Ginsburg-worship is just another way to proclaim your place on the political and cultural spectrum, but it might actually have changed American history. In 2013, just as RBG memes were becoming popular, Ginsburg was urged by some supporters to step down and allow President Barack Obama and a Democratic Senate to appoint a younger liberal replacement. Then aged 80 and suffering recurrent cancer, she refused. She died in office in 2020, allowing Donald Trump and Republican senators to tilt the court, and American life, away from her values. Did enjoyment of fame contribute to her decision? Never mind the dangers of judicial vanity: there are T-shirts to sell, and virtues to signal.

Some people clearly dream of turning Brenda Hale into Britain’s RBG, a pioneering feminist lawyer and cultural symbol. These are people who spend too much time online and have #FBPE in their Twitter bio. A couple of years ago, many of them added spider emojis, too, in tribute to Hale: she is best known for wearing a spider-shaped brooch while ruling, as president of the Supreme Court, that Boris Johnson’s prorogation of Parliament — a crude attempt to “get Brexit done” — was unlawful. In the days that followed, people seemed more interested in this “coded statement” — this “secret message” — than the unambiguous ruling, which marked the culmination of Hale’s stellar legal career. She retired not long afterwards and has now written a book that her publishers evidently hope will appeal to all those people who obsessed over her “power dressing”.

I suggest that this is her publishers’ hope because Hale doesn’t seem particularly keen on this attempt to turn her into a celebrity. Her book suggests an author somewhat resistant to the narratives that are being enthusiastically imputed to her.

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One of those narratives is of social mobility and possibly even class struggle: however did a girl from a little village outside Richmond in Yorkshire (not, she says early in the book, “the sort of place where you would expect a top judge to grow up”) reach the Supreme Court? Yet Hale’s origins are hardly humble. Born in 1945, she is the daughter and granddaughter of Oxbridge graduates. Her father is head of a boys’ grammar school. Her parents take the Telegraph, invite neighbours for sherry after church, and send the handyman to collect Hale and her sister from school at lunchtime so they don’t have to eat with the village kids.

Serious, diligent and ferociously bright, Hale progresses to Cambridge with neither difficulty nor trepidation. She rightly notes that this makes her part of a tiny minority: only 4% of school-leavers went to university at the time. She also says the transition to university didn’t faze her, because this was just what her family did: it was normal. So much for that class struggle, then.

Meanwhile, Hale pays only the most superficial attention to wider issues of access to the legal professions. She offers a rose-tinted view of today’s law school as places that mean people who would never have dreamed of becoming lawyers in the past can now do so. And yet, they undeniably remain bastions of privilege, much of it inherited. The sociologists Sam Friedman and Daniel Lauriston calculate that the children of lawyers are 17 times more likely than other kids to become lawyers. A 2020 study by Bridge Group and the University of York concluded that “the legal profession remains dominated by individuals from higher socioeconomic backgrounds with students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds half as likely to attend the top English law schools as other students”.

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Still, Hale seems better placed to discuss struggles not of class but of sex. Her success as a female lawyer in a male-dominated establishment is remarkable, and she deserves to be held up as a role model. But again, she seems reluctant to play the part. Her book has a striking opening, in which she writes frankly of suffering “imposter syndrome” at numerous points in her impressive career. But this candid author then quickly disappears behind a fairly dry account of her career progression. Having been set up to tell the story of a determined woman who rose to the top in the face of male chauvinism, Hale sometimes makes becoming a top judge sound almost easy.

In her telling, the closed male legal establishment actually looked after her rather well. She becomes the first ever female member of the Law Commission, despite not actually applying for the role — a more senior lawyer on the Commission nudges her into it. She becomes a judge after the traditional “tap on the shoulder” from a senior official. Further promotions sound smooth and painless. Occasionally she’s annoyed by anachronistic masculine judicial titles, silly remarks from colleagues and daft old dinner-table traditions that exclude women. But her book isn’t a tale of institutional sexism.

That’s not to say such bias doesn’t exist, and didn’t figure in Hale’s career. Rather, Hale isn’t giving us the whole story here; she often seems reluctant to talk about herself, her experiences and feelings. Her personal life is largely absent. The end of her first marriage, after 24 years, is mentioned only obliquely. Her daughter gets a handful of mentions, but there is no account of how she combined family life with a demanding job. The book is subtitled “A Life” but it would be better to say: “A Career”. Influential men, of course, when they write their memoirs, aren’t expected to explain who was looking after the kids while they were conquering the world — but given that so many women find their careers hindered by family responsibilities, Hale might be a more accessible role model if she’d addressed the subject.

That career has been driven by a truly formidable intellect — it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Hale’s rise demonstrates the old adage that a woman has to be twice as good as a man to achieve the same. But her refusal to talk about herself blunts her ability to explore sexism in the legal establishment. She’s more comfortable talking about her cases and the law itself. This is generally done dispassionately, though she reflects intriguingly that her time as a family court judge was largely spent “oppressing” women.

Perhaps she’d rather not be defined by her sex, but it’s hard not to think, reading her memoir, that an entire book by Hale on how and where the law fails women would be fascinating — and powerful. But that book wouldn’t include the prorogation case, Brexit or that spider brooch — the things that made her properly famous, and therefore the things most likely to sell copies.

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Focusing on them, though, is to forget that Hale was a public figure for decades. During that time, she figured occasionally in newspaper reports. Not all of them were positive, and this rankles — she recalls not just unfriendly Daily Mail headlines about her, but the page numbers and reporters’ bylines (“On 23 October 1995 there was a front-page article by Paul Harris”). In a rare display of emotion, she says such personalised coverage is “distressing”, but insists the greater worry is journalists’ failure to understand her legal thinking.

Was this memoir written as the last word, then? Somewhere behind the veil of judicial dispassion stands a human being with the same frailties as the rest of us — including vanity and inconsistency.

Both of these are displayed in Hale’s account of the prorogation case. To my mind, the Supreme Court’s ruling was a good one, re-establishing Parliament’s constitutional primacy, and deserving of ongoing attention. But how much do we need to know about the people who gave that ruling? How much do we gain from learning that Hale wrote her findings from her house in Yorkshire, and that one of her fellow judges did the same in Sicily?

Hale herself insists that the legal principles are what really matter here — and professes exasperation with public focus on her appearance in court. “What I was wearing that day is not important,” she declares, shortly after telling us what she was wearing that day, including the spider brooch and its history. Despite her exasperation, she appears rather pleased by the people who buy T-shirts with a spider logo or wear spider badges “to show their support”. And then there’s the title of her memoir, Spider Woman, which features the famous brooch on the front cover. Hale may not like that attention on her outfit and jewellery — something a male judge, surely, would never experience — but she’s content to use it to promote her book.

Is there a touch of vanity here? I suspect so, but I don’t say that as a criticism: we are all vain creatures, and there’s no shame in that. Even the most august and dispassionate of judges may succumb to the urge to show off a bit — fame has a terrible allure. To plug her book, Hale has been doing the media circuit of broadcast and print interviews, alongside authors, actors, and influencers. And even before the prorogation case, she heard the siren call: in 2018, she appeared as a judge on Masterchef. This is the age of celebrity, and everyone’s invited, even judges. Indeed, in her book, Hale make the case for diversity on the bench by arguing that judges must look like the society they serve. Perhaps they ought to be selling themselves, on Instagram or TikTok, to ensure that young people engage with the law and relate to those who uphold it.

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Then again judges are arguably the closest thing we now have to Plato’s Guardians, a group that comes from society but still sits apart from it, in order to make decisions in our best interest. We don’t really need to know what they think or — worse — how they feel while they dispense justice. And the more we know about them, the more likely we are to disagree with them. Familiarity breeds distrust. The story of Ruth Bader Ginsburg should be a cautionary tale to British judges, not an inspiration. For every American who adores “Notorious R.B.G.” there is one who distrusts liberals in the judiciary. It is better for public trust in our institutions if impartial public servants keep quiet than if they make themselves more “relatable” figures, a lesson that a certain former House of Commons Speaker has sadly ignored.

I’m wary of imputing thoughts to Brenda Hale, but I wonder if she, too, is in two minds about the wisdom of a senior judge courting celebrity. Perhaps that explains why her book is stuck somewhere in the quagmire between fully revealing autobiography and impersonal legal history.

51 years later McCluskey, now the leading trade unionist of the last decade, shows no regret as he reveals this scam in his memoir, Always Red (published to coincide with the annual conference of the Labour Party he helped to ruin). Indeed, he seems almost proud of getting away with it — his account mentions no comeuppance for the con. That’s fitting for a man whose career in politics and public life has been defined by two things: indifference to the consequences of his own actions, and the power of money.

Other people’s money, that is. Until recently, McCluskey headed Unite, and his liberal use of the union’s funds is a motif of this book. Even if you’re familiar with the grubby business of political party funding, there’s something startling about McCluskey’s lordly accounts of committing vast sums of his member’s money to whatever politician or campaign he’d chosen to favour. When Tom Watson spends the £50k Len handed him for a campaign, Len casually tosses him another £20k. When Alan Johnson calls about a donation to the Remain campaign, Len agrees £250k — the legal maximum — in one phone call.

The impression of McCluskey as a feudal lord, treating Unite as his fiefdom, grows with his account of using its resources to look after his own affairs. He criticises various adversaries for using expensive lawyers to fight their cause: when a challenger to the Unite throne seeks legal advice “from a top QC” it’s a sign of his “bottomless pockets” and “establishment” backing. Yet McCluskey recalls making repeated use of Unite’s in-house lawyers to threaten journalists who sought to report — accurately — his relationship with Karie Murphy, a close aide to Corbyn. If that relationship was a wholly private matter, why did the union spend members’ money concealing it?

All this is chickenfeed, of course, compared to the millions McCluskey spent propping up the man who would lead Labour to its worst defeat since 1935.

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For a book over-heavy on meetings, deals and chatter among and about politicians, there’s no clear explanation of why McCluskey thought Jeremy Corbyn was right — or just right for Unite. He backs Corbyn because he’s not a “Blairite” or from the “Labour Right”, a group that seemingly includes Ed Miliband — whose leadership campaign he backed — and any other Labour figure who doesn’t agree with Len. Indeed, McCluskey’s primary aim here appears to be to insist that he was right about, well, everything, despite the dreadful consequences of his choices.

Tony Blair gave Labour 13 years in power in part by breaking the unions’ grip on the party — a political success for which many in the Labour movement will never forgive him. McCluskey, interested in power as well as money, appears to see the primary job of a union leader today as reversing those changes. His aim, he writes, was to give Unite more “influence” over Labour. That influence is an end in itself — how it might be used, in the interests of Unite’s fee-paying members, is never explained. All that matters is that Len has senior Labour people at his beck and call. At least Corbyn was consistent in his principles; McCluskey offers far less ideological clarity. His politics are those of the back-scratching backroom deal.

Inevitably, then, McCluskey’s memoir reveals some stark inconsistencies. He expresses interest in Blue Labour, and its regard for traditional “family and flag” values. But without pause, he showers praise and cash on Corbyn, whose internationalism, pacifism and sympathy for identity politics is diametrically opposed to those values. He privately supports Scottish independence in 2014 while funding the No campaign. He thinks EU membership is bad for British workers, but campaigns to Remain.

His post-2016 position — to my mind convincing — was that Labour should commit to accepting Brexit, dismissing a second referendum or other schemes to overturn the result. If his arguments had won out, Labour might not have lost quite so much ground with its traditional voters. Yet even Unite’s money can’t buy him enough influence to make that the party’s policy. He blames John McDonnell and Diane Abbott: “Corbyn now had his two closest friends in politics, one in each ear, telling him to move on the issue — and that’s what he did, committing to a second referendum in all circumstances.”

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Not all Labour MPs backed Corbyn’s position, and McCluskey reports meeting members of the group who wanted to support Theresa May’s deal and “get Brexit done” long before the slogan was coined. They ask for Unite’s backing to go against party policy and deliver the Brexit McCluskey says he wants. But he refuses. Then he blames them for obeying the leadership. “They talked a good game but, whenever it came to the crunch, almost all of them fell into line with the whip,” he writes, failing to note that he funds and supports that very whip.

As a major player in the Corbyn project, McCluskey needs an excuse for its shattering failure in 2019 — and Brexit, rather than the infighting he’s implicated in, is it. In his account, Corbyn’s muddled position on leaving the EU was the sole reason for Labour’s collapse, especially in its working-class heartlands. To support this argument, McCluskey offers some second-hand anecdotes about Unite members’ dismay over Brexit, including some quotes that to my weary ear sound about as convincing as his testimony about his youthful broken arm. “At a meeting of the stewards I was told: ‘Jeremy is regarded as a traitor over Brexit’,” McCluskey recalls, conveniently.

He concludes with the bizarre claim that he and Unite were “vindicated” by the electoral catastrophe that he funded and “influenced”. Far from accepting any responsibility, he repeats a favoured Corbynite talking point about his man “winning the argument”, as if that makes up for reducing Labour to barely 200 Commons seats.

He also overlooks or cynically downplays the other major factors in that 2019 humiliation — most grievously anti-Semitism. “No evidence that antisemitism was more widespread in the Labour Party than in wider society has ever been produced. All the evidence that exists suggests the opposite,” he writes, dismissing the views of several Jewish Labour MPs, peers and members, and the Board of Jewish Deputies, and the Community Safety Trust, and the Jewish Chronicle. What, after all, do they know about anti-Semitism?

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Also dismissed is the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, which found that Labour, under Corbyn, had been “responsible for unlawful acts of harassment and discrimination”. Far more important to McCluskey is that accusations of institutional bigotry “demoralised” Corbyn and — worse — “devastated” poor Len himself. Will no-one think of the real victims here?

Besides, even if Labour was a little bigoted, voters didn’t care, in McCluskey’s telling. “I don’t believe antisemitism,” he writes, “was much of an issue on the doorsteps of Darlington or Doncaster in the 2019 general election.” Perhaps McCluskey, devoid of principles in politics, finds it hard to believe others might have them. Or perhaps this is just part of his wider habit of claiming the support of whoever he likes for whatever position he likes.

