themselves, but indications of underlying principles. Halving the rate of inflation isn’t the goal; the goal is to create a stable environment in which people can plan their lives.

Beyond Sunak’s five targets, do we have any idea what principles underpin his government, let alone his Conservative Party? Do we know what kind of country they would like to build and why? Again, as in 1960, the answer is surely no.

When you look back at Sunak’s time in power, what is striking is how much he has bounced from one idea to the next. When he first became Prime Minister, in October 2022, he presented himself as a safe pair of hands who would clean up the mess made by his predecessor. By October 2023, he was presenting himself as a radical who represented a break from a failed 30-year consensus. And then he hired David Cameron as his foreign secretary.

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Looking back at his record, there are three distinct periods of Sunak’s premiership: the technocratic honeymoon; the political reality check; and the desperate reset. From January to April, Sunak operated with the breezy confidence of a technocratic troubleshooter. After setting out his five tests on January 4, he started scraping off all the unwanted political barnacles he believed were making it harder for his government to function. First, Sunak blocked Nicola Sturgeon’s gender recognition reforms, flashing a bit of unionist muscle with a confidence that put the SNP in a position from which it has yet to really escape. Then, in February, Sunak concluded a deal with the European Union over the Northern Ireland Protocol. Here was a man in a hurry. By March, this new “Windsor Framework” was comfortably backed in the House of Commons by 515 votes to 29. Sunak was on a roll.

And then reality kicked in.

Over the next four months, from May to August, Sunak’s smooth technocratic sheen started to blister under the relentless pressure of events. First, in the local elections in May, the Tories lost more than 1,000 seats, registering an estimated 26% of the national vote, only a little better than their worst ever local election results in 1995 and 2013. Labour’s 35%, meanwhile, left them nine points ahead of the Tories, the largest lead that the party had recorded in any local election since 2010.

Then, in June, Partygate reared its head once again, with Boris Johnson suddenly announcing he would quit parliament rather than accept the Privileges Committee’s conclusion that he should be suspended for 90 days. Later that month, the Court of Appeal threw out the Government’s policy of sending refugees to Rwanda for processing, declaring the country unsafe. And then, in August, the “crumbly concrete” scandal broke when the Education Secretary Gillian Keegan revealed at least 100 schools would need to close because they were no longer safe. A few days later, Keegan was filmed angrily asking why journalists did not tell her she’s done “a fucking good job” because “everyone else has sat on their arse and done nothing?”

By September, the Tories had fallen back in the polls to almost exactly where they were at the start of the year, hovering at around 25% to Labour’s 45%. The truth is, while inflation was on its way down, prices were still rising dramatically and interest rates were being jacked up to deal with it. One way of looking at 2023 is through the prism of individual events, but another is to look at the structural current dragging the Government across the rocks. The basic reality for most people in 2023 was that they were quite obviously getting poorer while their services were getting worse. On top of all this, the Government seemed unable to deal with the growing problem of industrial unrest with strikes hitting transport, schools and even hospitals.

Elsewhere, a new threat was beginning to emerge on the Right, as Reform steadily grew in the polls. It is at this point that we can see the third phase of Sunak’s troubled year begin: the desperate reset.

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As summer’s glow faded, Sunak began to show a far sharper political edge than before in an attempt to create dividing lines with Labour and kill off the threat from Reform. First, in September, he watered down some of the Net Zero commitments made by his predecessors, putting himself on the side of the motorist and, as he would have it, “good Conservative common sense”. Then, in his speech to the Conservative Party conference in October, he went further, scrapping the northern leg of HS2, connecting Birmingham to Manchester, in order to save billions in public spending he could then start diverting around the country before the next election. Alongside Jeremy Hunt’s Autumn Statement in November, cutting taxes with future spending cuts, the Tory election strategy began to become clear: Vote Tory to stop Labour tax rises. In other words: Sunak was preparing for the classic Tory election.

What was more unusual — or eccentric, even — about Sunak’s conference speech in Manchester, though, was that in setting up this tediously traditional dividing line, he claimed he was upending decades of political wisdom. “What I have learnt is that there is an undeniable sense that politics just doesn’t work the way it should,” he declared. “The feeling that Westminster is a broken system… In particular, politicians saying things, and then nothing ever changing.” Sunak then declared that he agreed with this assessment. “Politics doesn’t work the way it should. We’ve had 30 years of a political system which incentivises the easy decision, not the right one.” He, however, was different.

Sunak’s assessment was revealing. By using this marker, he was dismissing the premierships of not only John Major, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, but also those of David Cameron, Boris Johnson, Theresa May and Liz Truss in which he had served. In effect, Sunak was declaring the last successful prime minister Margaret Thatcher. He was, he claimed, her heir. “You either think this country needs to change or you don’t,” he declared with an apparently straight face.

The problem for Sunak is that he couldn’t look more like the system if he tried. There’s nothing radical about him, whether ideologically, stylistically or temperamentally. He went to Winchester, became a banker and then Boris Johnson’s chancellor. He believes in the system and shares its prejudices. He became prime minister when the Conservative Parliamentary Party decided it needed to throw out the Tory members’ choice, Liz Truss, because she couldn’t do the job. In both his first speech as Prime Minister and his set-piece address setting out his five pledges, Sunak claimed to be carrying the same ideological flame as Boris Johnson, only with more competence. “The mandate my party earned in 2019 is not the sole property of any one individual,” Sunak declared. “It is a mandate that belongs to and unites all of us.” When he then decided to keep Johnson’s Rwanda refugee plan, Sunak further tied himself to Johnson’s record. And yet, here he was at the Conservative Party conference, no longer pledging to honour the manifesto of his predecessor, but declaring him part of an era of failure.

Ultimately, it is difficult to take seriously either Sunak’s claim that he is an anti-establishment radical or that he is different from all his predecessors in placing more value on “long-term” decisions than short term gimmicks. All governments must combine principle and expediency, but in his short time in power, Sunak seems to have grown ever more attracted to expediency. In September, he announced he would ban the XL Bully breed of dogs before working out exactly how he would do so. In November, he cancelled a meeting with the Greek PM at the last minute because his opposite number said he wanted the Elgin Marbles returned to Greece. And then in December, he forced ministers to suddenly come up with a new high salary threshold for migrants to be allowed to come to Britain without working out what exactly this would mean for the economy. Far from the calm, confident technocrat of January, here was a Prime Minister thrashing around to get some kind of traction with the public — and with little success. As 2023 draws to a close, Sunak is more unpopular than he was at the beginning, and with the Tories on 22% in the polls, close to the nadir the Tory party reached under Truss.

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If there is any hope for Sunak, it lies in the unpopularity of Keir Starmer, an improving economic picture and the fact that his own party just about kept itself together at its the moment of greatest crisis earlier this month — when it faced a choice between defeating the government over Sunak’s latest Rwanda plan or allowing it to die another day. The problem, though, remains the one that Utley put his finger on in 1960: what is the government’s purpose?

Throughout Utley’s career, he prodded and probed at this most elemental of questions about the purpose of Toryism. In 1974, he wrote a piece titled “Left, Right — or simply Tory?” in which he took aim at the inadequacy of the Conservative Party simply declaring itself the party of common sense, as Sunak did in his party conference speech. “On the rare and painful occasions when the Tory party feels constrained to re-examine its role in British politics,” Utley observed, “it normally starts its thinking with the assumption that, whatever other characteristics it should have, it should above all else be a party of ‘balance’ and ‘moderation’.”

Often, this means the party finds itself so desperate to avoid handing over any power to what it sees as its own “lunatic fringe” that it becomes captured by its “cliché ridden progressive wing” which is most obsessed with this notion of balance yet has few answers about the purpose of its rule. But, as Utley saw, Toryism needs to be about more than just moderating between other people’s ideologies — socialism and liberalism, say. And nor can it simply be about conserving the status quo, because that status quo could be wrong. This, though, is exactly where the Tory party finds itself once again, so desperate to avoid handing power to the various groups of lunatics that have formed on its Right that it has stopped thinking about what it actually believes.

