Each of these moments is pretty revealing, but taken together, they create a stark portrait of Britain’s predicament today.

Take P&O Ferries. It was recently labelled a “rogue operator” by the Transport Secretary, Louise Haigh, for its conduct two years ago, when it sacked 786 staff and replaced them with foreign agency workers. At the time, Boris Johnson — then prime minister — insisted P&O would not “get away with it”.

Not only did the company get away with it, but when P&O’s Dubai-based parent company, “DP World”, appeared to threaten to withhold a £1bn investment in Britain as a result of Haigh’s remarks, ministers began furiously back-pedalling. They offered “clarifications” to the company that the Transport Secretary did not actually speak for the Government. And so, DP World proceeded with its investment, taking a further stake in Britain’s infrastructure.

I happened to travel on P&O Ferries to France this summer, and found it a desperately soul-sapping experience. Gone are the canteens of old, staffed with actual visible people. In their place are giant vending-machine-style cafes, in which you order, collect, scan and pay for your food without ever having to interact with another human being.

The experience, like so much of our daily life today is entirely impersonal and transactional: the ferry turned into a giant service station on the sea, where the middle classes of England can be fed and watered en route to their Eurocamp holidays by a quiet army of foreigner workers largely kept from view. If you’re still struggling to imagine the scene, picture a Pret a Manger ferry.

The year before, in contrast, we travelled with Brittany Ferries to Spain, where all the staff appeared to be middle-aged Frenchmen and women. Brittany Ferries, it turns out, is owned by a series of Breton farming collectives who, you can only imagine, are rather better at ensuring the company’s bosses are unable to “get away with it”.

Like so much about Britain today, the ferry fable adds to the nagging sense that the country is not so much fiscally broke, as spiritually so. It is extraordinary that a country surrounded by the sea is unable to muster a single British ferry company in Dover employing British workers on wages that can sustain a decent family life in Britain. It’s pretty shameful.

The second revealing moment came courtesy of Jenrick attempting to rally supporters to his cause by, once again, celebrating the legacy of Thatcher. This is not to sneer at his stunt. The appeal of Thatcher should not be dismissed as mere nostalgia even if her record is not what many of her supporters assume it to be. Though Karl Marx observed that “the tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living”, his point was that when a country faces a crisis, its leaders naturally turn to precedents to make the current situation understandable, “anxiously conjur[ing] up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honoured disguise and borrowed language”. This is what we are seeing today. Aware of the daunting scale of the challenges we face, the country is anxiously looking back to its recent history for reassurance that they can be overcome.

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The fact that the challenges Thatcher faced are entirely different from today’s — and therefore require entirely different solutions — does not undermine the residual sense that, however flawed and incoherent her actual record in government was, at least she had an idea of what she was trying to achieve and why.

What also marks out Thatcher’s premiership is that whatever its practical reality, it was the product of an ideological movement that had been decades in the making, combining Hayekian economics with Cold Warrior idealism. Domestically, Thatcherism was, in effect, Powellism without Enoch Powell — a programme of privatisation, monetarism and spending restraint which he had been championing for much of the Sixties and Seventies, supported by Ralph Harris and Anthony Seldon at the Economic Affairs and the “St Andrew’s Set” at the Adam Smith Institute.

By the late Seventies, the IEA and ASI had been joined by Keith Joseph at the Centre for Policy Studies, as well as those older high-Tory thinkers such as Maurice Cowling, Roger Scruton and John Casey who added a certain academic depth to the Thatcherite counter-revolution, combined with an emerging cadre of radical libertarian students about to enter the political fold. As Casey himself pointed out “the early Thatcher years marked a very odd moment in the history of the Tory party when it decided to lie back and enjoy ideas”.

Perhaps the word “enjoy” here is doing a little too much work. This was a period of ideological ferment and not just between Left and Right, but within the Conservative Party itself, pitting the self-styled libertarian Thatcherites on one side against their “Wet” opponents on the other. Yet to have an ideological dispute, you need clashing ideologies, which in that period were in abundance.

Back then, ideas and intellect certainly seemed to matter. The other day I came across an entry from Thatcher’s engagement diary in October 1982 regarding a dinner organised by her think tank, the CPS.

Among those who attended were V.S. Pritchett, Anthony Quinton, Isaiah Berlin, V.S. Naipaul, Tom Stoppard and Phillip Larkin. A briefing note sent to Thatcher contains descriptions of each of the guests. “Anthon Quinton: President of Trinity Oxford. Conservative philosopher. You liked his ‘Politics of Imperfection’ and quoted it in the Airey Neave lecture”. “VS Naipaul: Very successful, sharp, angular novelist. Trinidad origin. Passionately opposed to the Left and of course ‘Liberation movements’.” “Tom Stoppard: Brilliantly successful and entertaining, rather Shavian, playwright. Czech origin. I expect you will have seen several of his plays e.g. Professional Foul, Night & Day.”