McCluskey has a habit of grandiosely speaking for the “ordinary workers” of Britain, the idealised grafters he allegedly represents. Despite a six-figure salary and a life spent in London offices and upmarket restaurants (as an aside in the book, he says he’s partial to Black and Blue in Borough Market, where a ribeye steak is £31), McCluskey insists that he retains a gut understanding of the workers, who, naturally, agree with him in all things.

But, strangely for a book by a union leader, Always Red pays little attention to trade unions and their members, at least in contemporary Britain. There’s lots of rose-tinted memories of earlier decades, and too many dull stories about the backroom politicking that saw McCluskey reach the top of the movement. But precious little about where unions stand now, and what their future might be.

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McCluskey led Unite for a decade, until this year. He proudly reports that under his leadership, its funds grew tenfold to almost £500 million, “more than all the other British unions combined”.  For him, financial clout is all — and apparently more important than the number of people who actually support him and his union. He fails to mention some other numbers. In 2007, when Unite was formed by merging Amicus and the TGWU, it had 2 million members. Its most recent official filing shows it now has just 1.1 million members paying into its general fund.

That’s in keeping with overall union membership, which remains in long-term decline. Today barely 13% of private sector workers are union members. Perhaps the most stunning figure on the unions’ decline is that members are now more likely to be university graduates (28%) than to have no qualifications (17%). Education is the dividing line of our age, and trade unions speak for those at the top, not the bottom.

Why have those workers least able to bargain for higher wages turned away from the Labour movement?  Could that trend be stopped or reversed? Union sympathisers like to explain the decline by pointing to legislation and the growing power of big employers, which makes “exploitation” easier. But if that’s the case, why haven’t supposedly exploited workers become more inclined to seek the unions’ protection? McCluskey offers a few cursory paragraphs about automation and technology, and a lot of blaming Thatcher and the Right-wing media — but makes no real attempt to answer such questions. He’s more interested in himself.

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And money, of course. He’s not the only one. Could it be that the unions, in search of members with solid and reliable wages to pay membership dues, have been more interested in representing public sector workers? Almost 52% are now union members. And the public sector now has twice as many high-skilled roles than the private sector, since many jobs — teachers, nurses, the police — now require a degree.

No doubt those workers need representation, in the workplace and Parliament. But a labour movement that focuses on relatively secure and affluent state employees, while neglecting those in more precarious positions, is a movement that has lost its way. The “Blairites” share some blame for that, but it’s been more than a decade since Ed Miliband disowned Blair’s “naive” faith in markets — and 14 years since the man himself left office. 2019 was the nadir of the modern Labour movement, and that’s the responsibility of those who led it at the time.

It was Corbynism that turned Labour into the party of the middle class. But he was aided and abetted by the man who was being paid to speak for British workers — who instead spent millions of pounds of their money trying to buy himself influence over a political project that repelled them. And McCluskey is about as sorry for it as for lying about that broken arm.

It wouldn’t happen, would it? The rules, conventions and incentives that put that pilot in the cockpit would do so on the basis of talent, effort and training rather than birth, wouldn’t they? Other than royalty and the dustier bits of the House of Lords, our modern, egalitarian society surely has no scope for people to do important jobs just because their parents did them first. Has it?

Well here’s a number to ponder: 24. In Britain, a child who has at least one parent who is a medical doctor is 24 times more likely than other children to grow up to become a doctor. For all lawyers, the figure is around 18, and almost certainly higher for barristers. Comparable figures aren’t easily available for journalists, but no one who has spent any time in the trade would doubt that hereditary hacks are at least as common. Even outsiders can easily spot the average media types who are just plodding along in daddy’s footsteps.

The old nobility, the people with the horses and the land and the congenital defects, have largely been marginalised in 21st-century Britain. But that doesn’t mean we’ve done away with aristocracy and inherited prestige. We still have aristocrats, but instead of wearing green wellies and going shooting, they put on white coats and wigs and write columns.

That is the real story of social class and privilege in the professions. The accountancy and professional services firm KPMG is barely a minor character in that story, despite its honourable efforts. It is trying to become less posh by setting targets for senior staff from working-class backgrounds, meaning people whose highest-earning parent when they were 14 did a manual or technical job.

This is … fine. The firm has had good coverage and is setting a good example by acknowledging that class matters, alongside the other personal characteristics that employers routinely fret about. But it should be seen in perspective. KPMG has 582 UK partners and reckons 20% are currently from a working class background, meaning 116 of them. Hitting the firm’s target of 29% means another 50 or so by the end of the decade.

It is a step in the right direction, and the value of the example being set cannot be dismissed. But does it really matter if a few dozen more kids from the wrong end of the socio-economic scale hit the big time as accountants, when the properly prestigious jobs remain in the hands of the posh and their offspring? Because accountancy isn’t really posh. I mean no disrespect to KPMG, or accountants in general, when I say this. I also accept that this point demonstrates what Freud called the Narcissism of Small Differences. But there are indeed distinctions to be drawn here. All professions are elite, but some are more elite than others.

It is in what the sociologist Michael Savage calls the gentlemanly professions – law and medicine especially – where posh power and hereditary privilege are greatest. Go back to that figure about doctors’ kids becoming doctors, which comes from Daniel Laurison and Sam Friedman of the LSE.

This is jaw-dropping, or should be. Medicine is a life-and-death activity, one that must be done by the very best people available.  Is it really possible that so many of the very best just happen, by sheer coincidence, to be the children of doctors? OK, the familiarity with the job you pick up from a doctor-parent might confer some advantage in training and practising. But if anyone seriously believes that aptitude for medicine is entirely inherited, I cannot find them.

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The wider data on entry to medical careers point in the same direction: what your parents do and earn matters more than your effort and ability. In 2017, a total of 320 students entering medical school by the “standard” route came from the poorest fifth of UK households. The number who came from the richest fifth was 2835. For every poor, clever teenager allowed to enter medicine, nine rich kids were admitted.

Even this marks a (modest) improvement. Among qualified medics, 74% are from the highest socio-economic group. That makes doctors the poshest professionals, beating even lawyers and journalists (both 64% posh). There are all sorts of reasons for the rich and privileged to dominate jobs such as medicine, and all sorts of why reasons poor, smart kids with stethoscopes are scarce. But whatever the causes, the consequences are stark. One of them is that we regularly put our lives in the hands of people who have not been drawn from the widest possible talent pool.

Of course, the same could be said about something that’s also vital to manage well: democratic debate. Anyone committing journalism about privilege and hereditary advantage has to acknowledge that journalists too skew towards the wealthy and advantaged. (For what it’s worth, I’d count as working class, at least on the terms used by KPMG).

The media’s poshness problem has worsened. Earlier generations of hacks contained many feral beasts who’d never set foot in a lecture theatre but used native cunning and love of language and ideas to break stories and make arguments. These days, graduates dominate and the trade has (almost) become a profession. Many print outlets are trying to remedy things by embracing apprenticeships, but it’ll be a long road back to a media whose staff reflect all of the country. The broadcasters, who have more clout, have even more work to do. Channel Four found in 2018 that two-thirds of its staff are from the higher social classes, and fewer than one in ten were working class. The BBC was 61% posh.

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This isn’t a new problem though, and it’s hard to see where political or wider social enthusiasm for change will come from.

A couple of decades ago, Tony Blair was a Prime Minister with a vast Commons majority and near-total dominance of the political arena. He looked, briefly, at reforming the truly elite professions, then backed off, deciding it was easier to fight battles against enemies such as the trade unions, Saddam Hussein, and Gordon Brown. Brown, too, nibbled at the idea of widening access to the professions, and some of his agenda survived under the Coalition and Nick Clegg. But even those modest efforts have withered and to use medicine as an example again, tepid interventions mean small changes. Despite a decade of promises and initiatives, the number of low-income youngsters entering medicine rose by just 70 in the 10 years to 2017.

Truly changing the make-up of the people who oversee our health, our laws and our debate would require the focused energy of a Prime Minister prepared to make the issue a priority over several years. Boris Johnson shows no enthusiasm for such a crusade, and as for Sir Keir Starmer, well: would anyone bet on him attempting something that was beyond Tony Blair, much less achieving it?

And where is the pressure on the politicians? Where is the outrage, the urgent demand for change? Britain should be furious about privilege and the professions. And not just because of a lack of justice but because of a lack of quality.

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That’s what debates about social mobility and fair access to the professions come down to in the end: some of the people who get the “top” jobs get them not because they’re the best at doing the work, but because of what and who their parents were. The abiding power of poshness means some second-rate still people get to do first-rank jobs. Tim Nice-but-Dim still runs quite a lot of Britain. Given the impact of the work that lawyers and doctors and, yes, journalists do, that should be nothing less than a scandal.

Yet by and large, unposh Britain just shrugs and accepts that posh people get posh jobs, since it was ever thus. It’s been 55 years since that Frost Report sketch where John Cleese looks down on Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett declares: “I know my place”, but little has really moved on, including public opinion. And until that changes, our professions, privileged and self-interested, won’t be the best, but they’ll be the ones we deserve.

So while Brexit may be done, only the dead have seen the end of Brexit books, which include Britain Alone by Philip Stephens, This Sovereign Isle by Robert Tombs and Gavin Esler’s How Britain Ends . None of them is terrible but all are sadly limited, and those limits say something interesting about Brexit and how its huge weight presses down on people who think about it too much, leaving some to buckle.

Stephens’s book is both the most accomplished and least interesting. As a long-standing columnist (and previously political editor) at the Financial Times, Stephens has extensive access to some of the key participants in Britain’s exit from the EU, and the subsequent search for an idea of what it should mean for UK foreign policy. He uses that access to good effect, painting a coherent picture of the thinking and feelings of those actors: the amateurism and arrogance of David Cameron is nicely captured, as is the bemusement of German officials who can’t quite believe that a British PM seriously believes he can charm Angela Merkel into overturning decades of German European policy for him.

Of the three books at hand, I suspect only Stephens’s will register with future historians of Brexit, because it encapsulates so neatly the views and voices of the foreign policy elites whose world was shattered by the 2016 referendum result. But for those of us alive and interested in Brexit today, the book is almost useless, since it’s all been said before. No one who regularly reads the FT or Economist will learn anything new from Stephens’s account of the FCO’s despair and European diplomats’ horror at the victory of the Brexiteers.

They certainly won’t learn anything about how that victory came about. Stephens makes no visible effort to understand the reasons the Brexiteers wanted to leave, or why 17.4 million voters backed them. Sometimes, he cannot hide his contempt. When Cameron’s somewhat accidental rejection of an EU eurozone bailout treaty in 2011 is received by Conservative MPs and voters as a triumph, this response is dismissed as “pathetic” without any attempt at analysis.  Likewise, Leavers are “elderly voters looking to reclaim the past” and the “left behind”; Remainers are “affluent and well-educated” and ensure that at least the “great cities” vote against Brexit.

A better book would wonder why, say, 1.5 million Londoners (40%) voted Leave, or why a similar proportion of voters aged 25-34 did so. But all Stephens can offer is that Boris Johnson is a good liar and Vote Leave successfully exploited voters’s grievances. Given that this book is published almost five years after the vote, during which time a lot of good research has been done into the motivations of Leavers and the Brexit campaign, it’s more than a little disappointing to see a leading political journalist show so little interest in the fundamentals of the biggest political event of his lifetime.

Here, Robert Tombs’s book beats Stephens handsomely, even though it’s half the length and based almost entirely on secondary sources. Tombs, emeritus professor of French history at Cambridge, is a rare thing, a Brexit-voting academic. By his account, he was largely pushed to this position by irritation at fellow guests at Cambridge dinners and their unthinking support for EU membership. If that sounds shallow, the results are actually quite positive.

Because Tombs is not implacably committed to his “side”, he is sometimes able to catch glimpses of it in proper perspective. He notes that Leavers’s economic claims about the effects of Brexit were often as “extravagantly” overstated as those of Remain’s “Project Fear.” He doesn’t buy the narrative that the Brexit vote was some sort of grumbling revolt by a marginalised majority; he can see the many things that most Leavers and Remainers had in common, at least before the vote, and predicts, persuasively, that cultural divides between the two will not be long-lasting.

Nor does he attempt to argue that Brexit was somehow an inevitable result of Britain’s historical relationship with “Europe”, even if he does sometimes lapse into trite exceptionalism. (Apparently Britain is unique in Europe in its ties to the world beyond the continent and its bigger sense of “abroad” than others. This might surprise the former colonial trading powers such as the French, Dutch and Portuguese.)

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Such triteness is surprising from a serious scholar, but This Sovereign Isle isn’t so much scholarship as the cheery musings of a man with time and scope to read a bit about something that interests him. The breezy tone is often welcome, though. Tombs confides that he is happily married to a committed Remainer, which might explain why he makes a decent attempt to understand the motivations of Remain voters, and does not assume they acted out of bad faith or stupidity, or because they’d been lied to.

Sadly, Tombs falls off the wagon of sober analysis when it comes to the years after the referendum. With unconvincing haste, he constructs a novel interpretation of the sovereign power of the referendum result that means no one and no institution has any role in determining how Brexit should be “done”. Pretty much everyone who attempted to have a say on that question, or who argued that Parliament might express a view, is dismissed as a wicked schemer plotting to thwart the will of the people. While that might well be true of at least some of the People’s Vote crew, Tombs is reaching too far when he tries to frame the Supreme Court and Parliament as illegitimate institutions with no standing in the vast process of Brexit.

The best and worst of the three books is Esler’s. Best because it at least asks some big questions about Brexit and Britain’s future that haven’t had enough attention even among the billions of words spilled since the referendum. Worst because it shares the same lack of perspective as the other two, but adds shoddy research and a fixation on trivial ephemera.

How Britain Ends is subtitled “English Nationalism and the Rebirth of the Four Nations”. Esler’s thesis is that the Brexit vote was essentially an expression of emergent Englishness as a political force. He thinks this is a bad thing, and one that will in due course force the Scots to flee the Union, Northern Ireland to accept Irish unification and the Welsh to… actually I’m not sure, and neither is Esler, who doesn’t devote much time to the Principality.

He certainly doesn’t try to explain how his central thesis (Brexit as English thuggery) fits with a Welsh majority for Brexit. Nor does he have any words for the 1 million Scots who voted to Leave, but then 38% of that country subscribing to a project of English jingoism is hard to square with Esler’s portrait of Scotland as pro-European nation where simply everyone is horrified by the prospect of leaving.