In 1974, Utley suggested a series of maxims that made up authentic Toryism. On top of securing the nation against foreign attack and maintaining public order at home, he argued that the chief function of government was to use its influence and power to “maintain that minimum of cultural and moral unity within society without which a nation can be held together only by political tyranny”. Toryism, in other words, was neither liberalism nor libertarianism. It does not believe in a neutral state, but one that fosters a sense of common purpose, habit, custom, duty and morality. As part of this job, Utley wrote, Toryism also believes the State is “justified in intervening to protect sections of the community whose protection is seen to be a matter of special importance to the nation as a whole”. Finally, Utley argued that of all the groups which the State exists to protect, “none is of more fundamental importance than the family”. And to protect the family, the State needed to defend and — crucially — expand property ownership.

Looking at the record of the past 13 years of Conservative rule and it is hard to think of it as in any way particularly Tory. Almost nothing has been done to promote a sense of national unity across the whole of the UK. A trade border has been erected within the country and trade deals are signed that seem to actively put British producers at a disadvantage. Foreign governments are invited in to build core national infrastructure or run once-nationalised industries. Home ownership has collapsed and families are having fewer and fewer children in part because of the necessity for both parents to work full-time to afford the basics of life. State subsidies for childcare only apply to nurseries and other official settings and do nothing to help parents or grandparents look after their own children. And, uniquely in Europe, the tax system does not see family units, only individual workers.

Sunak has shown some signs of an instinctive Toryism with his ideas about banning social media for the young, but there is little evidence of a wider, coherent Tory vision of what his government is trying to do. On the whole, Conservative governments now seem to treat everything as economic. People must be made more healthy — to grow the economy. Mothers and the retired must return to work — to grow the economy. And immigration must increase — to grow the economy.

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While there is a good deal of lunacy on the Tory Right, it is also the case that there is more intellectual energy coming on the fringes of the party than around Sunak, Cameron and the old Left. The New Conservatives, for example, today offer a more authentic Utleyite Torysim on questions of immigration and the family than the party’s liberal wing, which claims to want to reduce immigration but baulks at the economic price of doing so. Miriam Cates, though now under investigation for apparently bringing Parliament into disrepute, is not anachronistic in her concern about the falling birth rate in Britain — this is now a distinctly modern problem affecting not only this country, but almost all Western democracies. How to deal with the new reality of low birth rates, low growth and mass immigration will, in fact, be one of the central questions facing all Western economies over the coming decades.

Most important of all is Utley’s central contention that Tory governments must endeavour to create a sense of national unity and harmony. How will Britain do this in what is now a multinational, multicultural state in a globalised world? The economist Dani Rodrik has argued that in today’s world a trilemma has emerged which cannot be escaped, in which countries must choose between democracy, national sovereignty and global economic integration because it is impossible to have all three at the same time. The more you integrate your economy into the world, the less democratic sovereignty you will have over the material interests of your citizens. But the less you integrate into the global economy, the less efficient your economy will be, leaving your citizens poorer.

In some sense, Brexit is Britain’s answer to this trilemma, choosing sovereignty over integration. But, as we have seen, the trilemma does not go away, only emerges in different forms. What will be the Tory answer to these 21st-century dilemmas? The Tories have shown they can win General Elections: have they still got a philosophy of government? Right now, the answer is no.

Who gets to rule, and on what terms? This question underpins some of the most turbulent episodes in English domestic history. After a few centuries of relative quiet, it’s recently bubbled to the surface: first in the chaos that followed the 2016 Brexit vote, and afterwards in the issue of immigration. Most recently, it’s the deep story behind the drama over Sunak’s “Rwanda policy”.

England is, once again, revisiting a question we’ve asked at intervals since Bad King John: what political arrangement best guarantees our way of life? The Savoyard aristocrat and counter-revolutionary Joseph de Maistre, a keen observer of English political history, might have replied that this has the question backwards. In Studies on Sovereignty (1796), he argued that there’s no point trying to start with an ideal form of government, for “the government of a nation is no more its own work than is its language”. Nor is there any universally best form of government: rather, “all peoples have the government that suits them, and none has chosen it”.

De Maistre made these arguments against then-contemporary revolutionary efforts to rewrite France’s political settlement from the ground up. He argued that this attempt wasn’t just hubristic but impossible: that one cannot simply devise a constitution from first principles, “like a watchmaker makes a watch”. Rather, governments that actually suit a people emerge, over time, in conjunction with the specific geographic, cultural, economic and religious traits of that people. And if the people themselves are not predisposed to value what the constitution grants, then it doesn’t matter what the document says; you still won’t get the desired result. For as he argues, the settlement appropriate to a people reflects that people’s unwritten, core assumptions — what he calls “political dogmas” — that precede and give shape to the space of political possibility and command maximum power not once codified as a constitution, but before anyone writes them down.

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If de Maistre had lived to see the 20th century, he might have illustrated this with the Russian political settlement since the 1917 revolution, which sought to depose a remote, ultra-wealthy aristocratic class that lived by extracting rents from an immiserated peasantry, while leading gilded international lives. He might have noted that the resulting, nominally Communist government also produced a remote, wealthy nomenklatura which extracted rents from a peasant class, while themselves living in luxury. And that since the 1991 upheavals that deposed this class, Russia is still somehow governed by a remote, ultra-wealthy aristocratic class that extracts rents from a ground-under peasantry, while leading gilded international lives. From this we might infer further that, had the international coalition that tried to democratise Iraq and Afghanistan at the turn of the millennium read Studies on Sovereignty, we might have saved many military lives and a great deal of money.

While I can’t speculate on Afghans’ or Russians’ political dogmas, over a millennium of English political history suggests that, for the English, a central one is that rule by absolutists is Just Not On — especially when they’re not even much good at ruling. During the 10^th century, for instance, Anglo-Saxon kings weren’t crowned unless they received the imprimatur of the Witenagemot, a council of high-ranking lords on whose loyalty and military mustering-power that king would subsequently rely on to defend his realm. And though a great deal had changed in England by the 17^th century, this turned out to be still more or less true. Charles I was beheaded in 1649 for, among other things, making too strong a claim to absolute rule: repeatedly dissolving Parliament when it didn’t go along with his demands, and only reconstituting it to ask for more money.

Importantly, though, this wasn’t a revolution. The majority of Englishmen did not want to abolish the monarchy, and just thought Charles was doing it wrong. After his death, Cromwell governed under the Protectorate, to all intents and purposes as a monarch; then, in 1660, Charles II was restored to the throne. But even then, the balance between Crown and Parliament was still off. In the late 17^th century, James II found himself forced into absolutism to achieve his ends, and was again put in his place by the Witenagemot of his era: booted from the throne, and replaced with the more ductile (and Protestant) William and Mary.

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The resulting consensus — formalised via the 1701 Act of Settlement — represents the constitution of which Joseph de Maistre wrote approvingly, when he described how “the civil and religious liberties of England are there newly consecrated”. That constitution held, by and large, until the dissolution of the British Empire in the Sixties, and Britain’s 1973 accession to the EU: a curious political phenomenon in which the ruling elites of several post-imperial European states collaborated to colonise one another, as a kind of retirement project. As was exhaustively debated in the run-up to the Brexit referendum, in the course of doing so, many powers previously wielded by the Crown in Parliament were ceded to the impersonal hands of international treaties: an abstract order created from first principles, more like the “watchmaker” approach deplored by Joseph de Maistre.

And the Brexit vote was, at its heart, a popular revolt against this state of affairs: one deeply rooted in England’s unwritten political dogmas. For some Brexiteers, the main complaint was constitutional: that EU membership subordinated Britain’s sovereign Parliament to an unaccountable supranational government. For others, the grievance was more concrete: the fact that the powers ceded included control of immigration policy.

In turn, the Leave vote prompted several years of political psychodrama so painful I doubt anyone wants to revisit the detail. Importantly, though, the climax turned on the relation between parliamentary sovereignty and the supposedly pre-political, impersonal domain of law. Four years ago this week, Boris Johnson was elected in a landslide, after a white-hot constitutional battle. In it, Johnson threatened to prorogue Parliament to force Brexit through. After Remainer MPs got this ruled unlawful by the Supreme Court, Johnson called a snap election on a promise to “Get Brexit Done” and the rest, as they say, is history.

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The dispute clarified a fact long submerged in the detail of Brexit: that it was partly a dispute over the competing political settlements now claiming the rightful government of England. On one side, the “rule of law”: an abstract system, comprising post-war international treaties, naturalised EU laws, and a series of “reforms” instituted by Tony Blair and his inheritors. This is the project de Maistre warned against: an effort to escape history for the impersonal systems, and where the final arbiter is not political but juridical — in Britain’s case, the 2009 Blair-era innovation of the “Supreme Court”. On the other, we have the emergent, gradually accumulated settlement whose core assumptions persist, as unwritten as ever, in a spirit largely unaltered since Bad King John.