It is hard to imagine today’s political class ever receiving such a briefing with that degree of assumed knowledge — or any of the leading figures taking an evening off to enjoy their equivalent company. And Jenrick’s stunt only served to remind us of that. Starmer, despite declaring that he does not have a favourite book or poem, is not an uneducated man — far from it. In his speech to Labour conference he spoke of the value of the arts and his own love of classical music. Yet, we all know, implicitly, that this is an age not of great ideas, but of Zoom calls, spreadsheets and box sets.

As a result there is a shallowness to today’s politics. Starmerism is clearly not the product of an ideological movement years in the making boasting a cadre of political ground troops ready to go into battle for its principles. This government is, rather, a reaction to two distinct failures: the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn and the Conservative Party under five different prime ministers. Beyond that, its roots are so shallow it risks being blown away at the first storm that comes along.

Which brings us to that final, inescapable, economic reality. Money. While there has been much focus on the French fiscal crisis and the growing spread between its bond yields and those of the Germany, it has been less remarked upon that British borrowing costs are now higher than both countries — and rising as investors begin to price in the likelihood that Rachel Reeves will increase borrowing in her statement on 30 October.

For much of Labour’s first 100 days, it has argued that its first priority is to put the Government’s books in order  following an apparently reckless Tory splurge under Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss. “Never again” has been Starmer’s motto, a reference to the crisis which followed the Truss mini-budget of 2022. And yet, without much fanfare, the yield on 10 year gilts is now almost back to where it was in 2022 at over 4% — a whole percentage point higher than in France.

The reality for Britain, then, is that its economic challenges have not gone away because it replaced Truss with Sunak and then Sunak with Starmer. The fundamentals remain difficult and clearly no one in Government has a clue how we might escape this trap. And it is a brutal trap: how can we, as an ageing, indebted and energy-poor country that is dependent on inward investment, possibly find a way to prosper in an increasingly protectionist world dominated by Chinese exports, American technology and a booming Middle East? Right now, no one seems to have a clue.

At Starmer’s investment conference in London, the boss of the US pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly, David Ricks, set out the challenge as he sees it. “I think the difference in the UK is, separate from Europe, it’s a relatively small market for most multinationals and certainly for Americans, so something needs to be quite different to make it interesting.” For many Remainers, it was a gotcha moment: had we stayed in the EU, we would not have to be so different, and so would not be chasing businessmen like him. But the reality is that Britain has been desperately searching for inward investment for decades — and has even succeeded at it: last year the UK actually saw its its foreign investment grow, as Europe’s fell. The reason we are dependent on foreign finance is not because we left the EU, but because we run such a large trade deficit. As David Edgerton put it in The Rise and Fall of the British Nation, the dream of Thatcherism was to resurrect British capitalism, but what we really did was to open Britain up to the world’s capital.

I’m not sure Britain does need to make itself “interesting” in the way Ricks and his friends describe. But we clearly need to do something different. And in the meantime, we are prostrating ourselves before rogue operators who know how desperate we are.

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.

“Please, gentlemen, we will lower our voices,” she said at one point like a primary school teacher enjoining a rabble of five-year-olds to “use our indoor voices”. Again and again, she interrupted the babble of one or other to insist they answered the question asked, or shut up and give the other one the chance to speak. “Gentlemen, please!”

Not that her interventions were always, or even often, successful. Noting that the IFS thought that both men were in a “conspiracy of silence” about having to either raise taxes or cut services, she asked something to the effect of “are you levelling with us about the public finances — one-word answer, yes or no”. And, of course, both men embarked on long dreary meaningless sentences neither of which contained the word yes, or no.

There was a nice bit around then — it’s a format that could be developed in the second debate — when she made them stop answering out loud altogether. Raise your hand if I’m wrong, she said, and reeled off a list of the unpopular taxes that they both absolutely definitely scout’s honour weren’t going to raise. Both men kept their hands clamped to their sides and hoped their noses weren’t visibly lengthening. Then she asked how they were proposing to pay for everything and, alas, they went back to talking.