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Well, everyone Esler talks to, anyway. Far, far too many of the assertions in this book are based on conversations Esler has had with “a friend” of one sort or another, all of whom coincidentally share his conviction that Brexit is bad, the Union is doomed and Englishness is nasty and harmful. As for those who think Englishness isn’t all bad, they’re clearly weirdos and racists. We know this because Esler remembers a row with a London taxi driver who insists that the English are an ethnically exclusive group to which foreigners cannot be admitted. I used to work on a newspaper foreign desk, and know that any decent correspondent would die of shame rather than resort to the cliché of quoting a taxi-driver in copy. Esler, once a celebrated foreign reporter, is apparently beyond such embarrassment, proudly telling us how he had the last word in his dialogue with his driver.

This isn’t even the most embarrassing moment in the book. That’s probably a pointless story of Esler visiting a bar in Washington DC and hearing US Marines singing a Bruce Springsteen song without knowing — as Esler does — what the lyrics really meant. The idiots.

That taxi journey is about as close as Esler gets to trying to understand the people and the ideas that are supposedly the centrepiece of his book. Many of his observations about Englishness and the English are cribbed from Kate Fox’s Watching the English (published in 2004) and Jeremy Paxman’s The English (1998). Still, at least those are actual books. The most maddening thing about How Britain Ends is Esler’s constant references to Twitter. Barely a page goes by without him basing some claim or observation about the fate of nations on a few characters sprayed onto a screen by someone noisy but unimportant.

This isn’t just the stylistic grumbling of an old-fashioned reviewer. Esler’s regard for tweets as a primary source of evidence shows how social media can be the ruin of good journalists and journalism. If he’d spent less time staring at Twitter and more time trying to talk to people about the Englishness to which he imputes so much, he’d have written a much better book.

There are other flaws too, some sloppy (Norman Lamont, born in Shetland and educated in Edinburgh, is not “English”) and some disingenuous. Esler claims that “an attempt was made” to have Church of England church bells ring to celebrate Brexit, something he offers as proof that the UK is run by ignorant English Leavers uncaring of propriety or the other UK nations. He doesn’t say that the “attempt” amounted to one tweet by the Brexit self-publicist Arron Banks, and as such was taken seriously by no one except #FBPE types on Twitter.

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This Brexit deal is the end of the beginning

By Robert Tombs

All this is deeply frustrating, because Esler’s book is founded on some good ideas and useful inquiries. The relationship between Englishness and Britishness in a UK outside the EU really should be carefully considered, and better reflected in constitutional arrangements, as Esler suggests. He’s very good on Ireland too, and absolutely right to note the Conservative Party’s shocking indifference to the fate of Northern Ireland in the Brexit process and beyond. He’s also right to link that abandonment of Unionism to the growing lack of interest in (and understanding of) other parts of the UK among voters in each of its member-countries. Few English voters care much about keeping Northern Ireland in the UK; Scotland’s political discourse feels more and more distant from “British” debates in London.

If Stephens’s book is the only one of these three that is likely to be read in ten years’s time, Esler’s is the one that focuses most closely on the issues that will still be relevant then, and quite likely more relevant than they are now. Sadly, he too cannot achieve enough distance or perspective to offer truly useful thoughts on those issues.

The common theme of these books is that Brexit is simply too big a thing for an author today to put into that broader historical perspective. So authors who try, even very smart and accomplished authors such as these, end up falling back on their own prior convictions, using Brexit analysis as an exercise in confirmation bias. As befits a proper historian, Tombs comes closest of the three to admitting the limitations of writing the history of something that is still in motion. “Brexit is undoubtedly a gamble on the democratic nation state, its viability and its future,” he concedes. And while he thinks that gamble will pay off, he doesn’t claim total certainty. Stephens and Esler, by contrast, are more sure that Britain will slide into decline and nationalist division.

Brexit is done, but what does Brexit mean? Better to take some more time on that and get it right than rush to judgement.

Carney, of course, is a near-perfect specimen of homo financicus, a recent offshoot of common humanity that seems to sleep less, read more, earn more, do more than the rest of us. Among other things, Value(s) could be a field-guide to the subspecies: its PhD-holding author runs marathons, gets up before dawn to meditate and read the Classics. He analyses international finance with penetrative intensity. A father of four, he’s 56 years old but doesn’t even have the grace to look it. Some people think he looks like George Clooney. If he sometimes sounds a bit pleased with himself, we should remember that he has quite a lot to be pleased about.

But if Carney himself is relatively easy to describe, his book is much less so. Several famous names have had a go. Subtitled Building a Better World for All, it comes larded with glowing quotes from the likes of Bono (“a radical book that speaks out accessibly”) and Christine Lagarde (“Indispensable”). These endorsements are a pointer to the worst thing about the book: Carney’s namedropping. He frames the entire narrative as the result of a slightly over-written lunch with the Pope, and his cast of characters comes from the upper slopes of Davos. Not that Carney is wowed. Most super-famous people are disappointingly normal, he declares, though he admits to being impressed by Emmanuel Macron, the Grand Shiekh of the Al Azhar Mosque, Bono himself, and Greta Thunberg.

Unlike some of the names thus dropped, Thunberg’s walk-on part in this book makes sense. The author meditates long and hard on the greatest problem facing twenty-first century politics: climate change. He’s impressive on the technical and intellectual challenges involved in making huge changes now to avert a disaster that could still be several decades and many electoral cycles away. But can a matinee idol technocrat with a big brain and sharp suit take the people with him? Is Value(s) Carney’s first step into real politics?

He certainly likes to talk about “leadership”, dedicating page after page to the topic. But sadly, it turns that out what he means, most of the time, is “management”. Cue endless lists of the sort of bland wisdom familiar to anyone who’s ever set foot in a business school:

“Leaders are different in that they have to decide. In the end, to lead is to choose… When you take decisions as leader, it will obviously help greatly if they are the right ones… People will respect a leader who has integrity and who is benevolent, but they won’t always follow them if they are not deemed to be competent.”

Sometimes this stuff is sprinkled with some erudition and cod humility: “When I worked at the Bank of England, I would remind myself each morning of Marcus Aurelius’ phrase ‘arise to do the work of humankind’.”

Frankly, the classical references are easier to swallow than some of the jargon. Carney’s thoughts on the nature of the company, corporate purpose and how to encourage businesses to behave better — and make a profit by doing so — are genuinely impressive. If politicians engage with them, we may end up with a better, fairer and more sustainable capitalism. But Carney’s editors haven’t helped him welcome new readers to the subject. See, for instance: “IIRC is working with IASB, GRI and SASB to create a cohesive interconnected reporting system (though the IMP work).” To which even readers who like to think they’re au fait with corporate governance reform might say: WTF?

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What if it's not the economy, Vince?

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Carney’s lapses into impenetrable jargon are understandable; he’s never really had to communicate clearly to the masses. Yes, central bankers talk in public, but generally as opaquely as possible. Among his global colleagues, Carney was a chatty charmer, but the bar was low. He talks a good game about always remembering the need to win and maintain public confidence — and even makes a stab at claiming deep legitimacy for independent central banks by invoking Magna Carta. But the truth is that, while those banks are given considerable autonomy by politicians to take decisions that have profound effects on the lives of voters, they are not directly accountable to those voters.

Carney is no rabble-rouser. His idea of the BoE getting down with the people is updating the portraits on bank notes. More telling is what he doesn’t mention. Nowhere, in almost 600 pages, does he find space to discuss quantitative easing — the “extraordinary” monetary policy that continued on his watch. Creating new money to buy bonds, and lower interest rates, had a profound social and political impact. It saved businesses and saved jobs; without it many people, especially younger and poorer ones, would have suffered significant hardship. But the side-effect was pumped-up asset prices. Effectively, central banks made people who own property much richer, and made it much harder for people who don’t own property to buy it. Voters are owed more of an explanation for this than Carney offers.

But when you have a hammer, problems look like nails. If you’ve worked as a carpenter, you tend to want to make things out of wood. And so Carney is keen to take the model of independent central banking into climate change policy, proposing “independent Carbon Councils” that would make quite profound decisions about the price of carbon emissions. He’s careful to maintain that, in the end, elected leaders must sign off big distributional decisions, but makes no bones about trying to find ways to keep those decisions away from voters: “Delegating responsibilities helps insulate decisions with significant long-term implications from short-term political pressures.” Never mind addressing such pressures, let’s just duck them — a novel approach to “leadership”.

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Do you know where money really comes from?

By Peter Franklin

For all that, Carney’s book is still good — and the best bits are very good indeed. Unlike some global-minded liberal types, he recognises that the nation still matters. He sees patriotism as not just legitimate, but a way of actually helping countries work together on big problems. He understands that markets haven’t worked for everyone and won’t without sensible state action. He offers a lot of ideas about things like skills, education and employment that would make economies more productive and societies fairer. And his critique of “market societies” in which common values have been eroded, and individualism trumps social obligation, should be read and absorbed by every technocratic centrist wondering why those terrible populists do so well despite their terrible policies. “Building social capital requires a sense of purpose and common values among individuals, companies and countries,” Carney says.

That might sound like an uncontroversial statement of post-liberal orthodoxy — but remember that Carney himself is no post-liberal. He’s not just a Goldman Sachs-educated archduke of Davos: he’s a potential Liberal Party prime minister of Canada. And whereas the current holder of that title, Justin Trudeau, has largely embraced the identity politics that is rendering liberalism illiberal and unattractive, Carney’s book has no time for any of that — or for Trudeau himself. Other technocratic leaders get approving namechecks, but there’s not a single word about Canada’s current PM. Subtle, eh?

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By Dan Hitchens

Value(s) has enough ideas to fill a manifesto, but gives no overt sign that Carney is plotting a political career — an omission that suggests he wants to keep his options open. Could homo financicus make a sudden evolutionary jump to become a full-blooded politico? Less accomplished men have done so before him: Macron is an ex-banker who had a fraction of Carney’s experience when he took the Elysée; Trudeau, on the other hand, was a supply teacher. Barack Obama a law lecturer.

But those leaders are not the real comparators here, not least since they have all, in different ways, failed to live up to expectations. The liberal centre, the tribe of just-do-what-works technocrats, has lacked truly successful leaders since Bill and Tony were taken from us. Clinton and Blair were policy wonks and globalists who could still instinctively feel the mood and priorities of people who loved their communities and their countries. They have had no true heirs. Obama talked the talk, but in the end couldn’t hide his scorn for “bitter” people who “cling to guns or religion”. David Cameron put on a decent act but lacked conviction or spine. Even his greatest fans wouldn’t claim Joe Biden will define an era in the way Clinton and Blair did.

Could Mark Carney take the good ideas from his impressive book and try to make them work in the messy world of politics?  If he did and it worked, he’d be the closest thing the real world has seen to the West Wing’s Jed Bartlet: a liberal intellectual technocrat with a devout Catholic’s social conscience — every sensible centrist’s political fantasy. But then, fantasies are fictional for a reason.

Starmer’s speech this week wasn’t ‘big’ or radical. But it was interesting. A quick and only slightly unkind summary would go as follows: a Labour government would use public money and state power to do stuff that makes things a bit better, unlike those wicked Conservatives who would shut down hospitals and starve the poor. Clement Attlee was a bit dull too but he won the 1945 election so ignore all the media chatter about me being a bit meh, OK?

“Show, don’t tell” is good advice for journalists and politicians and when a politician ignores it, it’s worth paying attention. Starmer used his speech to tell us that British politics is approaching a “fork in the road” where the Labour and Conservative approaches on economic policy and the role of the state diverge sharply.  He then showed that in fact, the opposite is very likely to be the case.

Starmer’s hope is to frame politics as a choice between his own entirely respectable social democrat agenda of state power working in partnership with responsible business on one side and on the other, a Hayekian state-shrinking conservatism that dreams of Austerity 2.0 and de minimis public services:

“The truth is, whoever their Prime Minister is, the Conservatives simply don’t believe that it’s the role of government to tackle inequality or insecurity. They believe a good government is one that gets out of the way, rather than builds the path to a more secure future.”

To be fair to Starmer, there are indeed some Conservatives who do believe this. But there aren’t very many of them, and they really aren’t calling the shots in the Conservative Party right now.

Boris Johnson may well have libertarian inclinations, but he’s been willing to override them in the face of the pandemic, not least because he — eventually — accepted that lockdowns are quite popular. And, in any case, Johnsonian philosophy, such as it is, has never extended to economics: the PM doesn’t have any particular view of economic policy except as an extension of his political agenda.

Hence the Tory mayor of London who tried to protect black cabs against Uber. The Tory MP who said “fuck business” over Brexit. The Tory leader who said he’d spend billions more on the NHS instead of cutting corporation tax. And hence the Tory PM who has not hesitated to oversee the biggest expansion of state spending and borrowing in peacetime in response to the pandemic, and who has no particular interest in doing much to unwind that expansion, since that would mean tax rises or spending cuts or both.

Nor does he face much pressure from others to do such things; quite the contrary. At the level of international economics, the consensus view of post-pandemic policy has shifted quite remarkably since the global financial crisis. Economists and market actors who used to demand budget-balancing fiscal discipline are now deeply relaxed about states borrowing to support demand and fund infrastructure. That’s in large part due to central banks, of which more later.

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Can Labour be saved from the hard Left?

By James Bloodworth

Domestically, Tory budget hawks are pretty rare birds these days. Yes, Rishi Sunak drops hints at wanting a slightly more restrained approach than the PM, but that’s basically the job of anyone overseeing the Treasury and in any case it’s all relative. Signalling that you’re more fiscally conservative than Boris Johnson is like saying you swear less than Gordon Ramsay. If you want an illustration of how the centre of fiscal gravity has shifted among Conservatives, consider the ongoing Cabinet row over Universal Credit: Tory doves want a permanent increase of £1,000 a year; hawks want short-term increases worth hundreds of pounds. Osborne-era cuts in welfare are off the Tory table.

Which brings us back to the political problem for Keir Starmer’s modest, sensible speech. The perfectly sensible economic approach he outlines will only offer a “fork in the road” contrast with the Tory stance if that Tory stance changes dramatically in the next couple of years. In effect, Starmer is betting on his opponents doing what he wants them to.