Johnson won his landslide by standing up for the older political settlement, against the new technocratic one. But his victory has not resolved matters, any more than the instructive example of Charles I settled matters four centuries ago. Far from it: in terms of the grievances Brexit was intended to remedy, it has been a signal failure.

So far, immigration is not only not reduced, but significantly higher than pre-Brexit. Parliamentary supremacy, meanwhile, seems as hog-tied as ever by international obligations, agreements, and regulations — all enforced by the Supreme Court. If the Rwanda drama that engulfed Parliament this week tells us anything, it’s that we are a long way from having resolved the current imbalance in England’s political settlement to the satisfaction of the English people.

It’s clear that, for many voters today, the supposedly superior “neutral” system of laws is taking on the same hated characteristics of incompetence and despotism as a Bad King John.

It remains to be seen whether, having scraped a victory in Tuesday’s vote by 313 to 269, Rishi Sunak will succeed in reclaiming Parliamentary sovereignty — or whether this merely means the dispute will shift to some other disputed system of rules, agreements and obligations.

In any case, it’s clear that this fight will be ongoing — and also that it’s only secondarily about migrants. At its heart, it is the latest round of an ongoing dispute over how best to adjust the English political settlement for today’s conditions, while ensuring it still suits England and its people. And if history is any guide, this will continue until some compromise is reached that the English people finds acceptable. Or, alternatively, until the utopians manage to follow through on Bertolt Brecht’s ironic advice, and dissolve the people so another can be elected.

So much of our political commentary is spent speculating about how these absurdist battles will play out. Will Keir Starmer’s judgement over Gaza be vindicated come election day? Will Rishi Sunak prove us all wrong? Is the Prime Minister showing courage or weakness in sacking Suella Braverman and bringing back David Cameron? What we all seem to agree is that history will be the judge, that when the general election comes around we will have our answers. Somebody will win and somebody will lose; one will have ridden the tide of history and the other will end up as mere flotsam. But there are currents in politics pulling at events far below the surface, often more powerful than those we obsess about in our day-to-day coverage.

“The success of… movements of protest cannot be measured by their immediate political failure,” wrote Lord Blake, the great biographer of Benjamin Disraeli, who in his earlier career led the rebel alliance of romantic Tory ultras called Young England who worshipped the old aristocratic order. By any metric, Disraeli’s Young England failed politically. And yet, for Blake, these movements cannot be understood solely by their parliamentary success, but must be regarded “as symbols and examples that lend an imaginative glow to the dull course of party politics; showing that there are other ways to fame than conformism, diligence and calculation”. The same is true today.

We must shake ourselves from the notion that victory and defeat are the only things that matter. There are other ways in which the course of a nation is affected, often with more profound consequences than what a leader says or does.

Britain’s relationship with Europe is the perfect such example. Between the Schuman declaration of 1950 — the foundational moment of today’s Europe — and Brexit, there were any number of apparently decisive moments which turned out to be less decisive than they first appeared. In 1971, the House of Commons finally voted to join the Common Market and that was that: a long-running drama came to a conclusion. Harold Macmillan, who had failed to lead Britain into the EEC the previous decade, waited in Dover to hear the news and lit a beacon to announce the historic turning point, which was then answered across the water in Calais. Four years later, the British public ratified the decision by a crushing margin in the country’s first ever referendum. The end.

As Robert Saunders captures in Yes To Europe, a triumphant Harold Wilson was hailed a political giant for his skilful handling of events. A cartoon in The Daily Express portrayed him parading in triumph through the streets of London, a Roman emperor in a chariot drawn by Ted Heath and Roy Jenkins with Margaret Thatcher throwing flowers from the sidelines. Behind him were the poor, huddled masses of Labour eurosceptics dragged along in chains. The Sunday Times summed up the wisdom of the day: “If politicians are to be judged by their ability in the end to get what they want, Harold Wilson is a great politician.” But politics has to be about more than this. While Harold Wilson got what he wanted, within a year he was gone, a broken man.

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Suellaism is here to stay

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We never seem to learn this lesson. In 1977, Professor Anthony King published the first history of the referendum campaign, painting the “Yes” victory as a triumph for the moderate political centre against what would now be called the populists. King speculated what might have happened had there been a No vote: it would have undermined Wilson and Callaghan while strengthening the Labour Left. As Saunders says of King’s argument: “Benn or Foot might have become leader, opening a fissure between ‘the moderate centre’ and the ‘extreme Left’. Roy Jenkins and Shirley Williams might have left to form a new party, carrying many of their most popular colleagues with them, all of which could have had the cumulative effect of banishing Labour from power ‘for at least a generation’.” But as Saunders puts it: “This, of course, was almost exactly what happened a few years later.”

By 1980, Michael Foot was leader of the Labour Party and Thatcher had become prime minister. By 1990, Thatcher — who had campaigned for a Yes vote — had become euroscepticism’s first martyr. By 2000, the Conservative Party was preparing a “Save the Pound” election campaign and by 2010 its leader was vowing to veto the new European treaty if elected. And we all know what happened in 2020. The great current of history can move in the opposite direction from how it looks on the surface; a political riptide difficult to spot from the shore, but powerful nonetheless.

Sometimes political decisions move in one direction but the mood of a party or country moves in another. In retrospect, the Labour Right won their struggle with the Left in 1975, but were seen to have betrayed the soul of the party. Something similar happened for the Blairites after the Iraq war and for unionists after the Scottish referendum in 2014. Perhaps we are also seeing that play out now after the Brexit referendum of 2016.

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While this week in Westminster was extraordinary, perhaps that’s not for the obvious reasons. Suella Braverman was sacked, the Tory right had the wind taken out of its sails by the Supreme Court, David Cameron returned and Keir Starmer saw off the Left of his Party. The centre is back in charge of both political parties and, by extension, the country. Whatever happens at the next election, there will be no great changes. Our relationship with Europe, Ireland, the Middle East, China and the United States will largely remain as is. We will maintain our nuclear deterrent, the rough balance of tax and spending, education and health policies. All will be well for those who prize macro stability.

But what is happening under the surface? Who is winning the battle for the soul of each party? First, let’s take the Labour Party. The obvious point is that Starmer has emerged from this week with his authority intact and his chances of becoming prime minister enhanced. His party is now even further ahead in the polls than it was before. As things stand, he stands a very good chance of not only being elected, but serving as prime minister well into the 2030s. All this can be true and important — and for it to also be true that having a third of your parliamentary party rebel on an issue of core judgement before you’ve even become prime minister is a warning of problems to come.

Should Starmer become prime minister, foreign policy will quickly intrude on his premiership. Donald Trump might well have already won the presidency or could do so soon afterwards. It goes without saying that a Trump presidency will present particular challenges for a Labour prime minister leading a pro-European, pro-Palestinian movement. Let’s remember that Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza may still be raging in a year’s time — or even in five year’s time. The humanitarian crisis may be even more acute, the pro-Palestinian Left even more angry. Looking at the Labour party today, its foreign policy remains remarkably similar to what it might have been under Clement Attlee, Harold Wilson or Tony Blair — and yet culturally the Left has become more more anti-American, anti-Israel, and pro-European. These are not things Starmer can simply lead in another direction, only manage.

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On the Conservative side, it is hard to know where to start. There is more than a passing resemblance to John Major in the mid Nineties who, like Sunak, was more in line with establishment thinking than his own supporters’ instincts, and was forced into pathetic shows of nationalism to compensate for his overall failures of policy.

This week, Sunakism took control of the Tory party, with Cameron and other centrist figures brought into the cabinet. The prime minister’s Rwanda policy was then thrown out by the Supreme Court, who said it breached a whole array of international treaties that Britain had signed up to. In response, rather like Major’s doomed beef war with Europe, Sunak has gone to war to defend the policy, with the absurd notion that he will pass a law to simply declare the country safe. Like Major in the late Nineties, the likely result is that this will do little to ameliorate unhappiness within the Conservative Party or increase his chances of holding back the tide of support for Labour, which has declared its opposition to the scheme.