This was a wretched, wretched debate — in both its format and in its performers. Who was its intended audience, given it was neither informative nor entertaining? The quickfire format — 45 seconds an answer — meant, even before you factored in the endless interruptions, that nothing remotely substantial stood a chance of being said. Which left rhetorical dash, style and personality: something neither of these earnest technocrats could summon if their political careers depended on it. Sir Keir comes across like the teacher that nobody else in the staffroom wants to include in after-work drinks; and Rishi comes across like the sixth-former who should by rights be head boy but missed out because the teachers found him too annoying.

Of the two men, the debate marginally favoured Sir Keir — if only because he was on easier ground politically, not having been involved in causing the omnishambles the next PM will have to try to clear up. Rishi suffered groans and derisive laughter from the audience a bit more often — blaming Covid and industrial action for the state of the NHS; muttering weakly that the record number of small boats landing was “because it’s a challenge”, and scoring the biggest laugh of the evening when he told a Gen Z that national service was going to be “transformational”.

But stylistically, they were much of a muchness — and it wasn’t a muchness to write home about. Both did the thing of infallibly answering their questioners by name because a manual somewhere says it helps you sound like a human being: “Well, Claire”; “Well, Stephen”, “Like you, Myles, I think…” Both fell over themselves to burnish their ethos appeals with reference to their families. Climate crisis? It’s all Rishi’s girls ever talk to him about so, y’know, he cares. NHS? And did Sir Keir mention that his dad was a humble toolmaker and that he, too, knew what it was like to have your phone cut off because you’d failed to pay the bill?

Watching Sunak, you could see the stiff and nervous result of hours of intensive debate prep from the Tory party’s rhetorical turd-polishing department. Having determined that their candidate was hard to relate to, struggled with spontaneity, and couldn’t help looking slappably smug, they did the best they could to drill him. He had been told to look down the camera, and repeat a small handful of phrases and lines in the hopes that they stuck in people’s heads after the sight of his ghastly comportment at the podium had, hopefully, faded.

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Someone, at the very beginning of this campaign, decided that the two phrases he needs to get across to the electorate are “clear plan” and “bold action”. Work them in as often as you can, Rishi. And so he did. Those were the lines he repeated in that bizarre, soggy speech outside Downing Street that fired the starting gun for the election. And those were the lines he repeated every chance he got in the debate.

Cost of living crisis? Why, the Conservatives had “bold action” for that. And, what’s more, a “clear plan”. Immigration? “Bold action” was very much the thing. Oh, and “sticking to our plan”. On foreign policy? I’ve made a “bold” decision. Young people? Making you do national service is “an example of the bold action I’m prepared to take”.

How is running a country like running a football team (another point in Etchingham’s favour is that though she was clearly ordered to ask this “tongue in cheek” question at the end, she didn’t conceal her contempt for its idiocy)? You need, wait for it, “A clear plan and bold action.”

He had been given two other lines of attack and one of defence. The line of defence was, simply, that the last 14 years had been nothing to do with him, and that “this election is about the future”. As you’d imagine, Sir Keir made a certain amount of hay with this because, well, why wouldn’t you?

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The attack lines were that Sir Keir was proposing what he variously called “Keir Starmer’s pension tax” and “Keir Starmer’s retirement tax” (they should have settled on one epithet in debate training) because they wouldn’t sign up to his triple-lock-double-plus-ultra or whatever their offer to their core vote is. “For the first time in the history of this country, pensioners will pay tax… Why do you want to do that to pensioners?” he asked in his best Leave-Britney-Alone voice.

But the main one was his claim that every working family would be £2,000 poorer under Labour. My goodness he said that a lot; even more than he said, “bold action”. And to be fair, it did get under Sir Keir’s skin. He tried, with some indignation, to rebut it — even going so far as to deny it in answer to a question about something completely different — but it’s a fool’s game to try to unpick a shonky financial statistic in 45 seconds and Rishi knows it.

Sir Keir, too, had been drilled. He uttered variations on the phrase “turning the page” and “fourteen years” every chance he got. But he did manage moments of genuine, or genuine-seeming, indignation. “Shocking… shocking…” he muttered, really seeming to be shocked as Mr Sunak claimed that the Tories could be trusted on national defence and that Labour couldn’t.

It seemed an odd thing to be the one to really get ventilated about — until you realised that he had momentarily mistaken himself for John McClane in Die Hard, so was taking this personally. He was Director of Public Prosecutions, he said indignantly, when they’d taken down seven aeroplanes that were about to be blown up (and where was Rishi then, eh? Betting against the country in his bank!). He’d been DPP, too, when they’d smashed criminal terrorist gangs — so people smugglers wouldn’t be much of a challenge.

The way he spoke about it, you’d think the DPP was the tip of the spear, personally kicking in doors and wrestling the controls of jetliners from jihadists rather than, say, organising the paperwork for their court appearances in an air-conditioned office in Petty France.