I suppose that’s not impossible. Perhaps Sunak will somehow replace Johnson and turn out to be a true neo-Thatcherite who subcontracts economic policy to the Institute of Economic Affairs. But that’s an extremely unlikely scenario, to put it politely; far more likely is that Johnsonian politics continues to trump economic conservatism and the Tories go on spending on stuff they think will let them hang on to enough of the voters they won from Labour in 2019.

Which brings us to the first of those c-words — consensus. And it twins with another: Clem. It makes good headline sense for Starmer to evoke Attlee, given he’s the man some in the media think we need, and a good foil to Johnson’s Churchillian fantasy. But the parallel doesn’t really hold.

Clement Attlee’s 1945-51 governments might have helped establish what eventually became a sort of post-war consensus on economics and the state, but the Attlee reforms began in contention, not consensus. His big domestic calls — the Beveridge welfare state and the NHS — were initially opposed by the Conservatives, who only regained power after they accepted those reforms. So, if Starmer is Attlee, as he claims, what are the transformative, mould-breaking changes he wants that his opponents reject?

Even allowing for Starmer’s prudent reluctance to reveal much of a policy agenda so early in the game, there is no reason to think that he is a man who will oversee and implement an era-defining transformation of state and the public realm. When you see children’s “Thank you NHS” posters in front windows, you realise we live in a word Attlee’s governments helped design. Starmer is a clever man with good policy advisers, but even his greatest admirers would struggle to suggest he has an agenda for changes that will still stand tall in British life in 70 years’ time.

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A better post-war text for Starmer’s approach is in the continuity of economic policy that began under Atlee’s last chancellor, Hugh Gaitskell in 1950 and persisted under the Tories’ Rab Butler from 1951. The postwar consensus of “Butskellism” can be overstated, but for at least two decades after Attlee, there was little serious disagreement between Labour and Conservatives about how economic policy should work and the ends it should seek. Today, we live in another period of consensus, even though it is rarely acknowledged as such.

The unspoken truth is that Labour and the Conservatives today already largely agree about economics and — at least as important — how economic policy should be done. Since Tony Blair and Gordon Brown took power in 1997, UK economic policy has operated within rules they established. Politicians tax and spend as much as they think voters and the gilt markets will tolerate, under largely cosmetic fiscal “rules” conjured up and then broken according to the politics of the day.

Meanwhile, the Bank of England sets monetary policy and — sometimes — worries about inflation to provide real assurance to the markets. And in times of crisis, it is the Bank that provides the most important support for demand, even though stimulating demand is a deeply political business with the sort of distributional consequences that are more commonly made by elected leaders, not officials.

That policy framework, largely replicated in other advanced economies, has created the conditions that allow Boris Johnson to spend like a sailor in port, and all with the blessing of the IMF. Independent central banks have now spent more than a decade pumping new money into credit markets, pushing down borrowing costs and making it almost free for governments to borrow, borrow, borrow. To be clear, the Bank of England hasn’t deployed “extraordinary” monetary policy with the aim of supporting Government borrowing, but that policy has had that effect nontheless.

The economic case may be sound, but the political implications of quantitative easing are huge. Cheap money inflates asset prices, including housing, benefitting older property-owners and screwing asset-poor youngsters. It helps pump up equity prices — because money has to go somewhere — and arms private equity with barrels of “dry powder” to spend buying up companies and transforming the corporate landscape.

A Labour Party that wanted to offer a real economic alternative, a true fork in the road, would challenge that policy framework, look again at BoE independence and the role of QE. That’s what John McDonnell wanted, you might recall. But his successor as shadow chancellor, Annaliese Dodds, has made clear that while she’s aware of the side-effects of QE, Starmer’s Labour will defend the post-97 policy framework to the hilt: central bank independence will be the foundation of Starmer’s economics. As for fiscal policy, Labour would conjure up another set of rules “targeting a balanced budget over the cycle but still allowing for flexibility in times of crisis and for productivity-enhancing investment”. Which would sound familiar to a decade of Tory chancellors.

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Dodds set that out in her Mais Lecture last month, a speech that got less attention than Starmer’s but which is essential to understanding the current Labour position. That position, made clear across the two texts, is that Labour wouldn’t do things differently but it would do them better. Industrial strategy. Regional policy. Supporting skills and investment.  Saying nice things about small business. Agreeing that inequality is bad and should be reduced. The Labour agenda boils down to promising much the same as the Conservatives with better implementation and better results.

Which brings us to competence, and compassion. Accepting an economic consensus cuts down Labour’s options for attacking the Conservatives. It is banal for an Opposition to accuse an incumbent government of not doing enough to fix the problems of the nation: that is dog-bites-man politics that sways no-one’s vote. So Labour can only offer greater competence and greater compassion.

The first is simple to describe and near-impossible to deliver. How do you show people you can govern well when you’re not in government? Blair and (almost) David Cameron managed to convince the electorate they could run the country well despite a total lack of experience, but in both cases they were helped by incumbents who were (harshly) seen to have overseen catastrophes of incompetence: Black Wednesday and the credit crunch.

And while it’s still very early in the political story of Covid-19, voters are so far showing few signs of penalising Boris Johnson for his errors over the pandemic. Current polls show the Tories edging ahead of Labour and Johnson’s approval ratings now higher than when he entered No 10 in 2019. Embracing lockdown caution and the stunning competence of the vaccine rollout mean it’s possible that the PM who oversaw more than 100,000 Covid deaths might not pay a major political price.

Of course, that could change. Most voters don’t currently see the pandemic as a political event and they’re not really thinking about an election that’s still nearly four years away. Perhaps the slew of inquiries that must follow the outbreak will reveal culpable failures by Johnson and his party. But betting the 2024 election on a public inquiry isn’t a coherent strategy for Labour. And remember those predictions about how the deadly mismanagement of the Iraq War in 2003 would doom Blair in 2005?

Starmer’s other route will be the familiar Labour promise of compassion: trust us to do things better than the Tories because we’re nicer and we care more about you and your family. Again, there are limits to how effective this will be against Johnson. First, it’s another dog-bites-man political cliché: every Labour election campaign in modern times has come down to promising to protect the NHS from wicked Tories. Even if voters hadn’t heard that line before, this time they may well be offered the chance to vote for wicked Tories who have showered the NHS in record-breaking sums of (borrowed) money. Compassion may still favour Labour, but it won’t be enough.

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Does Labour understand why it lost?

By Graeme Archer

And so to culture, then. When there is no significant political division about economics, what’s left to fight about? Values, worldviews, social issues, and who understands and likes the country best. Both the 2016 referendum and the 2019 general election proved that for some voters at least, culture and values trump economics. Some people voted Brexit aware that it might mean foregoing some national wealth; similar imperatives helped turn bits of the Red Wall blue for Boris.

Johnson’s Conservatives understand that, which is why they’ve largely ditched fiscal conservatism and decided to forget the history of Margaret Thatcher signing the Single European Act and promoting the Single Market. Instead of the “markets uber alles” approach that Starmer now alleges, Johnsonian Tories  make a hard-edged cultural appeal to people who used to vote Labour by instinct and tradition. Thatcher won over working-class Labour people by promising to make them richer. Johnson’s offer is less about wealth than freedom: a sovereign nation you can be proud of again. For some people, the nation’s precise GDP matters less than the flag that flies above it.

This is why it’s sensible for Starmer to try to talk up his economic differences with the Conservatives, because focusing on the truth — that those disagreements are fairly minor — inevitably shifts the conversation to cultural dividing lines. As leader, he’s been very adept at sidestepping Conservative elephant traps that would force him to take a position on “woke” issues such as trans rights and free speech, which are of only minor importance to most voters. But some in his party are quite keen to fight over such things and every time a Labour MP joins the debate about pulling down statues or decolonising the curriculum or using the right pronouns, a small cheer goes around Conservative HQ. Witness the Labour “backlash” when some second-tier advisers suggested that the Labour Party might want to show voters that it — gasp — actually likes Britain and understands why some voters like the Union flag and being British.

Politics-as-culture-war is a battle that many (though not all) Conservatives would relish far more than Starmer would. Tory strategists see the image of Woke Labour led by an Islington lawyer as the best way to stop those Red Wall folk taking back the voters they lent Johnson in 2019. If Starmer’s consensual approach to economics succeeds in neutralising the issue as an attack line for the next election, you can look forward to Tories deploying ever more culture-war wedge issues in the hope of forcing Starmer to choose between the values of his progressive colleagues and the worldview of voters who want politicians to talk about jobs and hospitals and schools, not undergraduate debating points about “social justice”.

Keir Starmer is currently experiencing the downswing of a political pendulum that’s been accelerated by social media and our ever-shorter attention spans. For as long as I’ve been writing about politics, the media-political village has had a tendency to divide politicians into triumphant victors and dismal failures, with no room for shades of grey in between. But in a discourse made jittery by Twitter-immediacy, the jumps from one extreme to the other quicker and more jarring.  A couple of weeks ago, my former colleague Stephen Bush wrote a smart and nuanced piece that included balanced reporting of some Labour discontent with Starmer; yet for all Stephen’s nuance and balance, within a few hours, the SW1A village had settled on a new consensus that Starmer is a duffer doomed to fail.

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Will Labour ever repent?

By Paul Embery

Before we reach that far-off next election, the Labour leader will see some highs and more lows too; I suspect he’s calm enough to treat those two imposters much the same. I also suspect that absent a huge change in the politics of Scotland, he’ll struggle mightily to secure a Labour majority at that election.

But ultimately, I’m less interested in the fate of Starmer – or Johnson – than in what their approaches to economics reveal about politics and policy today. The last few years have seen a lot of people talking about the death of our fifth c-word, centrism, cheering as consensual technocrats lose out to ideologues who supposedly have a better understanding of what The People want. But that narrative, like most, has been over-done. Between them, Boris Johnson and Keir Starmer are tacitly agreeing a modest, technocratic consensus over UK economic policy after the pandemic. What Works is quietly reasserting its dominance over the Will of the People.

At least on economics, they aren’t so much Churchill and Attlee as Butler and Gaitskell. Shall we call it Johnmerism or Starmsonism? Take your pick, but I’m happy to go with Centrism 2.0 — and a country tired of politics as demented soap opera will be too.

The problem was that Cable, who later became an interesting Cabinet minister then a poor Lib Dem leader, struggled to connect his economic insights to practical politics. The ever-smaller band of hacks attending used to leave that room each week wondering what his seminars had to do with the Blair government, the Lib Dems’ prospects, or anything else that was then on the agenda at Westminster.

Those Commons sessions — erudite, informative, almost devoid of politics — came to mind while I read Cable’s latest book. Money and Power is good and interesting, but fails utterly to deliver on one of its key promises. The book is 16 portraits of world leaders who made a real economic impact, and if you’re looking for a brisk, slightly old-fashioned “great man” primer on modern economic history, pre-order it today. But if you’re taken by the publisher’s promise of a book “examining the fascinating interplay of economics and politics”, prepare for disappointment.

Because this is economics largely estranged from — and sometimes wholly divorced from — politics. Time and again, the matter of whether and why economic policies and their authors are approved or rejected by their populations is an afterthought, treated like a weather event: something that just happens. And in his intelligent but bloodless way, Cable unwittingly says quite a lot about what can go wrong with economic policymaking. By omission, he points towards some things that the next generation of economically-interested politicians should be thinking hard about now.

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Maybe the first and biggest question is: how important should economic policy be to politicians? Cable quite rightly notes that for most of the post-war period, countries around the world have given national priority to rising living standards and economic wellbeing. He goes on to describe how a variety of leaders have sought to do that, with varying degrees of success. Cable’s measure of success for the politicians he profiles is largely based on economic outcomes: did they deliver more wealth and wellbeing for their populations?

The importance of that barely needs to be explained: sustained economic growth in recent decades has transformed human experience in ways that were barely conceivable even a generation ago. Infant mortality has plummeted, lifespans are soaring, and the years of life we have are happier and healthier than ever before.

But is that enough? And is the pursuit of growth above all always the right thing for politics to do? Cable’s economic policymakers often come across almost as Platonic guardians, distant and superior beings making decisions about the best interests of the masses who will eventually benefit, whether they know it or not and whether they welcome it or not. One of Cable’s most revealing observations is about Margaret Thatcher: “One of her traits — and an admirable one — was to introduce and persist with measures that she knew to be unpopular but judged to be necessary.”

In this book, elections, opinion and consent are peripheral; where Cable says “politics”, he often means a leader’s ascent through the hierarchy of a party, not anything directly involving the people who feel the results of economic policies. His depiction of Ludwig Erhard, father of social market economics, is crisp, informative and challenging (I speak as Director of the Social Market Foundation) but says almost nothing about post-war politics in West Germany. He writes about Franklin D Roosevelt’s success in establishing a generation-long post-war consensus around a “strong, active federal US government, labour rights and social protection”, but he does so in a single paragraph and offers no explanation of how FDR turned economic success into political wins.

And as Cable acknowledges — but cannot explain — there is no certainty that good economics is also good politics. He profiles Leszek Balcerowicz, Poland’s finance minister at the fall of communism: his “Big Bang” liberalisation of the Polish economy put the country on track for years of strong growth and, eventually, EU membership. But Balcerowicz lasted barely two years, as Poles rejected him and his allies. By contrast, Cable notes that Peronism in Argentina “has combined one of the most abject, sustained failures in economic policy with continued political popularity, evidenced by the 2019 election of a sixth Peronist president”.

What makes the difference? Cable doesn’t know and doesn’t really try to answer. His puzzlement over voters’ curious choices is evident in his last and probably unwise profile, of Donald Trump, which appears to have been hastily finished in the strange days following the November election.

Trump’s eclectic but not haphazard approach to economics perplexes Cable (and others), who cannot understand how Reaganomic tax-cuts could sit with a fixation on protectionist bilateral trade policy and nostalgia for inefficient manufacturing — and command the support of a large section of the American electorate.

All of which leads to one of the questions Cable doesn’t ask, but which emerges clearly on reading his book: what happens to economic policy when people decide there are more important things in life than economics?