Perhaps the most important thing here is not whether Sunak will succeed or fail with his approach, but what will happen to the mood in the Conservative Party. From 1997 onwards, Britain’s place in the European Union seemed to grow ever more secure as Tony Blair triumphed signing up to one treaty after another, only for the Conservative parliamentary party to grow ever more sceptical until, eventually, the sceptics won.

Today, you have to wonder what is going to happen to Britain’s membership of the European Convention of Human Rights. Suella Braverman has been kicked out of the cabinet, but will Suellaism eventually take hold of the Conservative soul? This will not be decided in a single election, or even multiple elections, but by trends working away under the surface, buffeted by events, stories, scandals and political groupings operating beyond the remit of mere leaders, lending Blake’s “imaginative glow to the dull course of party politics”.

Braverman may never become Tory leader. She may end up leading a faction in parliament that suffers defeat after defeat, like Bill Cash in the Nineties or Tony Benn in the Eighties. But that doesn’t mean her politics will die or Britain’s membership of the ECHR will remain secure. The same is true of the Labour Left, which will not disappear simply because Keir Starmer triumphs in 2024 or does not.

Politics is not some placid, obedient sea able to be parted by whichever Moses is in charge at that moment. It is tidal and choppy, issues, constantly being shaped not just by leaders and calculation, but by events, scandals, ideas and, yes, the losers of politics.

Just over a year ago, Sunak claimed his mandate to govern came from Boris Johnson’s victory in 2019, a victory that was, he insisted, “not the sole property of any one individual” but that of the entire party. “And the heart of that mandate is our manifesto,” Sunak declared triumphantly outside No 10. “I will deliver on its promise.” 

Within a year, Sunak had junked it completely: corporation tax was hiked to 25% and HS2 scrapped. Sunak then spun these moves as part of a new mission to end the “30-year political status quo” which he wasn’t a part of. Then, a month later, he sacked Suella Braverman and made David Cameron Foreign Secretary.

In terms of short-term political tactics, there is a certain logic at work. The story — for a day or two at least — is no longer about the former Home Secretary or the “hate marches” that have so divided the Conservative Party since the mass slaughter of Israelis on October 7. But what are voters supposed to make of it all? Is Sunak still out to end 30 years of political failure? Or just the past seven years of failure since Cameron was last in office? 

The reshuffle reveals the terminal nature of the crisis now facing this Government. These are its dying spasms. A year ago, Sunak tried to resuscitate the Johnson coalition by appointing Braverman Home Secretary. The gambit inevitably failed. Johnson’s coalition was gone by the time Sunak took charge, killed by Partygate and Truss’s mini-budget. Sunak then tried the hopey-changey thing, but voters hated it, with polls at the weekend predicting a landslide defeat for the Tories worse than in 1997. Now Sunak seems to be trying to rebuild the Cameron coalition that was upended by Brexit. But Cameron’s coalition is also long gone. 

And the war for the future of the Conservative Party has begun.

For the Conservative Left, Cameron’s appointment to Foreign and Braverman’s sacking from Home is long overdue. “The fanatical fringe we call the Tory hardline Right will be the death of modern Conservatism unless Tories wake up to the reality that these people are not the party’s friends,” Matthew Parris wrote in The Times on Saturday, urging Sunak to sack Braverman. The most obvious option for Sunak would have been Kemi Badenoch, who also shares similarly “sound” views about cultural issues, but does not carry with her the same sort of melodrama. Had Badenoch been promoted to the Home Office, there would at least have been a semblance of intellectual coherence about this reshuffle. As one senior Tory who is fond of Cameron put it to me yesterday: “This isn’t a strategy, it’s about shafting your enemies.”

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The political story here, then, is simple: Sunak defenestrating the Right of the party. It is, in a sense, Sunak’s coming-out party: the moment he reveals his real politics. He will now fight the next election as a moderate, liberal conservative. The problem for Sunak is that while Braverman might easily be discarded, Suella-ism will prove much harder to get rid of. Ultimately, she is expressing a feeling about modern Britain that is shared within the Conservative Party — beyond the fringes of its hard Right.

In many respects, Braverman’s downfall is her own fault: she botched her attack on the police in The Times, failed to clear it properly with No. 10, went too early and failed to use the power of her office to achieve concrete results. Braverman is far from the first Tory Home Secretary to take on the police; she is just the least successful. Theresa May, remember, took them on in 2015 and won. 

At the heart of Braverman’s attack on the police is a much more interesting ideological shift taking place in the Tory party, and one, whatever its faults, that has a far more coherent story to tell about British politics over the last 13 years than Sunak has yet to come up with. Her story is this: the Conservative Party has failed. It won elections, but failed to change the country. Yes, it took Britain out of Europe, but — and here is the essence of Suella-ism — the Blob remains in charge: the courts remain all-powerful, schools promote their own ideology, police declare that “jihad doesn’t mean jihad”. It is time, she insists, to take back control.

One fundamental mistake people make with politics is to constantly seek to dismiss people they don’t like as a throwback to some distant era. As such, Braverman is a modern-day Enoch Powell, or little more than the latest incarnation of the Tory party’s unchanging, loopy hard Right. But far more interesting is to see politicians for what they are: expressions of the Britain that exists now, with all its anxieties, paranoias, prejudices and complexities. Keir Starmer is not Harold Wilson — he is the leader of an altogether new Labour party, representing a new coalition of voters, which is why he is finding the crisis in Gaza so challenging. Likewise, the concern for those who so obviously loathe Braverman should be that she is touching a nerve about today’s Britain.

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I have felt a sense of gnawing unease that something fundamental has changed in the country since October 7, and perhaps even in the West; as if we’re living through some kind of great national argument where things are being said that cannot ever be unsaid, images seen that cannot be unseen. The Braverman battle with the Met is part of this national row, but only one part of it. 

In the four weeks since Hamas’s orgy of slaughter, we’ve had four mass demonstrations in London, all in support of Palestine, which, taken together, amount to the biggest display of antisemitism in Britain since the Thirties, even though the vast majority of protesters were not hate-filled. In response, unlike France, we’ve had no mass display against antisemitism or sense of outrage at the hostages currently being held in Gaza, only a mob of nationalist hooligans rampaging around London looking for a fight. I can well understand why, for many Jews, this has been a far more profoundly unsettling moment than I can ever comprehend.

The images that I have found most unnerving over the past weeks are the little acts of social breakdown that now seem to be bleeding through everyone’s Instagram reels and Facebook accounts: the thugs in balaclavas surrounding the one lone man brave enough to stand with a placard likening Hamas to Isis; the fights breaking out in train stations; the racists on buses asking if passengers are Jewish; the placards calling Suella Braverman and Rishi Sunak “coconuts”. Even the degree of violent, elemental loathing for Braverman which seems to be considered fair game hints towards something darker underneath. “She’s fucking gross,” spat the comedy-commentator Jonathan Pie in one of his recent videos. “Full of hate and bile and lies; just lies and filth; utter filth that comes out of that monster’s mouth.”

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We’ve lived through moments of murderous trauma before, of course: 9/11, 7/7, Charlie Hebdo, Lee Rigby, the Bataclan. But have any been quite as psychologically successful as this one in revealing quite so much division, quite so quickly? Each of the previous terrorist attacks brought about a moment of cohesion. The opposite has happened here. Part of this seems to be the nature of the violence that was on display. September 11 was purposefully cinematic in its scale; October 7 in contrast was made for the mobile phone: genocidal snuff pornography, its depravity the point. A pogrom designed to divide — and so it has.

It would take a brave soul to believe that the removal of Suella Braverman and the appointment of David Cameron as Foreign Secretary can somehow whisk us back to a time before the division, when common sense and level heads reigned. This wasn’t true then and isn’t now. If she wants to win the Tory leadership, Braverman is going to have to explain why she achieved so little in office. But whatever happens to Braverman herself, the Tory liberals are going to need a better story to explain their own failure if they are to defeat Suella-ism in the long term.

The 14th Earl of Home emerged as leader in autumn 1963 after one of the most contentious leadership selections in Conservative history. The process even forced him to rebrand, becoming Sir Alec Douglas-Home when compelled by democratic mores to disclaim his hereditary title. His party was divided, behind in the polls, and widely expected to lose the next election. The circumstances were unpropitious, and on first inspection Douglas-Home doesn’t offer an encouraging role model for Sunak. When voters had their say on his leadership in the 1964 election, he was ejected from office in favour of Harold Wilson. But in his short time at the helm, Douglas-Home managed to turn a widely forecast electoral blowout for the Conservatives into one of the closest contests of the century. When all the votes were counted, Labour led the Conservatives by just 0.7%, earning them an overall majority of just four seats.