If he turns up for the final debate in an oil-stained vest and sees the PM off with the words “Yippee-ki-ay, motherfucker”, it will be a very welcome development. But the real pop-cultural parallel here is the Spiderman-pointing-at-Spiderman meme. We’re presented with a choice between two men who have rather more in common than divides them.

The infantile politics of the day, and the infantile format of the debate, means that they can talk about “tough decisions” but they can’t talk about tough decisions. Neither of them can admit that one way or another they’ll have to spend less, or tax more, than anyone wants to hear — and that they will both be at the mercy of events rather than otherwise. The rest is showbiz.

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.

More recently, however, Hayek’s economic ideals have lost their glow in Right-wing circles. Even former Prime Minister Liz Truss, the “free-market fairy godmother”, appears to be faltering, as populist politicians from Donald Trump to Giorgia Meloni retreat to the comforts of economic nationalism.

At a time like this, it’s worth remembering that the free market wasn’t always betrothed to the Right. In the early days, its advocates could instead be found on the internationalist Left, particularly among the leaders of the transatlantic anti-imperial and peace movements. In 1846, Britain’s Left-wing free traders set a precedent by overturning the protectionist Corn Laws. Overnight, Britain became the first modern free-trade nation.

For Left-leaning intellectuals in the 19th century, global free trade was a moral necessity that augured millenarian visions of a world without want or war. It meant cheap food and a world at peace. Richard Cobden, Britain’s foremost free-trade prophet, believed that free trade would work by “drawing men together, thrusting aside the antagonism of race, and creed, and language, and uniting us in the bonds of eternal peace”. He predicted that: “The desire and the motive for large and mighty empires; for gigantic armies and great navies… will die away… when man becomes one family and freely exchanges the fruits of his labour with his brother man.”

His vision even convinced Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who, residing in Britain in the 1840s, gave it their cautious approval. They believed that free trade would unite the world’s workers and that it represented the next progressive capitalist step on the path towards socialist revolution. Protectionism, by contrast, was regressive.

Cobden and his fellows assumed that Britain’s inspirational Corn Law reforms would set the world ablaze, initiating a peaceful and prosperous free-trade era. He was sure that industrialising imperial powers would soon follow Britain’s liberal lead. And yet, despite his best efforts, economic nationalism persisted for some time beyond the enlightened borders of Britain. The onset of a global economic depression in 1873 sent Britain’s imperial rivals — most notably the United States, Germany, France, Russia, and Japan — cowering behind ever-higher tariff walls.

As protectionist monopolies and trusts grew in Europe, so did the frenzy for colonisation. Conservative protectionist politicians in the late-19th century were on the lookout for new markets in the hope of exporting surplus capital and exploiting raw materials. The result was the European Scramble for Africa and the carving up of Chinese markets.

Left-wing free traders — a motley international crew of liberal radicals, feminists, Christians and socialists — redoubled their efforts. And in 1879, the liberal radical US political philosopher Henry George published Progress and Poverty, which quickly became an international bestseller. George called for a “single tax” on the estimated value of land that would provide all the revenue that a government required and thereby eliminate all other forms of taxation, including tariffs. As a bonus, the single tax also promised to break up land monopolies the world over. Absolute free trade, prosperity and peace would surely follow.

The single tax movement spread from the US to Britain to the Asia Pacific and Latin America. “The Land Song” became a rip-roaring tune for Edwardian Liberals. Leo Tolstoy believed George’s single tax on land would “usher in an epoch” and dismantle Russian serfdom. Meanwhile, single tax “colonies” were formed across the globe. Lizzie Magie, a turn-of-the-century feminist radical residing in a single tax colony in Arden, Delaware, even invented a board game to teach about the evils of land monopoly: Monopoly.

With the dawn of the 20th century, socialist internationalists increasingly worked alongside their liberal radical capitalist comrades to overturn the protectionist imperial order. Political parties including the Labour Party in Britain, the Socialist Party of America and Germany’s Social Democratic Party explicitly endorsed free trade. And influential German Marxist theorists such as Eduard Bernstein and Karl Kautsky found themselves in agreement with socialist internationalists such as Japan’s Toyohiko Kagawa, Britain’s Bertrand Russell and Crystal Eastman in the USA.

Yet it was still an uphill battle. In his bestselling book, The Great Illusion (1910), British journalist Norman Angell sought in vain to warn nationalistic politicians and businessmen that, because the world had become so interdependent, nobody could win from war, not even the so-called victors. When the First World War inevitably broke out, Left-wing free traders blamed it on the rise of economic nationalism and colonial expansion since the 1870s.