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To be fair to Cable, he’s hardly alone in this. All sorts of people — politicians, journalists, academics — have been keen to try to explain the politics of recent years in solely economic terms. Trump won in 2016 because white non-college incomes fell and jobs disappeared; Britain voted Brexit because of austerity.

And economics may have been one factor for some voters. But that economics-first view overlooks other things, the cultural and the social, which some people consider more valuable than GDP growth. Philip Hammond used to say that none of the 17.4 million who backed Brexit voted to be poorer, but some of them did. Some were quite happy to forego some portion of future economic growth in exchange for what they saw as sovereignty, national pride, a sense of control.

That’s not a choice I’d have made, but I think people who make policy need to accept it as a valid choice. They also need to think more about why some people feel able and compelled to make such choices: free trade made America richer in aggregate, but didn’t benefit everyone, or make everyone feel happier about themselves or their country. Economic policy should acknowledge such perceptions and experiences and reflect them more, rather than — as Cable’s analysis sometimes seems to imply — regarding voters’ irrationality as an inconvenient obstacle to be overcome or just avoided.

Here, I should note that I have a lot of sympathy for Cable’s Platonic view of policymaking: both as a columnist and a think-tanker, I’ve often argued for politicians to do unpopular-but-sensible things. (And I still do: the sooner we start taxing housing assets to fund social care the better.) But my guess is that it’s going to become even less viable to make economic policy by doing complicated and contentious things for the greater good of the electorate in the hope of securing their weary consent later. I suspect electorates empowered and (sometimes) informed by social media and possessing a very(historically speaking) high level of wealth and comfort are only going to expect more from their leaders than sound economic management.

My bet is that sooner or later, that’s going to mean people in politics start talking a lot more about central banks. A conversation about their role in modern economics — and politics — is surely overdue. Our elected leaders have handed vast power to technocrats whose legal mission is to do what’s best for the masses, not what they want. There’s nothing wrong with this — it’s better than the alternatives — but where’s the political process to deliver consent? The economic guardians of monetary policy routinely make decisions with profound political consequences: ultra-low interest rates and quantitative easing are effectively transferring great wealth to older property-owners, at the expense of younger people struggling to buy a home and amass decent pension. Yet in the UK at least, politicians barely talk about any of this. In QE, economics trumps politics to such an extent that politics is barely present.

That cannot last. Cable several times cites Bill Clinton’s campaign slogan — It’s the economy stupid — as a truism that explains all politics. Not anymore.

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There’s another even deeper canyon on the politics-economics faultline that Cable highlights without apparently noticing. Can economics be used to suppress politics? Can you provide enough wealth to buy your way out of the political need to win arguments and elections? These questions arise in Cable’s analysis of east Asian leaders, in which he has disappointingly little to say about political freedom.

His portrait of Lee Kwan Yew, for instance, has more to say about the academic background of Lee’s economic advisers than about the people of Singapore and their view of a leader who delivered economic growth and an increasingly authoritarian state.

And then there’s China, which is posing one of the biggest questions of all about politics and economics. Is it possible to make a country and a people rich without making them free? Our entire idea of the West is premised on the assumption that economic growth and political freedoms proceed together: as people own more stuff, they demand and acquire legal rights over that stuff, and in due course a say in how those laws are made. Educated, property-owning masses cannot be denied political freedom forever, we trust.

China is doing a depressingly good job of proving us wrong on that. The CCP’s embrace of the market has made many of its people — by global and historical standards — rich. Hundreds of millions of Chinese people have smartphones and flatscreen TVs, but not one of them has a vote. Effective economic policy is trumping politics.

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This is the stuff I’d like to read about in a book that offers to guide our understanding of the future relationship between politics and economics. Sadly Cable barely touches on this and his book sometimes goes beyond being simply apolitical and borders on the amoral. His chapter on Deng Xiaoping treats Deng’s role in Mao’s mass murder of their countrymen — and direct responsibility for the Tiananmen Square massacre — as mere factual context for the man’s views on markets, industrialisation and agricultural reform.

The results are jarring, especially when Cable writes blandly about the catastrophic Great Leap Forward, when private farming was banned and crops seized by the state. This horror took place when Deng was one of the three men running China, yet Cable presents it as little more than a bump in the road to economic success:

 “…countless millions died in the famine: 45 million according to some Western sources; 16-17 million on Chinese official estimates. It was an epic disaster which appears to have persuaded Deng (working with like-minded senior leaders) to press for ‘adjustments’: radical economic changes designed to raise living standards.”

After all, what other response could a good economic policymaker have to helping cause the worst famine in human history than to seek to raise living standards for those still living? Deng may have been, in Cable’s phrase, an effective economic architect, but he was a gravedigger too. Shrugging off a state’s murder of its own people because it made the ones it didn’t kill richer is the logical, dismal conclusion of a worldview that accords economics priority over politics.

For some, the future is now. More than 4 million people have had a shot of a vaccine, each jab sparking a little flash of hope. Social media and family WhatsApp groups ping with people keen to share the news that a parent, a grandparent, a great-aunt, anyone they know has had the vaccine. Each story is offered as proof that the light at the end of the national tunnel is drawing closer. Britain is cautiously optimistic, and that’s good for a government that hasn’t won much praise for managing the crisis so far. YouGov finds 61% think the government is handling the vaccine rollout quite well or very well.

Are we about to emerge from the darkest days and start putting the strains and pains of the pandemic behind us? Don’t bank on it. Britain and Boris are happy right now, but both should enjoy that tentative feeling of vaccine-driven optimism while they can, because a whole new set of problems is on the way. Indeed, if luck is against us — and it generally has been — then it’s ominously possible that vaccinating Britain against Covid-19 will bring about a greater test of faith in the state — in our coherence as a society and in our national character — than the virus itself was.

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The first act of the vaccine-tension drama is regional, with different bits of the country complaining that other bits are getting more jabs more quickly. Any metro-mayor or local political baron worth his or her salt has already jumped on this bandwagon of grievance already: Sadiq Khan says London is hard done-by; a cross-party group of pols in Birmingham say the same for their city. This will make for good local headlines but will fade away as long as the overall rollout continues well. And thankfully none of our sharp-eyed local leaders has yet decided to copy the health boss in Italy’s rich North who wants vaccine stocks allocated according to regional GDP.

Far more serious is how people behave — and see each other — once some of them have had the vaccine. Will the Covid rules survive the partial vaccination of Britain?

Despite the fretting of politicians and headline-writers, posterity will remark that the most notable aspect of Britain’s early pandemic experience was near-universal acceptance of restrictions meant to protect some of our society from harm. The UCL Covid Social Study found more than 97% compliance with Lockdown 1, with no reduction from March to May last year. Britain really did stick to the rules and, although most people with symptoms still don’t get tested, overall compliance in early 2021 is near the levels of May 2020.

Why? Far from being an atomised amalgamation of hyper-individual libertarians, Britain is, when the chips are down, still a coherent society where people feel themselves part of something bigger than themselves. We stay inside to “protect the NHS” not just because we want it to be there to look after us, but for other people too. We stay inside to “save lives” not just because we fear for our own and those of our family, but to avoid increasing the risk of the virus killing a complete stranger several links down the infection chain.

The uniformity of compliance is all the more noteworthy given that economic experiences of lockdown are anything but uniform: staying at home is an annoying way to save money for people with decent and secure incomes, but a financial disaster for many people in poverty. Even the young and healthy who have less to fear from the virus than others have, mostly, complied with restrictions that have disrupted their lives and damaged their life-chances. Far from being feckless and reckless, their compliance rates are not much different to those of older people, and they’re actually more likely than others to get themselves tested.

Young people haven’t turned their lives upside down just to prevent Covid killing their gran. They’ve done it to protect other people’s grans too. And this is where the vaccine, the lovely vaccine that will protect from the dreadful virus, could end up injecting real discord into British life.

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The fact is, people who are vaccinated might still be able to spread the virus — and therefore still pose a threat to people who aren’t, some of whom will end up in hospital and possibly dead. And then there’s the nightmare scenario where a virus circulating in an only partially-vaccinated population mutates into something resistant to that vaccine. In short, there are still good reasons to keep a lid on things even after a big chunk of the population is vaccinated. But will there be persuasive arguments for that? The idea that you might kill someone’s gran unless you stay at home loses its force when grannies are out to lunch because they’re all vaxxed up and raring to go.

Will vaccinated older Brits comply with the rules if the lockdown persists well into the spring? There are reasons to think that many will not. Among them, the evidence that older people aren’t very compliant with some of the key elements of Covid strategy. The Covid Social Study shows 75% of adults aged 60+ say they have never requested a test despite experiencing symptoms on one or more occasions since the pandemic started. Will those people step up their compliance once they’ve been given a shot? No wonder ministers are ramping up their messaging to the vaccinated to tell them that they need to keep playing by the rules.

On current progress, by early spring the vaccine should be cascading down to people in their 60s. Will it really be politically viable for any government — but especially a Conservative one dependent on older voters — to instruct millions of fit, healthy 60-somethings to accept ongoing restrictions to contain a disease to which they are now immune? Especially given that those 60-somethings might be keen to get out and spend money in bits of the economy that dearly need their custom.

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There’s another reason the political climate will make it harder still to keep the vaccinated at home and masked up. They don’t boast about it, but newspapers in the UK are largely read by people who will get vaccinated by the time the tulips are up. Most also rely on advertisers and sales that have been hammered by Covid restrictions. Don’t expect Fleet Street to argue that 60-somethings with an armful of vaccine and a wallet full of cash should stay at home until the whole population is jabbed in the autumn.

The prospect of lots of people once again circulating freely while the virus is still active is troubling scientists and health officials, and for good reason. The risks that arise from older people cutting loose once vaccinated include a domino effect on the behaviour of others. We’re social animals and group norms affect all of us: a powerful force behind Covid compliance is the sense that everyone else is doing it so we should too. If we think other people aren’t playing by the rules, why should we?

More specifically, why should 20-somethings who face no significant risk from Covid, and who have put their lives in the bin for a year to protect their grandparents’ generation, continue to do so when that generation has been very visibly (and expensively) vaccinated — and is out and about making up for lost time?

In the dry verdict of the Government’s SPI-B behavioural analysis experts: “Adherence might decline if people feel less of a need for protection, or the rules and guidance seem less salient to them as attention focuses more on the vaccine.” Crucially, SPI-B notes: “These factors might vary across different sectors of society.” In other words, a vaccination plan that only covers some of the country may well mean that when it comes to Covid compliance, we no longer stand together. Whatever national unity we maintained during the earlier phases of the pandemic will be tested as never before.

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Will ministers try to hold the ring and urge ongoing restraint, more social distancing and curbs on gatherings? Already, this week’s attempts to curb Britain’s enthusiasm are looking rather underpowered. As the vaccine rollout continues, emotive arguments for ongoing restrictions and compliance will only get harder. By the time the vaccine reaches the 60+ group, the best reason to go on restricting movement and curbing viral spread will be that among those still unprotected are the group who are among the most likely to end up in intensive care with Covid, with all the attendant burdens on the NHS: overweight middle-aged men.

“Don’t kill gran” had moral force and emotive power. “Stay at home because Fat Uncle Barry could end up in ICU” seems unlikely to sway the British population in quite the same way. Maybe the vaccination journey will see some realignment in Britain’s intergenerational relations, the young and the old uniting to demand the restoration of their freedom, at a public health cost to the generation in between.

Then there’s race. One study reckons 72% of black Britons are reluctant to be vaccinated, and 42% of those of Pakistani or Bangladeshi heritage; conspiracy theories about the vaccine are said to spread widely in some British Asian communities.

This isn’t just awful because of the ongoing risk to those who decline the vaccine. There’s also a nasty risk to social coherence. Significant numbers of Covid-vulnerable BAME Brits going without the vaccine bolsters the need to maintain Covid restrictions for longer. Public health policy and basic humanity both dictate that they must be protected even if they’ve chosen not to take up the vaccine.

But I fear that point could be taken badly in some corners of the emotive, social media-driven debate about the virus. A country where a small number of people are willing to accuse NHS staff of lying about hospital occupancy is capable of unpleasant conversations about whether a majority group should have to make compromises to ensure the welfare of a minority group.

Sometimes, wartime unity is replaced by peacetime tensions. When the pandemic raged with no sign of an ending, Britain was all in it together. But we won’t get out of it together, and that could be our toughest test yet.

Even amid rising case numbers, hospitalisations and deaths from Covid-19, it’s possible if you look closely to see the first chapters of a new story about Britain and its prospects in 2021 being written. It’s a story of a new Roaring Twenties, a time of national cheer, celebration and even indulgence.

It’s also a story that I find more than a little unnerving.

Ever since the first effective vaccine to the virus was confirmed, optimism about 2021 and beyond has been rising, with financial markets the epicentre of the outbreak. In the last couple of months, I’ve noticed that the closer a person is to the City and financial services, the more likely they are to be looking forward to 2021 as a year when the champagne starts to flow again and the fun resumes.

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That’s a generalisation based on anecdotes, but it’s also borne out by wider evidence from the markets and their related industries. Depending on how you measure it, share prices are now as high as they’ve ever been and the gap between those prices and the actual earnings of the companies concerned as wide as at any point in history.

A lot of that comes down to the most important public policy that almost no politician talks about these days: central banks pouring cheap money into economies to keep businesses and households afloat. All that money has to go somewhere, which means higher share prices, more mergers and takeovers (private equity deals are now at their highest levels since 2007 ). A lot of City types will tell you, in terms, that There Really Is No Alternative to putting money into things like companies and property.

All this will inevitably mean more pay and bonuses for the people involved, money that will, in part and unevenly, cascade out through the economy: UK house prices are up almost 10% in 2020, and London estate agents are full of excitement about next year.

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Economic exuberance isn’t wholly irrational. After all, as long as mass vaccination programmes go OK, there’s every chance of a return to some sort of normal economic life starting in the second or third quarter of 2021. Companies that have survived the long winter and make it to Easter may find a good number of optimistic customers with cash on hand and a desire to spend it.

Household finances are another thread in the story of optimism and hedonism in 2021. For some people, 2020 has been annoying and inconvenient but also quite financially advantageous: if you have the sort of job that involves sitting at a keyboard and talking to people on Zoom and you’ve kept that job through the pandemic, you’re probably better off than you were a year ago, because your costs have fallen. No more commuting, no more Pret sandwiches, no more drinks after work.