Douglas-Home’s turnaround mission began by restoring stability and decency to a government rocked by scandal. Throughout the spring and summer of 1963, rumours swirled around Westminster about War Secretary John Profumo’s affair with the showgirl Christine Keeler, who’d also had a fling with a Soviet Naval attaché. Both decency and national defence were said to be under threat by the actions of a government minister. Profumo strenuously denied the allegations in Parliament — a straightforward lie — and was ultimately forced to resign, but only after his lapse in judgement exposed a government that appeared to have lost its moral compass. Douglas-Home was one of the few senior ministers who managed to stay aloof from the sordid affair, preserving his reputation and enabling his appointment as prime minister to signal a clear turning of the page.

Sunak’s premiership began in much the same spirit. On the steps of Downing Street one year ago, he told the country that his “government will have integrity, professionalism and accountability at every level”. It was a promise that things would change after two Tory premierships were prematurely felled — one by scandal, the second by a mini-budget that called the government’s economic credibility into question. Sunak, the former chancellor known for his hard work and teetotalism, was well placed to signal change at the top. But as is now clear, change alone isn’t enough for the public to look at the Conservatives with fresh eyes.

Like Douglas-Home before him, Sunak also needs to find ways to get the better of a revitalised Labour party. The Tories’ opponent six decades ago was the wily and accusatory Harold Wilson. From the moment Douglas-Home walked through the door of No. 10 Wilson pounced on his aristocratic status, alleging that he had won the leadership thanks to his “family and hereditary connections” in an affront to the meritocratic spirit of the age. Against Wilson’s class politics, Douglas-Home fired back that while he may have been the 14th Earl of Home, “Mr Wilson, when you come to think of it, is the 14th Mr Wilson”. His pithy line, combined with his decent and earnest approach to politics, helped make Labour’s attacks look both unfair and ineffective.

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Keir Starmer has been borrowing from the Wilson playbook in his attacks on Sunak. Whilst insisting that he is “very relaxed about people being rich and getting rich”, a tactic borrowed from another Labour leader, Starmer has consistently chided Sunak for his personal wealth. Yet Sunak is no landed aristocrat. His story — the migrants’ son who went on to lead his country — is self-evidently one of ambition realised in a meritocratic country. But Labour clearly sees the Sunak family’s success, and that of the family he married into, as one of his principal weaknesses. Douglas-Home repudiated Wilson by tapping into the country’s sense that what someone does, not what they’re born with, should determine how you judge them. Sunak would do well to turn his own story back on Labour, emphasising how his life shows a Britain where hard work and determination pays off — a message Labour will not want to oppose.

While Douglas-Home’s approach earned him the right to be heard among an electorate that had grown weary of his party, it wasn’t enough to win the election. Two key failings denied him another term. Firstly, Douglas-Home failed to heal his party after his bumpy ascent to the top of British politics. When Prime Minister Harold Macmillan announced his resignation in October 1963, there were no clear rules for the selection of the new prime minister. The decision would ultimately lie with the Queen, who would take her advice from Macmillan. Over the course of 10 days, senior Conservatives jostled in unprecedented and chaotic scenes to earn themselves the Queen’s commission. Douglas-Home stayed above the fray, refusing to comment on the leadership and even briefly ruling himself out of contention before he emerged as the choice of Macmillan and senior Tories.

The appointment of a peer crushed the ambitions and bruised the egos of many Conservatives, especially those in the Commons. Two senior MPs, Iain Macleod and Enoch Powell, were so outraged that they refused to serve in Douglas-Home’s government. Macleod went on to write a denunciation for The Spectator of the “magic circle” that had put Douglas-Home in office, while Powell vented his fury through anonymous articles in The Times, attacking the government’s policies and direction. Douglas-Home later said that their election year antics cost the Tories at the polls.

While Sunak’s elevation to the premiership followed a process with clear and predetermined rules, that hasn’t prevented a small number of MPs and activists from echoing allegations of illegitimacy from 60 years ago. Perhaps this was inevitable after the rapid turnaround of Conservative leaders left supporters of Johnson and Truss disgruntled and unexpectedly on the backbenches. Sunak has built a big-tent cabinet, including senior names from both former administrations. But the warning from Douglas-Home’s experience is that it only takes a small number of malcontents for a party to look divided. With the benchmark so low, it will take an almighty display of political skill from Sunak to keep his party’s divisions contained as polling day approaches.

Douglas-Home’s second big mistake concerned policy, specifically the abolition of the Resale Price Maintenance (RPM). Under the antiquated RPM, shops had to sell branded products at the price recommended by the manufacturer. With its removal, they could compete on price. So far, so good — for the consumer. The problem for Douglas-Home was that those in the firing line were an essential part of the Tory voting coalition: small business owners and shopkeepers. Fearing they would be undercut by major stores and driven out of business, they revolted. It was, according to Ian Gilmour, “Sir Alec’s Poll Tax”.

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One motivation for the policy was the pursuit of a legacy, a means of rebutting Labour’s claim that the Conservatives had overseen “13 wasted years”. Six decades on Starmer has been making the same criticism. The challenge for Sunak, who is clearly keen to use the time between now and the next election fruitfully, is to show that his party is still brimming with ideas while recognising what can be achieved in the fifth year of a parliament — and what cannot. By abolishing RPM, Douglas-Home discovered the worst kind of electoral dividing line: one that separated him from his voters. Sunak will be hoping that yesterday’s announcements can bring the two closer together and improve his party’s polling.

One silver lining for Sunak is that, compared to Douglas-Home, he has the benefit of time. Douglas-Home’s premiership ended after just 363 days; Sunak has around another year (longer if he really wants it) before going to the polls. No two elections are the same and the playbook that would have won for Douglas-Home in 1964 won’t be the same for Sunak. But if the Prime Minister can learn the lessons of 60 years ago, he could still deliver a competitive electoral performance, as Douglas-Home did, and possibly even a Conservative victory. If not, Sunak may find that it isn’t just the beginning of his premiership that looks like Douglas-Home’s, but its ending too.

And yet, the evil of cigarettes has not been fully extinguished. Which is why the Conservative government of Rishi Sunak is proposing that those in their late teens should become the last generation ever to smoke legally in this country. Policy to be announced this week in the King’s Speech will eradicate tobacco from our society as surely and comprehensively as cannabis and cocaine have been.

None of this is particularly new, of course. Official disapproval of smoking goes back as far as James I’s 1604 pamphlet A Counterblaste to Tobacco, though it took another three centuries for the government to get fully involved. The spur then was the outbreak of the Boer War in 1899, which saw a flood of recruits to the colours, young men who were employed as servants, shopworkers, clerks and labourers. But if working-class patriotism was in fine fettle, the same could not be said of working-class health. Around three in 10 who applied to join the ranks were rejected on medical grounds. This worrying state of affairs, said some, was down to the advent of the cheap cigarette.

“The chief cause of unfitness was proved to be smoking,” declared Percy Everett, a magazine editor who later co-wrote Scouting for Boys with Boer War hero Robert Baden-Powell. The habit was responsible for “upwards of 80 diseases, including blindness and cancers of the lower lip and tongue, and is credited with killing 20,000 each year”. In short, it was “an evil which is sapping our boyhood’s strength, and so undermining our national manhood”. Smoking, like masturbation, was linked to blindness and insanity.

In response to such concerns came the Children’s Act of 1908, passed by H. H. Asquith’s Liberal government, which introduced the first restrictions. It became illegal to sell tobacco products to anyone under the age of 16, and policemen and park keepers were authorised to confiscate tobacco, cigarettes and cigarette papers from underage smokers; they could also search boys for such items — though, for reasons of delicacy and decency, not girls.

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Adults, however, continued to smoke freely for six decades, until the evidence of the harm it caused became too great to ignore. The medical profession demanded a government intervention and in 1965 — when 70% of men and 40% of women smoked — television adverts for cigarettes were banned. (Other tobacco products fared better: “Happiness is a cigar called Hamlet” ads were still being aired on TV into the Nineties.) The ensuing introduction, in 1971, of warnings on packets — “Smoking can damage your health” — wasn’t entirely successful. A 1975 poll showed that a third of smokers didn’t believe cigarettes could kill. The wording was accordingly ramped up, to include the word “seriously”.