The horrors of war galvanised support for free trade, partly through the international women’s peace movement. As these “mothers of the world” saw it, women and children suffered most during trade wars and military conflicts. Their aim was therefore to democratise foreign policymaking further to curb men’s tendency towards economic nationalism and war. And they supported free trade because it meant that women and children would no longer go hungry. For them, free trade meant food security.

Take Jane Addams, the Chicago social reformer and figurehead of the interwar women’s peace movement, who had witnessed horrific scenes of starvation during her tour of south-eastern Europe in 1921, three years after the Great War had ended.  She noted how “food resources which were produced in Europe itself and should have been available” weren’t because “a covert war was being carried on” through “import duties and protective tariffs”, as these small European states erroneously “imitated the great Allies with their protectionist policies, with their colonial monopolies and preferences”.

The winds of change finally began to blow once a free trader, Tennessee’s Cordell Hull — “Richard Cobden reincarnated” — became Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Secretary of State and went about liberalising US and world trade during the Thirties and Forties. He believed that a free-trade world could only be effectively maintained by subordinating national sovereignty, thereby keeping nations from falling into the same economic nationalist trap that had led to two world wars and a worsening global depression. With the support of his Left-wing globalist allies, he laid the groundwork for the United Nations and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT, 1947), which became the World Trade Organisation in 1995.

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After Hull left the US state department, the Left-wing free traders became outsiders once again. They quickly lost their influence over the GATT, which during the Cold War became more beholden to the profit-seeking demands of multinational corporations than to the workers and consumers of the world. And their envisaged Pax Economica, seemingly within their grasp in the late Forties, looked ridiculous against the Manichean backdrop of the Cold War.

Over time, conservative Western governments grew more receptive to freeing global markets. But rather than enlisting the help of Left-wing free traders, they turned instead to anti-communist economic thinkers such as Milton Friedman and Hayek. With paranoid cold warriors seeing “red” everywhere, democracy from the Left came to be seen as an impediment to free trade, rather than its accompaniment. This led to a series of Western-backed coups d’état and military interventions in the name of defending free-market capitalism.

Bertrand Russell, British socialist free trader, philosopher, and peace worker, perhaps portended the fate of the Left-wing free-trade movement a century ago when he wrote: “It seems to be the fate of idealists to obtain what they have struggled for in a form which destroys their ideals.” Yet perhaps, with Right-wing populists trampling over free-trade ideals, the time is ripe for a comeback.

Fragments of the movement remain hidden in plain sight. They can still be found within regional integration projects including the EU and the African Continental Free Trade Area, and in Fair Trade’s moralistic global vision that prioritises economic justice over corporate profits. But today’s Left-wing internationalists cannot hope to forge a new Pax Economica without first reclaiming their history from the ideological citadels of the Right.

Or at least a kind of Whig history. It — infamously — relied on grand narratives. Here is one. In the Middle Ages, England made a precocious finish to what we might call the story of early modernity. It had a single language; a single legal code; central government; national feeling; no great magnates; no municipal liberties; no regional distinctions that mattered. There was no rigmarole of provincial Diets, as was the style almost everywhere else. There was one organ, Westminster, where people could speak of a national interest that was felt as keenly in Scunthorpe as in London. These were legislators, not petitioners pleading the case of a town, or a guild.

The logical next step for this hot-housed national England was to round out the polity, incorporating the rest of the island to prevent it being used as a “backdoor” by its rivals. The unification of England meant, inescapably, the unification of Great Britain. Everything seemed to be pulling in this direction. The Scottish aristocracy was Norman. The Lowlanders, great bulk of the country’s population, were Anglo-Saxons. The Reformation had given the people of Great Britain a common religion (mostly), and, still more, a common set of enemies.

That decision, in 1707, to take the plunge for full parliamentary union simply made sense. Sure, much of it was down to self-interest. But it was a self-interest that presupposed a common one. The sectarian difference, dowdy and obscure by continental standards even during the time of Oliver Cromwell, was becoming even less important. Scottish merchants declared that the internal customs barriers with England were intolerable — barriers which were still the European norm well into the 19th century. Nationhood had arrived, and required only its formal consummation.

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If the unity of the island of Great Britain seemed in some way preordained, it still feels that way. Modern technology means that centralised rule is easier than ever. The confessional divide between England and Scotland has vanished. So too has the economic one: the choice is no longer, as it was in the dog days of Churchill’s chancellorship, between the shipbuilders of the Clyde and the City of London. Scotland and England both are now sustained by high finance; luxury goods; education; tourism. The departure from the European single market has made the British single market more important than ever.