Andy Haldane at the Bank of England reckons that adds up to £100 billion in extra savings piled up, money that could start to flow in 2021 as the Zooming class starts to spend at least some of their week back in the office and start feeling confident enough to go out to dinner, buy a new car, take a holiday.

That’s the economics. The politics of the New Roaring Twenties are more obvious still, and start at the very top.

Boris Johnson is a booster. The Prime Minister thrives on, trades on, optimism. His life and career have been built on telling people — voters, colleagues, friends — stories of how things will be better, if they only just let him have his way. Throughout the pandemic, he has been visibly desperate to tell another story of the sunlit uplands that await us when the darkness finally passes.

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So it is no insight to say that the PM will want to tell a story of a new “golden age” for Britain, with Brexit “done” and the pandemic fading in the rear-view mirror. His legacy, his possible re-election and his personality — a war between depression and exuberance — demand that 2021 is a year of celebration that buries the memory of 2020.

My suspicion is that a lot of voters will want to buy what Johnson will be selling next year. As I wrote here before Christmas, a fair chunk of the electorate has given him and his Government the benefit of the doubt during a bad year for Britain. Imagine what his ratings could look like in the summer if growth is rebounding, consumer spending is booking and the sun is indeed shining again.

The other significant players in the narrative of national happiness are found in the media. Fleet Street isn’t what it used to be, but it still matters, and some of its players are itching to tell their readers a tale about a new era of jubilation and consumer spending on stuff their advertisers sell.

So what am I worried about? What’s the problem with a national mood of optimism and good cheer? Well, to be very clear, I’m not making a political point here: I’m a tiresome, equivocating centrist who really doesn’t take sides in contests between parties. I have no view on whether the sun should shine on Boris Johnson rather than Keir Starmer. Nor am I a professional doom-monger, though I accept it’s rarely difficult to distinguish between me and a ray of sunshine.

No, what worries me is that the national story of the New Roaring Twenties won’t actually be a national story. It will exclude and overlook a significant number of people, and in so doing store up more trouble to come.

Simply, the fact that people who read upmarket newspapers, write for newspapers and get written about in newspapers will spend the second half of 2021 going out to dinner in restaurants again isn’t the same thing as a roaring recovery from an economic shock. Yes, it will make those people happy and make them feel like things are getting back to normal. Yes, it will be good for some people who lost their low-wage jobs in hospitality this year, who will find some of those jobs come back into existence. It is in no way a bad thing. But it will be far from enough to address the economic and social harms done by the pandemic and its consequences.

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Those harms include unemployment, some of it structural, thus requiring people to move sectors and places to work again. That means scarring: the older someone is, the greater the lasting damage done to them by unemployment. Women who worked part-time in retail and hospitality, sometimes because they’d secured shift patterns that fitted around children and caring, may face some of the biggest challenges in the new UK labour market.

Low-income households won’t be adding to the release of “pent up demand” next year either. National aggregates for saving conceal big variations: the Zoom classes may have piled up cash, but people at the bottom of the wage ladder ate into their modest savings just to get by.

Poor children won’t see 2021 as a golden year either, even if ministers do the sensible thing and maintain the £20 a week uplift in their parents Universal Credit. Those kids’ educational prospects took a heavy blow during the first lockdown, meaning some will fall further behind better-off peers and never catch up. Some children took physical blows and worse too: some social workers and child protection officials fear abuse and neglect rose largely undetected during 2020.

The importance of place will only grow in an uneven return to “normal”. The experience of previous economic shocks is that bigger, more prosperous places tend to bounce back more quickly than smaller ones with fewer connections and fewer high-skill, high-wage jobs. It’s a statement of the obvious that the pandemic makes those nice-sounding promises to “level up” Britain’s lop-sided economic geography all the more relevant. That also means the cost of failing to deliver on those promises will be all the higher.

Sadly, there is little confidence among officials and expert veterans of regional and industrial policy that this Government has a plan to deliver the rebalancing that has eluded previous administrations. And while it’s perfectly possible that this expert establishment view is wrong, even the PM’s most optimistic fans should concede that his plans are unlikely to smooth out decades of uneven development in a few months, let alone months that fall immediately after the biggest economic shock in peacetime history.

There are all sorts of economic worries that will persist next year and beyond, including some I haven’t even mentioned yet: epic public debt; corporate debt that holds back investment; dismal and uneven underlying productivity; the ongoing search for a post-EU economic model.

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But in the end, my fears about the new Roaring Twenties are social and political, about the way we talk and feel as a nation.

A 2021 where champagne flows in the more expensive bits of London and the PM talks about a new golden age will be a bitter year for a lot of people who feel far, far away from the exuberance of the better-off and better-connected.

In the past few years, such feelings of distance and disenchantment delivered economic and political disruption and outright rupture: Brexit; Corbyn; Trump. Those things, blended with the poison of social media, have created divided and divisive conversations, where both media and political voices take sides and damn those on the other side of the line.

Even from this distance, I find it all too easy to see a post-pandemic Britain where one side cheers and orders another round while scorning the gloomsters who talk Britain down. And between the two imposters of outright triumph and utter disaster, a country that feels less and less like one nation.

Perhaps the only person who appeared surprised when Johnson, less than 72 hours later, scrapped those rules was the man himself; the look of bafflement on his face as he announced that he was indeed cancelling Christmas suggests that, like many politicians, he himself may actually believe the words he conjures up every time he finds himself in a tricky corner.

But where does that cancellation leave the PM? Measured in his own terms, he has surely failed: he is now doing something he desperately did not want to do and had promised just days earlier not to do. Hence the barrage of brutal headlines, social media sniping and whispers about his future.

On the face of it, that might all seem justified. A politician who does something that will sadden and inconvenience many people cannot expect a good coverage — especially if that thing also hits the bottom line of many media groups that rely on consumer spending for their revenues. Nor can a leader who repeatedly sends his troops out to defend positions that he quickly abandons count on their loyalty forever.

Neither media nor Conservative parliamentary anger are small things, yet they also count for rather less than the views of the wider public. And my bet is that the public will ultimately forgive Boris Johnson for cancelling Christmas.

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The British public are generally less political, more pragmatic and far more subtle than those of us who do and write political things for a living. While the SW1A bubble — Johnson included — may be consumed with binary choices between Cromwellian authoritarianism and Cavalier libertarianism, most voters judge governments by results and circumstances, and politicians by their intentions.

Start with the circumstances. For an awful lot of people, it is clear that the Government is facing extremely difficult problems to which there are no wholly good answers. Poll after poll shows that solid majorities of those surveyed are broadly supportive of restrictive policies that cause economic pain and personal sadness. That’s not because Britain is a nation of authoritarians. It’s because voters think that a pandemic that has killed 60,000 people requires unusual interventions.

Those interventions include changing our Christmas habits. Before that agonising retreat over the festive Covid amnesty, the same polls were consistently showing that a majority of people wanted the rules to be tighter. After the “cancellation”, YouGov found that two-thirds of voters approved of the decision.

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Again, that’s not because the British hate Christmas and want to cancel it. It’s because they think that in a pandemic, their government ought to take action to reduce the number of people who end up dead.

Boris Johnson has now taken such action, albeit later than necessary and in a typically shambolic manner, dragging his feet, like any decent libertarian. What does that mean for him? Here again, I think the whispers of imminent doom are overdone. I think a lot of voters will still, just about, give him the benefit of the doubt and conclude, in terms, that the bloke is trying to do his best in bloody difficult circumstances. Johnson’s visible misery and exhaustion probably play quite well for him here too: the cognoscenti may regard him as unforgivably unserious, but a lot of people glancing at him making yet another grim announcement will likely see a man who looks like he’s taking the pandemic pretty seriously.

Of course, the suggestions I’ve just made would be strongly disputed in Westminster twitter-chambers, where everyone knows that Boris is a stranger to leadership and fidelity, that he’s the sort of shallow chancer who only tells people difficult truths when he has exhausted every other option first.

That being so, Westminster Twitter might want to ask more questions about why a party led by such a chancer, a governing party that has presided over dither, delay and death and which has now cancelled Christmas is set to finish the year with a polling average of just under 40%, essentially neck-and-neck with the Labour opposition.

For those of us who remember the days, so long ago, when David Cameron’s Conservatives didn’t dare to dream of 40%, it is all the more remarkable that this Conservative government, overseen by this PM, can be even remotely competitive in the polls. Put it another way: if the Tories aren’t a mile behind Labour in the nadir of a miserable pandemic, you have to wonder where public opinion will be in the summer of 2021 if the vaccination programme really has started to make life start to feel more or less “normal” again. If Christmas 2020 and the even bleaker midwinter that follows are as bad as it gets for Boris and his party, he will be uncorking a second bottle of the good stuff to go with his second turkey when Christmas is reinstated in 2021.

That “if” is key. Because while it’s right and proper to look past a lot of headlines and political froth over cancelling Christmas, that doesn’t mean that these dark days are cost-free for Johnson and his government.

While voters are fair-minded and pragmatic, their patience and generosity are finite. There is a very fine line that divides understandable mistakes made in difficult circumstances by people trying their best, and culpable cock-ups committed by a cluster of clowns.

The political history of the pandemic so far is that just enough voters will just about allow Boris Johnson’s government the benefit of the doubt when it comes to competence. That will likely just about hold true for a little longer. By cancelling Christmas, Boris has, eventually done the right thing, and may eventually get a little credit for that.

The same may well apply over the closure of Channel ports. While that’s obviously a dreadful and distressing thing, will voters really — as some sophisticated Tweeters now suggest — directly blame the PM for decisions other governments have made to control the spread of a new coronavirus variant from the UK? I have my doubts.

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But if — some would say when — the impression properly takes hold that Johnson and his Government simply don’t know what they’re doing, that they’re just not up to the job, well, then the rest of this Parliament will feel very long indeed for the  Conservative Party, and be potentially quite short for the PM. There are already angry calls for his resignation and a government of national unity. So sooner or later in the New Year, he’ll do what all PMs do so try to hang on to a sliver of that c-word: reshuffle his Cabinet, relaunch his government and brief journalists about “taking personal charge” of stuff. It might work; it might not. The outcome of that will matter more than this week’s bad headlines about a cancelled Christmas.

The Cromwell analogy is a good one, as Johnson’s own words show, but people looking into it for portents of Johnson’s doom might look more closely at dates. Puritans in Parliament banned Christmas in 1647. Oliver Cromwell ruled for another 11 years before dying in office.

And Cromwell’s regime didn’t fall because he allowed the Puritans to ban Christmas. It fell because his son and successor lacked the strength to grip and lead that regime, and provide the reassuringly stable government that the country wanted.

Boris Johnson has always wondered about his place in history. If posterity ends up recording him as another Oliver Cromwell, he’ll be doing OK.

It’s being Richard Cromwell he should be worried about.

Who hasn’t stopped to think about the alternative universe where the novel coronavirus first reported in Wuhan just fizzled out in late 2019? What would 2020 and the first year of the Johnson premiership have looked like then?

The flight of fancy that follows from that question is not to minimise or trivialise the real experience of Covid-19, which includes more than 60,000 dead in the UK alone. But by imagining what might have been, we can sometimes see more clearly the things that are in front of us, hidden in plain sight.

*

The club at 67 Pall Mall was heaving with happy Tories, drunk on good champagne and opinion polls. When Boris Johnson finished his brief speech to the faithful, there were chants of “ten more years”, not all meant ironically.

The PM himself withdrew to a small private bar reserved for his nearest and dearest, where alone he munched a plate of manchego and chorizo with a large glass of Clos de la Roche. Carrie’s joke about his waistline soon exceeding his approval ratings still rankled a bit, but what’s the point of being world king if you don’t enjoy it?

And enjoy it he had. As he’d recently told Cameron Minor on WhatsApp, this prime ministering lark was actually pretty easy when it came to it — “Can’t understand how you made such heavy weather of it all, Dave.”

Of course, the critics — many of them his former Fleet Street colleagues — were forever whanging on about him not understanding the difference between campaigning and governing, but he took no notice. Likewise the whining from Lobby journalists given ever less information by a Downing Street operation they described as aggressive and dysfunctional. A career in newspapers had taught him exactly how much the good opinion of hacks matters.

Instead of the papers and the Lobby, Johnson had spent his first year communicating his government’s record directly to the people who put him in office. Every week he was in another Red Wall seat, talking about “getting Brexit done” and “levelling up”.

The pundits, sometimes kindly but generally not, compared this approach to that of Donald Trump: a permanent campaigning operation built around the appeal of “Boris” and often largely detached from the actual record of his government. And as that first year since the 2019 election ended, that record was patchy. The UK economy had crawled through 2020, growth barely breaking 1% amid uncertainty about Brexit and what was looking increasingly like a full-blown trade-war between the US and China — Trump himself having decided that America First was his best bet at re-election in November.

Probably the most significant thing the Johnson government did in that first year was unveil its March Budget, which was heavy on spending promises and a programme of income tax cuts aimed at lower earners. Economists fretted about the deficit and the new young Chancellor “let it be known” that he too had wanted a more hawkish approach to the public finances. But with no real public profile, Rishi Sunak had little chance of resisting the economic cakeism demanded by his far more prominent and powerful boss.

Johnson’s decision to hold a 5pm press conference on Budget day to talk about the package in time for the evening bulletins only confirmed No 10’s dominance over No 11. “It is my great honour to serve Her Majesty as First Lord of the Treasury,” Johnson grinned when asked if he was stealing the Budget.

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Has 'Long Covid' left us leaderless?

By Mary Harrington

Domestically, there wasn’t a great deal else of substance to report from that first year — the deliberately skinny 2019 manifesto was far from an agenda for government, and for all its dominance and aggression, the No 10 team didn’t have much in the way of detailed reform ready to roll out. Instead, they revelled in charges that they’d started a “culture war” by organising repeated attacks on the BBC and “woke” universities. Both of those went down well with the Red Wall group of Tory MPs, whom some commentators described as the most Right-wing cohort of Conservative Parliamentarians in a generation.