There was also an effort to encourage switching to weaker cigarettes. A league table was published, showing the potency of the various brands. The implication was that if you were on Capstan Full Strength — which offered 38mg of tar per cigarette — you might be better off if you traded down. The Embassy Ultra Mild had just a tenth of those levels.

Advertising restrictions didn’t apply to sponsorship, though. Sport was a particularly attractive partner, since it enabled the brand-names and logos to be displayed on television. Snooker even offered the opportunity to see sportsmen light up while competing. There was also footballer John “Bionic” Osborne, a goalie for West Bromwich Albion, who was famously photographed having a quick smoke during a match in 1972, while the ball was down the other end.

Some, feeling that government action was painfully slow, took matters into their own hands. In 1971, the New Inn in Appletreewick, West Yorkshire declared itself Britain’s first no-smoking pub. It was reported that takings slumped. Later that year, a GP made the news when he refused to accept as patients a 45-year-old woman or her eight children because she had chronic bronchitis and wouldn’t give up smoking. She’d had a 15-a-day habit before the rejection; after, she claimed: “I have become so distraught that I now find I am getting through 30 cigarettes a day.”

Between government initiative and peer pressure, the number of smokers steadily fell, as did the number of places where one could indulge. The restrictions were not always popular, however. In 1982, British Rail banned smoking in the buffet cars of its Southern Region trains, but found itself overwhelmed by complaints and forced to back down. Two years later, smoking was prohibited on Tube trains in London, despite a survey showing only 18% of passengers in favour of a ban and 54% against. By then, only around a third of adults smoked.

It was around this time, though, that public attitudes really changed. Evidence for the negative effects of passive smoking began to accumulate, and there was no coming back from that. In the Nineties, diktats were issued from Brussels that radically reduced the maximum tar yield per cigarette — even as the Common Agricultural Policy was pumping millions into subsidising tobacco production. (An exception was made for Greece, which really liked a strong smoke, and negotiated an opt-out until 2006).

In response to this directive, the other John Osborne — the playwright, not the footballer — wrote a splendidly vitriolic letter to The Times, railing against those who had deprived him of his favourite Turkish cigarettes; “untipped, robust and fragrant”, they were “one of life’s few and reliable pleasures”. The restriction was “craven abasement” to “puny tyrannies”, to countries that had so recently been dictatorships. “As a schoolboy, I narrowly escaped from ‘European’ bombs on my doorstep,” wrote Osborne. “I can forgive this eagerness, but not the compounding of the insult by dashing the tobacco from my lips 40 years on.”

Those who objected to government action on smoking — and they tended, like Osborne, to be awkward individualists — insisted that this was a question of the liberty of the individual. The war against smoking was a “new Puritanism”, said Nicholas Ridley, Margaret Thatcher’s environment secretary: “A crusade to stop others doing what they want or taking risks with their own lives.” (Ridley refused to give up smoking even when diagnosed with lung cancer.) And when David Simpson, formerly of Amnesty International, took over the anti-tobacco lobby group Action on Smoking and Health in 1979, journalist Bernard Levin spotted an irony: “Have all those years of admirable work on behalf of the oppressed and persecuted taught him nothing about the indivisibility of freedom?”

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Like our modern culture wars, the division has not been between Left and Right: over the years, Conservative, Labour and Liberal governments have all been on the same page about tobacco. Rather, it’s been between polite society — those who know they know better — and those who need to be protected from themselves. John Reid, health secretary in Tony Blair’s government, described the war against tobacco as “an obsession of the learned middle class”, and Diane Abbott saw it in similar terms in 2006: “Under New Labour, the party has gone from speaking for the white working class to speaking at them — whether about junk food or the smoking ban.”

There was some truth in this. The four-decade-long campaign had successfully reduced the number of smokers, but its impact was shaped by income and social class. Cigarettes had become unfashionable among the middle classes, but 42% of unskilled workers still smoked, as did 55% of single mothers. According to the Office for National Statistics, the imbalance remains: those with no educational qualifications are four times more likely to smoke than those with a degree.

Education, taxation and location having not been enough, there now comes a new policy to stub out smoking altogether. Sunak’s proposal is to raise the age at which one can purchase tobacco products by a year, every year, so that those now too young to smoke will forever be too young. It’s based on a similar law passed in New Zealand last year, and it will presumably pass through Parliament without much of a hitch — because in government, and in public opinion, the war has been comprehensively won. A taste for tobacco has become the love that dare not speak its name. Smokers are down to fewer than one in eight of the adult population. A YouGov poll last month showed a third of people supporting the proposed age-restriction; when you added in the 29% who wanted a complete ban immediately, it’s clear that Sunak has the public onside.

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Those who fear similar net-zero campaigns elsewhere — against alcohol, the wrong foodstuffs, cars, fireworks, whatever — might note with concern the pattern of public response to every step of the anti-smoking pathway. First, complaints, then ridicule, swiftly followed by compliance and acceptance. It took a while, but there was no rebellion. That studio laughter on Yes, Prime Minister is the sound of a different world.

Admittedly, the suppression of tobacco was greatly aided by an increased understanding of secondary smoking, but once the principle of prohibition is established, it becomes easier to administer. There’s no known secondary harm from vaping, for example, but restrictions have still been imposed by the Conservative government, and there will be more to come. In particular, there are objections to flavoured vapes, since these are assumed to be more attractive to children.

That’s not new, either. The same thinking was seen in the European directive that banned menthol-flavoured cigarettes — though its most notable objector was not a child, but Helmut Schmidt, the venerable ex-chancellor of West Germany. As well as being possibly the last major European statesman to carry a snuff-box, Schmidt was a chain-smoker, and it was reported that he bought up a stash of 38,000 mint-flavoured fags, which proved sufficient to see him through to his last puff. It’s not clear whether he bought enough. He died just shy of his 98th birthday.

He had, after all, warned the Conservative Party that Liz Truss would cause an economic crisis. Which she duly did. He also had credit in the bank from his time as Chancellor, having found the money to keep everyone in work during the pandemic — with enough to buy us a cheap meal to boot. So when he stepped up after those years of chaos, there was a feeling of relief, at least among the governing caste of Britain: the class swot was now in charge. The rows with Europe were quickly put to bed. A deal was reached over Northern Ireland. Pledges were made. The boats would be stopped. 

But, then, the penny dropped. He was just as useless as the rest of them.

His polling today is brutal. Before he took over, the public was almost evenly split over whether he’d be a good prime minister or not. A year later, barely 11% agree — compared with the 50% who think he has been poor or, even, “terrible”. Sunak’s reputation for competence is in ruins as well. Very few people trust him on anything, whether that’s immigration, housing, the NHS, or even the economy. The Tory party’s troubles are deep, of course; they have not recovered since “Partygate”. And yet, they were only 10 points behind when Johnson resigned. After this plummeted to an extraordinary 25 points under Truss, it has miserably stabilised at between 15 and 20 points under Sunak. 

Why? Is he just not very good at politics? It’s certainly true that going to Manchester to cancel a train line to Manchester doesn’t suggest a particular proficiency in the fine art of winning people over. Is it that he inherited such a colossal economic mess that popularity is all but impossible? There is also an element of truth to that. But there is something more fundamental at play. This isn’t just Rishi Sunak’s fault. He is only the last leader of Britain’s worst-ever run of governments. We have never been as badly governed as we have over the the past 13 years.

This isn’t hyperbole; it’s cold evaluation. Whichever way you measure it, whether in terms of meeting its stated objectives or simply the outcomes for ordinary people, there has never been a period of party rule when so little was achieved. Ever.

Living standards have never before grown so weakly over such a sustained period of time. Debt has ballooned: up from around 65% of GDP in 2010 to 100% today. The deficit remains. The basic structure of the UK economy remains as broken as ever: dependent on the City and foreign direct investment to offset the fact that we continue to import far more than we export. Net migration has jumped from 300,000 to 600,000 to help keep our demographic Ponzi scheme from collapsing, while the care system has never been fixed. The proportion of people owning their own home has fallen; the proportion of your pay packet you must give away on rent has risen; taxes have risen to their highest on record.