And yet, there has been a concerted effort to throw the tide of history into reverse. Since the Scottish referendum in 2014, it has become common to say that Great Britain is an artifice with no real historical existence. But that rupture — devolution, Scottish and otherwise — is part of a particular idea of authority that has become hegemonic over the past 25 years.

The administration that came to power in 1997 was decentralist and localist in its assumptions. It did not like the idea of a powerful central metropolis in London. It did not like Parliament, with its debates, its majorities, and its ability to make and unmake any law — which threatened new unfalsifiable ideas of human rights. New Labour opposed majorities, executive power, and central government. No tradition of distributed power existed in Britain, so it would invent one. So was born the Supreme Court and the devolved assemblies, both practically free from Parliament’s writ, and which would make endless bartering between claims of right the legerdemain of politics, not popular appeals, or debates.

That idea soon became bipartisan. As a political programme, it preferred the local and familiar to the remote and metropolitan. It wanted politicians to “stop arguing” and come to an agreement. It distrusted Power, and sought to set things up in such a way that no one could exercise it over anyone else — except over the common people. It was, as George Orwell once wrote of Swift, “despising authority while disbelieving in liberty”.

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Modern Scottish nationalism is not separable from this programme of decentralism. The two are symbiotic. Devolution created a strange and subsidised layer of local politicians and bureaucrats, who, having no real reason for their existence, could do little else but play to provincial rights and an exaggerated Scottishness as a gambit for funding and jobs. Westminster, won for the cause of sham provincial liberties long ago, always obliged. As national life was purposefully fractured, rule from London began — completely by default — to seem like a foreign imposition.

As the entirely self-created “crisis of Union” began to mount in 2014, Westminster could answer only with yet more decentralisation. Everything about London’s response to the separatist threat presupposed that a Scottish nation already existed, and that a British one did not.

The latest invocation of local rights was that Scotland had recently been getting governments and policies it had not voted for (so had, say, Cambridge). When a set of voters is unhappy, the usual course is to change things around to appease them — as Rishi Sunak is now attempting in the Red Wall. Instead, London’s response was a promise to shield them from the English electorate: “The Vow”. Reform of public services had been the main aim of David Cameron’s premiership, but now these public services were to be devolved entirely. In his heart of hearts, the prime minister did not believe that his mandate from the British people gave him any real right to govern Scotland.

The Vow, and the further devolution that followed, was an avowal that a British body politic did not and should not exist. London conceded every premise of the SNP. But these were its own premises. For its part, while the SNP was not the creature of London, at every turn it consented to play the role marked out for it. In the years that followed the referendum, Nicola Sturgeon became a permanent fixture of national life, and offered a general running commentary on British affairs. She was acting the part cast for her by London: a stern and forthright provincial critic of central excess. Unlike in Catalonia, or Quebec, there was never any serious talk of unilateral secession, even as parliamentary government in London virtually collapsed between 2017-19.

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The implicit relationship became clearer during Humza Yousaf’s year in power. One of his first announcements was that no second referendum would be pursued until a “sustained majority” emerged for one. This was, in practice, a way to adjourn the idea forever. In his resignation speech, Yousaf warned of the threat of populism. What? Scottish nationalism’s aim is to break up the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland: a permanent member of the UN security council, a stately member of the international system, and a nuclear power. It is, ostensibly, one of the most populistic causes on the planet. But that is no longer its way. To its leadership, at least, Scottish nationalism is not for Scotland, merely against majoritarian democracy in Britain.

But this dependence on patronage and concession made the SNP’s position too precarious. Having forsworn demagogy, it could now only petition Westminster to carry through its own project by degrees. Up till now, it had always found a receptive audience. But were even the feeblest of unionism ever to emerge in London, it would be out of road.

So it proved. After 2016, London took the bold and daring step of not allowing the SNP to hold another referendum at the time of its choosing and with its own gerrymandered franchise. This threw the party into a crisis from which it never fully recovered. The end, when it came last year, was suitably anticlimactic. Scottish nationalism, as practised, did not survive contact with a unitary British state that was prepared to take even the smallest of steps to preserve itself; and it perished over a trifle. The decision to veto the Gender Recognition (Scotland) Bill in January 2023 was a humdrum affair, entirely normal under any federal or pseudo-federal structure. But it has probably buried the SNP for a generation.

Buried, but dormant. In Westminster, devolution remains the solution to all political problems, and has indeed been given energy anew by recent events. Britain’s governing classes now believe that devolution is the best bar to the populist threat. They could not have been more clear about this: every anti-establishment vote from the British people is interpreted as, really, an inchoate cry against London, and for local autonomy. People in Teesside did not truly want lower immigration, it was said — only an Assembly of the North East, and a Mayor.