In May, a pamphlet co-written by Red Wallers called for “welfare conditionality”, which would deny benefits to people without a clear record of work; the reintroduction of prison ships; and the construction of detention camps for asylum claimants. The pamphlet was, eventually, disowned by the Prime Minister for being at odds with “my One Nation principles”. Despite that disavowal, when it later emerged that the pamphlet had been strongly encouraged by advisers in No 10, no one was surprised. Especially since its publication caused journalists to repeatedly ask Sir Keir Starmer if he agreed with the proposals: his answers spawned dozens of Facebook memes, made by the ongoing Tory campaign operation, depicting the new Labour leader as a north London human rights lawyer who backed welfare cheats, yobs and illegal immigrants. The most effective of these was a crude photoshop of Starmer wearing Jeremy Corbyn’s beard.

Meanwhile, “Levelling up” was a popular slogan and tended to go down well on the PM’s weekly tours, even though the critics kept pointing out that the Government didn’t seem to have a clear plan for actually doing it. By the late summer, there were even whispers starting to emanate from the Treasury that the Chancellor himself had doubts about the “economic blueprint” his team had been given by their line manager in the Spring. “Setting up BARPA and re-arranging the furniture in No 10 don’t constitute an economic strategy,” one Treasury source was reported as saying in September.

This had not gone unnoticed and Dominic Cummings was stepping up his efforts to have the PM move Rishi in the New Year, possibly under the cover of the New Deal with Europe.

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The PM's cabinet of puppets and placemen

By Peter Franklin

Mind you, Dom had problems of his own to worry about. To the surprise of many observers, the Prime Minister’s Senior Adviser was widely seen as the decisive force behind Johnson’s decision to strike a deal with the EU in October.

That deal went down well with business and allowed Johnson to give some speeches about a new era beginning and looking forward to an early trade deal with what he privately expected to be America under a re-elected Trump Administration. But it also saw the first stirrings of unease on the Conservative benches. The day after Johnson announced his deal with the EU,  Steve Baker and Iain Duncan Smith were spotted by a passing hack arriving at No 5 Hertford Street in Mayfair. The MPs later insisted they were there for a “private lunch” but a persistent — and accurate — rumour suggested that they dined on rare roast beef with several of the financial backers of the Vote Leave campaign. At a table where the diners’ collective net worth was measured in ten figures, one red-trousered guest cheerily christened his meat “Dom” before driving the knife home.

But then… not much. For all that Baker and a few other Tories enjoyed some TV hits lamenting the deal as a “betrayal of Brexit”, not many colleagues followed them over the top. Yes, that dysfunctional Downing Street operation annoyed MPs, but they were mostly quite circumspect about it. When you have an 80-seat majority, who really cares that your staff aren’t very nice to backbenchers? And as usual, promises of a reshuffle just over the horizon worked their magic.

Still, not everything was tranquil. As he swilled the wine in his glass and listened to that talk of a decade in office, Johnson found himself thinking again of a conversation he’d had with Carrie a month earlier. On 4 November, the day after Trump’s narrow re-election victory, she’d asked him flatly: “Do you want to go down in history as that man’s sidekick? You might get your statues, but don’t be surprised if Wilf and his friends want to tear them down when they grow up.”

For all that he enjoyed the applause he got on his weekly visits to the new Tory heartlands, that shook him, because he knew he wouldn’t get the same warmth closer to home: liberal Londoners who’d embraced him as one of their own just a few years earlier had closed their doors to him, and it hurt.

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Why did Boris Johnson survive?

By James Kirkup

Stung into action, Johnson startled aides by announcing he would fly the next day to Glasgow to take over the chair of the COP-26 summit that had started earlier that week. He would spend the next week in Scotland ignoring Nicola Sturgeon and SNP protests to give daily updates on Britain’s leadership in what he called the new battle of our times.

Diesel-petrol cars and vans would be banished. Gas boilers would be banned. Green jobs would proliferate. And the real news: Britain would support the development of new geo-engineering solutions: “Huge machines to suck the deadly carbon out of the skies. Oceans seeded with iron to trigger an explosion of carbon-munching algae. Reflective particles in orbit to reflect back the heat of the sun.”

Closing the COP, Johnson reached for his favourite wartime metaphors:

 “To win this battle, we must work together to build an impregnable shield around our climate and that can only be achieved by developing and mass producing airborne sulphate to ward off deadly radiation.

“The more we pull together and share our expertise, the faster our scientists will succeed. The race to build the shield  is not a competition between countries but the most urgent shared endeavour of our lifetimes. We are in this together and together we will prevail.”

The speech led news bulletins around the world.  The intro to the New York Times report called it “a vaultingly ambitious claim to global leadership whose questionable practicality was eclipsed by its brio and stark moral clarity”. The BBC led on the speech for three days running and even the Guardian leader column praised the PM for taking “global heating” seriously.

Not everyone was quite so impressed. In late November, Baker announced that he had been elected chair of the new Climate Research Group of Conservative MPs, said to have more than 40 members. “We don’t deny the science of climate change or the need to act,” he said. “We just want to know why British workers and taxpayers and motorists should have to make the biggest sacrifices when countries like China and India are responsible for 37 times more carbon than us?”

Meanwhile, a leaked paper from the Treasury’s Net Zero Review talked darkly about the loss of low-wage jobs in carbon-intensive industries, “distributional trade-offs” and even new taxes on carbon. Questioned about the paper in the Commons, Sunak failed to deny any of its details, or to confirm that he believed the PM’s “moonshot” plans to re-engineer the planet were practical or affordable. “Those are questions for the First Lord of the Treasury,” he said with a thin smile.

Dom wasn’t helping much either, always going on about how the focus groups showed that even though people say they care about the planet, they care a hell a lot more about jobs, wages, schools and hospitals. And Carrie had started saying she didn’t like the way Dom and Lee stopped talking when she entered the room, and the looks they gave her sometimes. It all made for a less than jolly atmos in Downing Street sometimes. Sooner or later, Johnson thought, something will have to be done about all that.

But settling back into his set, he considered more immediate matters: his glass was at least half full of good red wine and Carrie had gone home early so he could have another helping of cheese. After a year in power, Boris Johnson thought, life could be an awful lot worse.

The UK’s various authorities have agreed to relax Covid-19 restrictions for five days over Christmas. The result will be that some people will die who would not otherwise have died.

I don’t say this as criticism — either of the policy, the people who made it, or the people who will make use of it. Because there’s actually nothing unusual about a policy choice to accept some deaths in exchange for something else. Policy decisions that kill people are made all the time. Which is why we need to get better, and more honest, about the process of deciding when to let people die.

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It's worth taking a risk over Covid-19

By Timandra Harkness

How much is a human life worth? Philosophers and theologians would give answers in words. Civil servants and — though they never say so explicitly — politicians have a simpler answer: £1.6 million.

That is the current Value of a Prevented Fatality, according to Her Majesty’s Treasury. This is not, technically, the value of a single life. It’s just the maximum sum that HMT says is worth spending to avert a death that would otherwise take place. The figure exists to help officials and politicians decide whether any given policy is justified by the lives it would save — and, by implication, to decide when deaths are acceptable because it would cost too much to prevent them.

That figure of £1.6 million is potentially hugely important. It is baked into all sorts of choices, made by government and the private sector — which transport safety improvements are justified, for example, or how much money to spend reducing the chances of nuclear power stations blowing up. But there’s a tiny problem with that “VPF” figure. It’s nonsense.

The VPF is essentially based on some numbers plucked out of the air by a few dozen random members of the public in 1997; 167 members of the public, to be precise. They were responding to the Carthy Study, which asked how much they thought it was worth paying to prevent a minor and then major injuries. The Carthy authors calculated each respondents’ implied answer about the value of a death prevented. Then they averaged out the results and came to the remarkably neat figure of £1 million, which has subsequently grown with inflation.

And according to some academics, it’s far too low. Professor Phillip Thomas of Bristol University reckons it should be between £16 million and £22 million. If that’s even vaguely accurate, we’ve been spending far less on making safe reactors and railways than we need to in order to reflect the value people actually place on the lives of their fellow citizens.

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By Tom Chivers

But the trouble is, this is a crude measure that takes no account of the differences between people. Have you ever wondered why the accidental deaths of children get much more media coverage than the comparable deaths of adults? Of course you haven’t: we all instinctively recognise that there is something more viscerally upsetting about the passing of a child.

Part of that gut reaction has a sound economic basis: a child stands to live longer than an adult, so the death of a child means a greater loss of life-years. If we must put a cash figure on lost lives to reflect our collective valuation of life, shouldn’t that figure vary with the amount of life foregone? That would certainly accord with our instinctive gut feel about life, death and loss. But it could take us down a dark path, which we have occasionally caught sight of during the pandemic. Some lockdown sceptics have come close to arguing that the lives of older people are simply less worthy of preservation, meaning the case for precautionary measures that do economic harm to younger people are less justified. Some older people have made the same point. “Should we die, we deserve fewer tears than do those who come after us,” wrote 74-year-old Max Hastings in March.

Those arguments make me uncomfortable, because what happens when their underlying logic is applied on a population-wide scale to things such as healthcare: do we really want to formally declare that older people’s lives are less worth saving than those of the young? And if life expectancies determine our value, are rich southerners’ lives worth more than those of poor northerners?

But the answer to this stuff isn’t to shy away from the issue; it’s to debate it properly and systematically.

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By Giles Fraser

The good news is that the Whitehall machine is, slowly, moving to replace that nonsensical VFP figure with something that might just capture the different weights we give to deaths at different ages. Over the summer, the HSE published a comprehensive “scoping study” describing how government could better calculate the values that we collectively assign to human lives.

As the paper concludes:

“Applying such values would lead to better and more informed policy decisions and would have major implications not only for efficiency of government spending but also for equity in population well-being.”

Unsurprisingly, there is no sign of politicians engaging with that study or its implications, even though it’s their job to balance “efficiency” and “equity”.  That’s probably because explaining clearly and openly how you strike such a balance would mean telling some painful truths to voters. Truths such as: sometimes we decide that a few deaths are a price worth paying in order to keep the traffic moving, keep your taxes down or let you spend Christmas with your relatives.

What value has been assigned to the lives that might be lost from that festive relaxation? How does it compare with the benefits for the vast majority who don’t die? If the ministers who advanced the policy — or the opposition parties who accepted it — have answers to those questions, they aren’t sharing them. No doubt in due course a SAGE estimate for the number of additional deaths expected from those five festive days will come to light. But only after the fact, rather than as part of the Government announcement, the scandalously limited political debate about it, or any individual’s decision-making about whether to get together with others for Christmas.

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Simplicity is at the root of policy failures

By Polly Mackenzie

The pandemic has been a test of our thinking about the value of life. Yet we have largely taken decisions that can have life-or-death consequences without a proper conception of how much we are prepared to give up to prevent deaths. And despite the evidence that it will kill, and polls showing the electorate is split on the case for it, the five-day Christmas Covid amnesty is effectively going through on the nod. It’s a stunningly casual way to enact a policy with potentially fatal consequences.

To repeat, I don’t criticise people who chose to travel and mingle at Christmas and in so doing marginally increase the transmission, symptomatic or otherwise, of the virus. Because we all routinely do things that marginally and sometimes indirectly increase the chances that other people will come to harm. If you drive at 80mph instead of 60mph, you make it more likely that someone will die if you have an accident; you also contribute more to both air pollution and climate change, both of which are associated with some additional fatalities. (And yes, I have driven at 80mph and may well do so again.)

The state that acts in our name, uses our shared resources and sets the rules for all sorts of activities, makes similar decisions of life and death on a regular basis, and generally on the basis of shoddy evidence and limited, if any, debate.

Household mingling over Christmas will mean more people die than would otherwise have died. And that’s a perfectly defensible choice, both for individuals and the people behind the policy that allows and encourages it.

But those are choices that should be based on a clear and open discussion of their consequences, not least since those consequences are likely to fall on others. If our representatives have concluded that having a nice lunch with your family in late December is worth contributing to the risk that someone’s gran dies in January, they should set out that calculation calmly, explicitly and openly, rather than by mute implication.

People choosing to make use of the freedom to mix might want to give it some thought too. Enjoy your turkey.

Johnson, accompanied by Symonds for an immediate news conference, categorically denied wrongdoing, accusing the Met of a “shameful attempt to subvert democracy”. Friendly newspapers screamed about “unelected Remain-voting police chiefs’ political correctness”. Hunt extravagantly proclaimed his support for his rival, but in a way that left the Johnson camp furious: “Like anyone else accused of a serious crime, Boris Johnson is innocent until proven guilty,” Hunt solemnly declared.

The Met dropped the charges in September 2019, leading to the resignation of Commissioner Cressida Dick. But, by then, Hunt had settled into the role of Prime Minister, having been elected Tory leader on — of course — a 52:48 result. Keenly aware of that narrow margin, and the argument among some that his victory was illegitimate, he went to great lengths to accommodate Johnson allies in his Cabinet: Dominic Raab got the Home Office and Priti Patel the FCO. The biggest surprise was not Michael Gove as Chancellor though. It was Lord Cameron of Dean’s return to Government as International Development Secretary. “We are one Consevative family governing for One Nation,” Prime Minister Hunt declared after his first Cabinet meeting.

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All hail Good King Boris

By Maurice Glasman

But there was no place for Johnson, even after his exoneration: it was rumoured that he’d turned down Hunt’s offer of a new super-ministry for regional growth and industrial policy with the job of “narrowing the gap” between English regions. So that job went to young Rishi Sunak, while Johnson returned to the backbenches and writing lucrative columns finding fault with the new administration’s handling of the Brexit talks.

Such was Johnson’s detachment from government that there was even speculation that he would not seek re-election to the Commons when Hunt announced he would seek his own mandate from the electorate in a “battle of the Jeremies” general election in November 2019. Offered a stark choice between Hunt and Corbyn, Britain gave the new PM a majority, albeit a modest one. Labour clung on to several Tory target seats in the Midlands and the North, but the Tories enjoyed not just victory but the removal of every Lib Dem MP in England.

Back in office with a majority of just 40, many analysts predicted that Hunt risked becoming a posher John Major, picked apart over Europe by Tory rebels led by a reinvigorated Johnson.

That was the state of play in early January when the first reports came in of a human fatality from an unknown virus in the Chinese city of Wuhan.