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And yet, despite all that money pouring into the Treasury, services are stalling. NHS waiting times have risen across the board — a trend that started long before the pandemic. The target to be admitted, seen and discharged from A&E within four hours has not been met since 2014. Every single cancer waiting time is now being missed. The number of people waiting for medical treatment overall has risen from 2.6 million in 2010, to 7.75 million today. The police force, meanwhile, has dwindled, our army is smaller and the number of prison places available for violent criminals all but gone. The courts are in a mess. And the state of the Union has been permanently fractured: EU law applies in one part of the country but not another; a trade border is etched down the Irish Sea; power sharing in Belfast has collapsed, perhaps forever.

Has nothing improved since 2010? Well, crime has apparently continued to fall. Though that is a trend that has been in place since the Nineties. And Britain’s CO2 emissions are also declining; this, too, is part of a much longer trend. Cancer survival rates have improved, even though waiting times have risen (thanks, one suspects, to better drugs). Counterintuitively, inequality has fallen. Oh, and the Elizabeth Line has been built. Gay marriage is perhaps the one concrete achievement that is most mentioned when I cast around for lasting achievements of this period of Tory rule. But does anyone seriously think that wouldn’t have happened sooner or later? 

None of these factors changes the overall reality: things outside this Government’s control which were improving anyway have continued to improve; things which are within its grasp have got materially worse. 

We could, quite reasonably, trace the origins of our current parlous moment back to the great financial crisis of 2008, rather than David Cameron’s arrival in 2010. Certainly, 2008 either made Britain permanently poorer or revealed that we were never as rich as we imagined. However, Cameron’s entire promise in 2010 was that decline was not inevitable. “Our economy is overwhelmed by debt, our social fabric is frayed and our political system has betrayed the people,” Cameron declared in the Conservative Party’s 2010 manifesto. “But these problems can be overcome if we pull together and work together. If we remember that we are all in this together.” How emptily that now echoes.

Electing the Tories would “ensure macroeconomic stability”, he also claimed. This meant safeguarding Britain’s credit rating, eliminating the structural deficit in a single parliament, and keeping interest rates lower for longer. Let’s just say that didn’t work out very well. 

Other promises were made — and broken. “We will make Britain the most family-friendly country in Europe,” the manifesto declares. In 2022 we became the country with the most expensive childcare in the developed world but where every incentive created by the Government makes it harder for parents to look after their own children. Cameron even promised to “support and improve Sure Start” only for more than 1,400 to close since 2019. 

Going through the failures in the manifesto is like shooting fish in a barrel. The pledge to “deliver more affordable homes” and create “a property-owning democracy”; the promise to “extend early deportation of foreign national prisoners”; the complaint about criminals being released early from prison because “there aren’t enough places”; the idea that the Tories would or could “curtail the quango state”. How ludicrous it all now seems. The Climate Change Committee alone is one of the most influential quangos ever created, advising the Government on how to reach net zero by 2050 — the most revolutionary economic policy in decades.

Does Cameron feel shame? Embarrassment? Or does he just shrug and comfort himself with the thought that it was all going to plan until 2016? Perhaps, he’s right. Perhaps it is reasonable to differentiate between the era before the referendum and the era after. Brexit certainly left constitutional scars that will probably never be healed — the Northern Ireland protocol, for example. It also led to the chaos of competing mandates — popular and parliamentary — which took years to resolve. And it may well have exacerbated some of Britain’s other challenges. But, it can’t be blamed for Britain’s structural problems: its productivity slump, its regional divide, its surging NHS waiting lists. These are part of a continuous 13-year story.

No wonder Sunak is trying to present himself as the “change candidate”. He’s just doing what every leader of every badly led Conservative government has done for the past 13 years. Theresa May promised to make government work for ordinary people; Johnson promised to bring an end to austerity and Get Brexit Done; Liz Truss promised to re-inject growth; Sunak promised stability. Each said they could fix their predecessor’s failure. Yet each only worked to confirm the overall failure of the Tory project. 

In 2010, Cameron promised to lift the mood which he claimed had gripped the country. “There is no law that says we must accept decline,” he declared. “We have the energy, the ideas and the ambition to get Britain back on track.” It turns out he had the wrong energy, ideas and ambitions. David Cameron couldn’t see it, but he was a symptom of the problem too: our governing class isn’t fit for purpose. Thirteen years after Cameron, Rishi Sunak is trying to head into the next election with the same essential message that his predecessor tried back then. At heart, it’s a ludicrous pitch.

It’s not just that party conferences have become grim experiences inaccessible to the ordinary person, devoid of any real energy or free thought. They are also tawdry symbols for the state of the nation itself, great fraudulent towers of bullshit designed to look good from the outside. At best, they are empty of any real substance; at worst, they are actively harmful to the country itself.

Consider three of the most prominent policies that shaped this gathering: HS2, Net Zero, and an end to A Levels. Each is a serious structural reform, sold as the policy of a serious man doing serious work. And yet each is a personal whim, the latest preference of the latest inhabitant in No. 10. It is an absurd way to run a country.

On HS2, Sunak has summarily executed a policy included in three consecutive Conservative manifestos, passed into law by a Conservative parliament, and backed by Sunak himself in his leadership campaign. And while scrapping a project of this magnitude with the stroke of a pen might well bring tangible savings, it also brings intangible costs. Anyone who has piled money into Birmingham or Manchester based on the assumption that HS2 would be built — as agreed in law — has been shafted. As for the wider population, why should anyone believe anything the Government says? The only rational assumption is to assume it, and the British state more generally, will go back on its word. A raft of new train lines and road improvements in its place? Pie in the sky.

And with only a year to go before an election that the Labour Party is expected to win, Sunak has promised a complete overhaul of the A-Level system. We have had 10 education secretaries in the past 13 years; we’ve had free schools under Michael Gove; exam results have changed from letters to numbers; and three years ago we got the “T Level” which yesterday was axed. Exactly the kind of swerving “trolley” government Boris Johnson’s removal was supposed to end.

The absurdity of this policy switcheroo has nothing on Net Zero, however. Here is the most revolutionary economic policy in at least a generation, something which will affect almost every aspect of our lives. And how was it approved? By statutory instrument with almost no debate. Many MPs who support Net Zero will privately admit that the way it was introduced was outrageous. Sunak last month criticised the way the policy was enacted “without any meaningful democratic debate about how we get there”. And yet yesterday he delivered one prime ministerial decree after another, all of which the voters must take on trust that he will deliver — even though similarly radical plans promised by all his predecessors often amounted to nothing.

There is an obvious presidentialism to Sunak in his governing style and technocratic confidence. Yet he is better understood as our first management consultant prime minister, utterly convinced of his own rational superiority and common sense. Look at the language he used in his conference speech: “I concluded it simply was not right”; “I am changing all of that”; “I am cancelling the rest of the project.” The man from Goldman Sachs looked at the books and made a decision — and we are all supposed to accept that this is how we are governed.

The Party’s dizzying number of about-turns over the past few years is not without consequence. Within the party, the different factions are now openly challenging each other for control of its future direction, aware that they are only ever one leader away from another sudden change.

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Behind closed doors in Manchester, Tory MPs were in open disagreement about the direction the party needed to go. Was it for free markets or economic nationalism, staying in the ECHR or scrapping it, small-state libertarianism or old Tory moralism? More than that, few seemed able to agree on what story they had to tell of the past 13 years. Was it all part of three decades of cosy political consensus and failure, as Sunak suggested in his speech; one long era of Blairite supremacy, as some in the party now grumble? This, in effect, was the line Ed Miliband and Jeremy Corbyn once told of New Labour in reverse: a period of calamitous Thatcherite continuity. That didn’t work out so well. What seems clear from the feel of the conference and the tenor of Sunak’s speech is that we are heading towards a more robustly Thatcherite party in the truest sense: outwardly conservative on social issues, immigration and national sovereignty. And yet it also remains the party that left one part of the country under EU law.

It is hard not to feel cynical about the whole spectacle. What do all these conferences and prime ministerial declarations amount to? Within hours of his first — and potentially last — leader’s speech to conference, it turned out that Sunak’s education reforms are unlikely to amount to anything for a decade and that some of the great “Network North” to replace HS2 was either in the south or already built.

Away from Sunak’s Silicon Valley-syle unveiling, the big picture of the past 13 years is not that he is some great figure of revolution, but a cheap emblem of the entire era, just the latest in a long line to pull back the ambitions of the state being able to do anything. Sunak is the great reflection of the structural problems of our governing class and the grand economic challenges it is struggling to overcome.