Rather than any change of course, Britain’s rulers have answered populism with devolution: to reroute and blunt public anger at the direction of national policy; and, still more, to break up the unified British body politic that had just delivered those results. It is proposed to dismember an ancient constitutional polity and hand over the fragments to a series of local fanatics and workaday crooks, in exchange for the assurance that these people will preserve the country from populism.

For their part, the British people have been vaguely bewildered by devolution. For all that is made of a clamour for regional identity and local belonging, the mandates for the new devolved assemblies and metro mayors have been derisory. The recent election for Mayor of the North East had a turnout of 31%; for the Mayor of York and North Yorkshire it was 29.89%. In May of 2022, the people of Bristol voted to abolish their Mayor and return to the old system of council oligarchy. The Liverpool mayoralty has collapsed in scandal. London politics only really exists insofar as there have been attempts to artificially wall it off from the rest of southern England: the battle over Ulez being the case in point.

Devolution, as a means to bar the way to populism, may yet reawaken Scottish nationalism. Gordon Brown’s plan for a new federal constitution, A New Britain, includes such howlers as giving the Scottish Government the ability to conclude its own international treaties. These proposals are already being watered down, and are unlikely to be adopted in full. But they show a clear direction of travel — even as Scottish separatism itself starts to sputter out. The end of the British union, if it comes, will have been entirely self-inflicted.

More than anything else, it will be a tragedy. Great Britain was created as a vehicle to unleash the energies of two almost uniquely talented peoples: people who had much in common anyway, but were being forever side-tracked by a tedious and endless cousins’ war. Union seemed to make everything young again. Union meant that the Scottish and the English could turn outwards. They pounced on the world with a boyish enthusiasm unequalled since the days of Alexander.

Devolution aims to bring this grand enterprise to an end. It offers — demands — a slower pace of life for the island and its people. The United Kingdom was created to do Something. One gets the sense that Decentralised Britain — introverted, particular, ruminating — is by design meant to do nothing.

That same year, a French mining engineer, Albert Matthieu-Favier, drew up the first more or less convincing plan for a Channel tunnel. Carriages would be drawn along an oil-lamp-lit passageway, stopping to change horses at an artificial island halfway between Calais and Dover. Imagine, though, this tunnel in the hands of Napoleon — or in Palmerston’s time, Napoleon III. Before you knew it, Boney’s crack Cuirassiers would be sabring their way through with the massed ranks of the Grand Armée marching behind.

Fears of invasion were to confound plans for a Channel tunnel for decades after Lord Palmerston’s death in office in 1865. It was, though, all smiles, champagne and jointly cut ribbons on 6 May 1994. On that day, Queen Elizabeth, a fluent French speaker, and President François Mitterand, champion of the costly and impressive French “Grands Projets” — the Louvre Pyramid, Opéra Bastille, Musée d’Orsay and the new Bibliothèque nationale de France among them  — declared the Channel Tunnel open.

Politically, technically, financially and culturally, the digging of the “Chunnel” had been a profound achievement. Britain, said the press on both sides of the crossing, was no longer an island. After a thousand years of squabbling and fighting, the glorious French and the perfidious rosbifs had sued for permanent peace with a high-speed railway line. A 25p Royal Mail stamp commissioned for the occasion, designed by George Hardie of Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin album cover fame, depicted a happily stylised lion and cockerel shaking paws and claws over La Manche and its new undersea tunnel.

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The Queen, dressed in red, travelled from London to Calais on board a brand new 16,000-hp Eurostar train, packed with VIPs, cantering at a stately 80mph, while President Mitterand rode in an identical anguilliform train from Paris, scything through Picardy at 300 km/h, poppies almost in bloom. The two trains met nose-to-nose on the same platform. The Queen returned to Folkestone with President Mitterand sitting alongside in her stately Rolls-Royce Phantom VI adorned with a St George-slaying-the-dragon radiator grille mascot and shoehorned into a stainless-steel Eurotunnel car “ferry”. Madame Mitterand and the Duke of Edinburgh followed in a Citroën, a case of quel dommage or vive la difference. One says potatoes, vous dites pommes de terre.

It had been a memorable day, TV new channels that evening and newspapers the following morning indulging the story. In other news that month, Israel withdrew from Gaza, Nelson Mandela was sworn in as president of South Africa, Four Weddings and a Funeral was released and John Smith, leader of the Labour party dropped dead. Away from the glare of the media, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown met for dinner at Granita, Vikki Leffman’s fashionable new Islington restaurant, to agree on which of the two would be the first New Labour premier.

New Labour were happy to inherit the privatised rail network of the Major government before them. But the same could not be said for Margaret Thatcher, who regarded it was “a privatisation too far”. As Baroness Thatcher, spruce in broad-brimmed hat and pearls, she was nevertheless also borne to Calais on the Queen’s train to see the Tunnel opened in 1994. And with fervent talk of the renationalisation of Britain’s motley railways today, it is extraordinary to think that, unlike Mitterand’s Grands Projets, the Channel Tunnel was a privately financed venture. Construction costs may have risen by 80%, from a planned £2.6 billion to £4.65 billion (in 1985 prices) before the Tunnel was complete, yet, unlike the financially incontinent HS2, it was completed successfully within just a few years.

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By Iain Martin

From the beginning, the project revelled in its cosmopolitan continentalism. Freight locomotives, ferrying container lorries fetching and carrying what is now a quarter of all physical exports to and from Britain and Europe, were named after writers and composers: Molière, Émile Zola, Jane Austen, Debussy. But the names also served as a reminder of when cross-channel travel had been a far more precarious affair. One of those class 92 freight locos, Charles Dickens, had a more morbid symbolism, a reminder of the Victorian author’s fateful journey of 9 June 1865 through Kent on the boat train from Folkestone.

Dickens, his mistress Ellen Ternan and her mother, were on their way back to London from Paris. The 14-coach train departed Folkestone at 2.38pm. Half an hour later it was running at 50mph when the driver spotted danger ahead. With the locomotive thrown into reverse, speed was down to 30mph as the train approached the viaduct over the River Beault towards Staplehurst. Engineering works meant the track had been lifted. The boat train derailed, coaches tumbling into the river. Ten passengers were killed, 40 injured. Climbing out of a window, Dickens rushed to the aid of victims. He also managed to rescue the latest instalment of Our Mutual Friend he had been working on before the accident. Although physically unhurt, Dickens was scarred for life.

But that catastrophe aside, there had been several ways of getting from London to Paris pre-Tunnel. It must have been fun to choose between them. The Golden Arrow, a Pullman from Victoria connecting with the Flèche d’Or at Calais. The Night Ferry and its exotic French sleeping cars rumbling through south London. The Silver Arrow — train, coach, plane and Flèche d’argent train from Le Touquet. Then, ro-ro (roll-on, roll-off) ferries from 1953, and Hovercraft car ferries between 1968 and 2000. But from 1994 and even more so from 2007 when the superbly renovated and reconfigured St Pancras station, opened by Queen Elizabeth, took over from Waterloo International, Eurostar and Eurotunnel were the most obvious and smoothest way to go. In 2009, Eurotunnel shareholders were paid their first dividend.

And unlike other costly follies of the era — the Millennium Dome for instance — the Tunnel remains a rare example of an infrastructure project that did broaden horizons for the millions of people who used it. How special it was, when passenger trains began running through the tunnel in November 1994, to ride so effortlessly and so very quickly from London to Paris or Brussels. City centre to city centre it was faster than flying, more stylish and more relaxing. True, the British side of the track was slow-going then. But with HS1, the new line that, from November 2007, allowed Eurostars to insinuate a brilliantly engineered way through north Kent at a full 186mph, the route became preternaturally fast. Such was the speed that cars and lorries heading in the same direction along parallel autoroutes appeared to be accelerating flat out in reverse gear. And for foot passengers, it could mean lunch and an afternoon meeting in Paris; London that same evening. Parfait.

The Covid panic hit the operation hard. It has since got back up to speed. Now 30 years on, it remains a symbol of what can be done, of how transport infrastructure can be a marvel. In comparison HS2 is an embarrassment. Unlike the Channel project and HS1, it fails to stir the imagination. With the cancellation of its northern route, all it can offer for £100 billion or more is the possibility at some unspecified future date of a train from somewhere in London (Euston, Old Oak Common?) on a disruptive route to Birmingham in 52 minutes rather than the existing 66 minutes.

How might we revive the spirit of 1994? What about a truly high-quality cross country railway system connected to an equally impressive Northern network? What about the linking up of “Chunnel” trains, as was originally proposed, with other British cities? A revival of the idea of Nightstar sleepers through the tunnel? Car-carrying trains speeding through the Channel Tunnel to the South of France? And, of course, as the late Queen would surely have approved, dedicated carriages for dogs to travel by Eurostar with their human companions? All cordiale suggestions welcome. Palmerston be damned. The Channel Tunnel, 30 years on, deserves to be celebrated.