Just look at the record: under Cameron, the country was promised a “Northern Powerhouse” with mass electrification of the rail network across the north. Under May, much of this was scrapped — to George Osborne’s fury. Then, under Johnson, we got levelling-up instead of the Northern Powerhouse, with government departments dotted across the Red Wall to no discernable strategic purpose or any great depth of support in the party. When Johnson went, so too did levelling up, a policy all but ignored by Truss whose own plans were quickly crushed by a national fragility she could not comprehend (and still can’t). Now, we have Sunak, who has rolled back Cameron’s grand promises even further — to make room for a whole series of new ones which will not happen.

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For 13 years, Conservative Party leaders have traipsed up to one party conference after another attempting to spin the reality away: that we are a poor country where everything is expensive. At every turn, with each new PM, they have succeeded only in making things worse, deluded about their own unique wisdom, power and ability to shape the environment in which we operate. They promised national sovereignty and put a border down the Irish Sea; to reduce immigration only to let it double; and to stop the “chaos” threatened by Labour only to then turn around after 13 years and say they haven’t managed to change anything. Sunak has enough energy and arrogance to cause real problems for Labour over the next year or so and should not be ruled out politically. But that does not change the fact that, rather than challenge Britain’s state failure, his government by decree epitomises its worst excesses.

Britain has somehow contrived to produce a system with too much political power concentrated in a centre which is too weak to do anything meaningful with it. Walking around Manchester this week was a grim reminder of this paradoxical reality; the British state both distant and impotent; the city’s successes its own, but its future in someone else’s hands. “There was a time when Manchester was known as the ‘home of living causes’,” wrote Priestley back in 1934. “Exactly what living causes are finding a home there now I do not know.” The same seems true today. Outside of the South East, Manchester is the home of Britain’s great hope of economic success. Maybe it is also where it goes to die.

It is a marked difference to the optimism of classical economics. Most of us are used to living in a society with a strong belief in material progress, with a sense that we can collectively advance as a society. This belief allowed us to assume that the shared pie that is the national economy is always growing and so, if we work together to grow it ever larger, our slice will grow with it. Not all societies are like this, however. Most throughout human history, especially peasant or tribal societies, have no illusions of material progress and so tend to be structured around zero-sum thinking.

The American anthropologist George M. Foster called this the “principle of the limited good”. In a society where the pie never grows, the only way to increase your share is to decrease the share of another person. Societies that subscribe to the principle of the limited good tend to be static, have high levels of material and social equality, and be strongly resistant to social change. They also tend to be highly susceptible to envy, suspicion and rather aggressive interpersonal politics. Clearly this describes both the small insular village and the communist economies of yesteryear. But it is also becoming an increasingly good approximation of contemporary Britain.

A recent study from Harvard examines the principle of the limited good in granular detail and it suggests that the zero-sum thinking associated with it is becoming commonplace across modern capitalist economies, seeping into our collective psychology. As the authors themselves make clear, this is not a political mindset per se — both Democrats and Republicans can tend in this direction — although overall it is more common among those who categorise themselves as “strong Democrat” or Left-wing. Interestingly, one of the most zero-sum thinking groups the authors found were Democrats who voted for Donald Trump.

This type of thinking does not generate typical Left-Right opinions either, with constituents of both parties favouring both redistributive policies and immigration restriction. Zero-sum thinking is above all else a mindset, a way that people frame the world. If you think that someone else’s slice of the pie comes at the expense of yours then you will favour both fewer people to take slices and policies that give you more in the first place. But though this study shows how this thinking manifests, it fails to answer the question of why it does. The authors seem to want to impose a Left-liberal framing on the data, seeking to prove, for example, that zero-sum thinking is associated with having family that were slaves or slavers. The Confederate flag gets a look-in too, as the authors argue that people with ancestors in the Confederate South have higher rates of this attitude.

These findings arise from a flaw in their methodology. The authors use a questionnaire to ask people about their family backgrounds and then base their findings on this. They find, for example, that “among Black respondents, those who have ancestors who were enslaved have a more zero-sum worldview”. It seems far more likely that people who have this worldview will be more likely to view their own past as a competitive struggle than those who do not. Ditto for those who wave the rebel flag. This is an obvious point, and it feels like it was lost on the authors because they wanted to impose their own worldview onto the findings.

Their two most interesting findings, however, are that young people tend to be more zero-sum in their thinking than older people and that their zero-sum thinking is increasing over time. In fact, the trend is accelerating as young people go on to replace previous generations, shifting society at large in this direction. And this raises an extremely interesting question that the authors do not explore: demographic change, arguably the greatest economic division of the modern West. The authors think primarily in terms of income groups and groups that may have been oppressed in other ways, either now or in the past. Yet it is obvious to the neutral reader that, given their results, the most obvious arena for conflict is between the young and the old.

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Our societies are ageing rapidly due to low birth rates. The median age in the United States has risen from 28 in 1970 to 38.9 today. In Britain it has risen from 33.2 to 40.7 in the same period. As a society ages, more old people emerge relative to young people. Since older people tend not to work, this means that the remaining young people must work to feed and clothe both themselves and the retirees. This is the most bitter zero-sum economic relationship in any society, and it is the one that is the most obvious and visible. It is also the one that is most often discussed politically. Rarely a year goes by when the newspapers are not filled with talk of a pension crisis and the need for reform and yet this is rarely tied back to the bigger picture: a society with low birth rates that is rapidly ageing.

Fertility rates in both Britain and the United States are now far below replacement. This means that the ageing of the population will accelerate as time goes by, a vicious cycle which in turn means that the economic relationship between the young and the old will become increasingly antagonistic. We have seen that the young tend to be more zero-sum in their thinking and that this group is becoming more so as time goes on. Filling the gap with immigration, which is only a stopgap, will become more difficult as zero-sum thinking makes the society less and less accepting of mass migration – this is already happening amid sluggish economic growth. The confluence of these demographic trajectories appears to be putting us on a path to a society dominated by the “principle of the limited good”.

The dynamics of an ageing society will greatly favour this sort of thinking. Consider the case of precious assets, such as housing. Savings accumulate throughout the life cycle, meaning that older people tend to have more than young people. This also means that older people own more assets than younger people as the savings are typically parked in assets. But as the pool of older people grows, so does the need for assets. Eventually stock and bond markets become too small, and the greying savers need new places to park their savings. One option is property which can then be rented out to earn a yield.

Who rents the property? The asset-poor young, of course. More and more, the older generation will end up owning all the property and renting it to the younger people, who will be doing all the work. Even the most charitable of us would feel economic resentment in such a society. We are already seeing its stirrings in our heavily financialised housing markets, and the concomitant and largely youth led “Yimby” movement — although they misunderstand the problem, thinking that the solution is to build more housing when the reality is that the property prices are being bid up by the asset-rich.

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In his speech to Conference on Wednesday, Rishi Sunak is widely expected to discuss cutting inheritance tax as well as the thorny issue of the triple-lock pension. Reports suggest that his advisors believe it would be “political suicide” to get rid of the latter. And they are right. Older people, and pensioners especially, tend to vote in much larger proportions than younger people. The triple-lock ensures that pensioners will see no decline in their income relative to the inflation by government guarantee. Meanwhile, the pay for workers is barely higher than it was in 2008 when adjusted for inflation and has fallen around 9% since the start of 2022. What is the triple-lock debacle if not a zero-sum debate turned inter-generational ruck?

The inheritance tax issue is similarly an implicit demographic debate. Sunak wants to at least reduce the tax if not abolish it. While some may portray this as a straightforward grab by a notoriously wealthy Prime Minister, Sunak’s advisers rightly point out that polling shows that the tax is the “most hated in Britain”. Why is it so hated? Once again because people accumulate assets as they age. When parents see that their own children have not been able to do so and are stuck as tenants, they want to be able to pass their assets down. This is the founding principle of that mythic financial institution, “The Bank of Mum and Dad”. Parents see all too clearly that the ageing society is no good for their children, and if they can afford to do so they want to do their best to set this right.

Tear back the veil and we see that the Tory Party conference is already shot through with zero-sum thinking related to an ageing population. As the population gets older, this will get more and more acute. The only way out of this is to convince people to have more children. And that will require a new type of zero-sum politics, one in which the government recognises two groups fighting over resources: those with children, who produce the people needed to look after them in their old age; and those without children, who must rely on everyone else. To the former the spoils must go, if we want to escape from the dreaded society of the limited good.