“As a confident, global leader with first-rate businesses, scientists and technology, it’s important that we do everything we can to help our Chinese friends manage this virus,” Hunt told the Commons as he announced an offer of British assistance with the outbreak.

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What if everyone loses this election?

By James Kirkup

The ensuing debate was mostly focused on the fact that the Chinese had shown no interest in the British offer, with Labour MPs accusing the PM of using international affairs to distract from his own party management worries. The paragraph in Hunt’s statement about a Cobra meeting to consider the UK activating its own domestic contingencies got much less attention.

In the six weeks that followed, Hunt statements on “the coronavirus” became a common occurrence at Westminster, and saw him start to build a modest international reputation as a leader just about ahead of the curve on what was now recognised as a pandemic. Some Westminster cynics were surprised by what they saw as the transformation of Hunt into a gritty national leader: “It’s like seeing a Blue Peter presenter presiding at a funeral,” wrote one sketchwriter.

But close Hunt-watchers were not surprised, remembering his days in mortal combat with the doctors’ union over new contracts for junior doctors in 2016. Then, he didn’t back down, even though that meant playing the heartless Tory hatchet-man while white-coated saints condemned him. No 10 aides briefed hacks that this battle had taught him that taking the harder road can pay off in the end.

In late February, in a decision influenced by Cameron, Hunt stepped up his “national leadership” pitch by inviting Labour’s shadow health secretary Jonathan Ashworth — but not his outgoing party leader, Corbyn — to join a new Cabinet subcommittee on the virus. The same invitation was also extended to the candidates to replace Corbyn, with Keir Starmer the first to signal acceptance. Hunt considered inviting Tony Blair to No 10 to discuss the pandemic, but instead settled for giving Blair’s old lieutenant Alan Milburn a cross-bench peerage and job at the Cabinet Office coordinating pandemic planning.

“Jeremy’s Big Tent politics” riled the Conservative Right, and gave Johnson more material for columns, but the polling data muffled the protests. Hunt went into March 2020 with strong approval ratings and a hefty Tory lead over Labour. That meant that when on March 5, acting in coordination with the government of Italy, Hunt announced a three-week national lockdown “to take control of the virus”, his decision was broadly welcomed in Parliament and among the public.

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Boris has a dream

By Tanya Gold

Yet that decision was also where the trouble began for Hunt. By the early summer, Covid-19 had killed more than 25,000 Britons and the British figures were better than those for Italy and France and broadly comparable with Germany’s. But the UK economy had fallen off a cliff and Hunt faced accusations of not doing enough to support businesses and workers; anxious about the public finances are wary of being accused of trashing the Tory commitment to sound money, he’d limited the Treasury’s new “furlough” scheme to paying just two-thirds of workers’ wages.

Worries about the economic impact of the lockdown combined with a touch of hubris to persuade Hunt to declare “victory” over the virus in late June 2020, a couple of weeks after New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern had declared her nation covid-free. “Britain is open for business again and we can now lead the world into the post-Covid future,” Hunt declared at a smoothly choreographed press conference at the Royal Festival Hall in London, where a slightly underwhelming line-up of British business leaders announced plans to reopen and rehire.

Oddly though, Business Secretary Sunak was missing from the event. No 10 claimed that was down to mundane logistics (“His helicopter broke down”) but party colleagues knew that Sunak had been spending more and more time in conversation with Johnson. Johnson himself was saying little, beyond columns in which he called for more Government spending to support the economy and the “British heartlands that have suffered so much this year”. He also made repeated appeals for Hunt to guarantee that the Conservative Party conference would go ahead in Birmingham as planned.

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By Peter Franklin

After a blissful summer of something like normal life, that conference took place as Hunt’s “victory” started to fray. Covid cases were starting to tick up again, prompting another Cobra meeting and talk of another early intervention from the PM.

But Johnson moved even earlier. His conference speech was packed with admirers ignoring the notional government guidance on social distancing, and his message was clear: no more restrictions. “My friends, I have reluctantly reached the conclusion that our admirable Prime Minister has used an industrial grade twin-cylinder tungsten steel power hammer to crack the microscopic nut that is this virus. And in so doing, he has shattered businesses, jobs and something even more precious, our ancient British liberties. I say, No More Lockdowns. I say it’s time to take back control of this country from doomsaying doctors and this gloombucket government. No More Lockdowns! Set Britain Free!”

Facing a resurgent Johnson, backed by the old Vote Leave machine and firing out barrages of three-word slogans, Hunt struggled to hold together the coalition he’d built for his safety-first approach to the pandemic. Tory grumbling about economics and liberty grew, but in the end, it was events inside the Labour Party that did for him.

With the virus returning in parts of the country, Hunt sought a series of regional deals with local leaders to agree new control measures, an approach that left him even more reliant on Starmer’s cooperation to secure local Labour buy-in. That bipartisan approach was to prove fatal to his leadership when the time came to agree a deal for Greater Manchester.

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Why did Boris Johnson survive?

By James Kirkup

The beginning of the end of the Hunt premiership was Sunak’s resignation over the prospect of a north-west lockdown. The end came two days later with the striking spectacle of Johnson and Andy Burnham, side-by-side on a wet Manchester pavement in angry protest against what Johnson called the “pub-closing, job-wrecking, fun-crushing tyranny of the medical elite and their puppet in Downing Street”.

Burnham’s key contribution to the fateful press conference was to call Hunt “a Surrey millionaire sitting in his big house in London, making plans with his Westminster mates to send Northern businesses to the wall — including a Labour leader who should be standing up to him, not sucking up”.

From there, there were only a few short steps to a position where Johnson was installed as Britain’s fourth prime minister in four years, at the head of a Cabinet conspicuously lacking a development secretary following that post’s brisk abolition. (“Sorry, Dave old chum.”)

At his first PMQs in early November 2020, the new premier wished his predecessor well in his new role as British ambassador to China, and greeted Starmer with a cheery smile and a benediction: “May I wish him all the best of British luck in his own leadership contest against the estimable Mayor of Greater Manchester, Mr Speaker?”

Tories stopped fantasising about the rope because they accepted that those days were gone and it was time to move on. But all parties need a rallying cry, something to stir the blood, and it was George Osborne, who had been so keen to move on from IDS, who found it.

A decade on from that Blackpool debacle, Chancellor Osborne delighted his party — and a fair few voters — by announcing a Tory war on welfare.

“Where is the fairness, we ask, for the shift worker, leaving home in the dark hours of the early morning, who looks up at the closed blinds of their next door neighbour sleeping off a life on benefits? We speak for that worker,” he declared.

Two years later, he was back on the conference stage announcing the biggest cut of the austerity age, the benefits freeze.

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Where will Boris Johnson lead us?

By James Kirkup

And now, six years, two prime ministers and one pandemic virus later, where do the Tories stand on welfare? And where will they go next? Perhaps it’s a good thing for the Conservatives that they aren’t having a proper conference this year, the sort of gathering where Osborne used to bash idle welfare recipients. Because the Tories don’t seem able to work out what they think about welfare today.

While a lot of people now agree that austerity was a mistake and welfare cuts went too far, it’s worth remembering that they were quite popular at the time. Osborne, after all, isn’t stupid: he knew his message — welfare claimants are idle scroungers who take your taxes — would play well with the wider public. It was one of many things he learned from Tony Blair.

The British Social Attitudes Survey, the gold-standard measure of national opinion, shows that in 1997, 28% of voters thought unemployment benefits were too high; 46% said they were too low. By the time the Coalition took office, 54% said welfare for the workless was too high, against 23% who said too low.

And now? The most recent BSA figures, for 2018, show opinion is back in balance: 39% said unemployment benefits are too high, and 35% say too low. And that was long before that little virus came along and put hundreds of thousands of British workers out of jobs.

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By James Bloodworth

Britain’s emerging unemployment ordeal leaves Conservatives in a quandary. What do they think about welfare claimants now? What do they tell voters about those claimants? In other circumstances, a party might consult its guiding philosophy, its core ideas to help frame a response, but Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party, which has been quite willing to abandon many of the old articles of Tory faith on economics and markets since taking office, doesn’t have much philosophy left to fall back on.

For a mock of the intellectual and political exam question fast approaching the Conservatives, consider the decision to maintain — or not — the £20 a week emergency increase to Universal Credit and Working Tax Credit that was put in place in April. That’s scheduled to be withdrawn in April 2021, just as unemployment is likely to be nearing its peak. Conservatives including Stephen Crabb, former welfare secretary, and Mel Stride, Treasury select chair, say it should be extended, as does a serious coalition of anti-poverty groups led by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. I agree, for what it’s worth.

How do Tories view claimants? The Osborne worldview saw them as idlers who had chosen not to work. Will Osborne’s successors continue to see claimants as undeserving types who chose their fate?

And whatever the evidence, some voters believed that, at least partly because that’s what they had been told, for several years, by their leaders. It wasn’t just David Cameron who talked about welfare “scroungers”. In 2011, Liam Byrne, then shadow work secretary, talked about Labour standing for “workers, not shirkers”.

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This was amplified via the media, and serious, well-organised efforts to make sure the public were served a regular diet of stories about excessive and fraudulent claims by undeserving claimants. I was a political reporter from 2001 until 2014 and remember the regular briefings and releases from CCHQ and its friendly organs such as the TaxPayers’ Alliance, all striving to feed the narrative that welfare was too generous and claimants too lazy.

Not all Tories sang that song, of course. IDS fought Osborne for years to make UC more generous. Boris Johnson once said Coalition welfare cuts would impose “Kosovo-style ethnic cleansing” on the London he then led.

And slowly, the narrative of feckless welfare claimants faded. The Theresa May machine had no interest in maintaining it. Boris was even keener to declare the end of austerity, though his 2019 manifesto took a characteristically have your cake-and-flog-it-too view of welfare, promising both an end to the benefits freeze and a crackdown on “those who cheat the system”.

So what now for the Tories on welfare? The dark Osborne magic of castigating the feckless has faded away. What story will the Conservatives tell about the hundreds of thousands of people who are about to lose their jobs? Self-sufficiency and rugged individualism run deep in conservatism, as does the notion that people are largely responsible for their own fate. But how many Tory purists will be prepared to argue that the coronavirus jobless brought it on themselves by choosing the sort of jobs that get cut in a pandemic? It seems likely that at least some voters will regard the Covid-unemployed as jobless though no fault of their own; some might even regard those claimants as unemployed as a direct result of Government policy.

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Will the pandemic kill off libertarianism?

By James Kirkup

And if you see those claimants as blameless, you need a better welfare provision for them. That’s a long way from Osborne’s scrounger-bashing, but it wouldn’t be much of a stretch for today’s Conservatives.

The logic of Johnson-Cummings Big State interventionism — and the political imperatives of retaining those Red Wall seats — would eventually transform the Covid-era Tories into the party of a much more generous welfare offer, at least for people with a solid history of work. Before the pandemic, there was a quiet debate beginning in Tory circles about a more contributory welfare regime, where people who have paid more in get more back when they need it. Offering higher rates of welfare to some workers who lose their jobs over Covid might have superficial attractions, and might play well with voters who like the idea of reciprocity. But some Tories worry about moving towards a system that divides claimants into the deserving and undeserving poor. This debate was only starting when the virus exploded. Expect to hear more of it when the smoke starts to clear.

Could the Tories emerge from the pandemic as a party that wants to do more for the unemployed? It might not be as implausible as it might seem at first glance.

No less an observer than Professor Sir John Curtice has concluded that public opinion on welfare issues is heavily influenced by the narrative offered by politicians: “Even though it might currently find itself in an unfamiliar policy position in expanding the welfare state, it is also open to the Conservative party to develop and secure support for its story as to how the welfare state should be run in future.”

The British labour market is in turmoil. Public opinion is up for grabs. The country needs a new story on welfare. Will the Conservatives try to write it, or fudge the issue and let Starmer inherit it?

Back in 2012, as the Lib Dems were really starting to suffer for their role in the Coalition government, some commentators  and some Conservatives started to speculate that growing unpopularity could force the smaller party out of government.

Others, perhaps more familiar with the Lib Dems, saw more resilience in the party. One of the more colourful bits of analysis noted this extreme resilience, comparing the party’s ability to survive political damage to the apocryphal cockroaches that will supposedly survive even a nuclear winter.

Most people would be mildly unhappy at being called cockroaches, but the Lib Dems wore it as a badge of pride — literally.  The party press office had yellow cockroach badges run up for that year’s party conference. The joke stuck, and at the 2013 party conference, Tim Farron, then the party president, cheerily called his party “cockroaches and nutters” from the podium.  Party members loved it.

Fast forward to 2020, and winter has well and truly arrived for the Lib Dems. This weekend, they will meet, virtually, at an online party conference that will attract little attention — and not just because of the huge events taking place elsewhere in British national life right now.

The story of the Lib Dems in 2020 can be told in two numbers. The first is 2 – that’s the percentage of voters in Wales who backed the Lib Dems in a recent poll.  Dismal, but hardly inconsistent with the party’s general standing. The Politico Poll of Polls currently puts the Lib Dems on 6%, far behind the Tories on 41% and Keir Starmer’s Labour on 39%.

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By Tim Bale

A year ago, that same tracker put the Lib Dems on 20%, snapping at Labour’s heels on 24%, and even Jo Swinson’s general election failure in 2019 saw the Lib Dems take 11.5% of the vote last December.

The other number that explains the state of the party today  is 998. That’s the number of words in the official party definition of transphobia that the Federal Board of the Liberal Democrats (more about party structure in a minute) recently adopted as the party’s official position on what constitutes discrimination against trans people, and people who suport them. (“Transphobia, whether through words or action, may be targeted at people who are, or who are perceived to be, trans or trans allies…”)

Really, the various Lib Dem sub-groups and working parties who laboured over this epic could have saved themselves a lot of time, because those 998 words can be expressed in just three: everything is transphobic. Still, the words do merit some attention here, because that statement says rather a lot about the Lib Dems today. How on earth does a party that can count JS Mill among its forebears end up seeking the outlaw the use of the phrase “biological man”?

To be clear, I am not suggesting that the Lib Dems are tanking in the polls because they are staunch supporters of trans rights, or that the British public is deserting them as a result. I’m suggesting that the Lib Dems are tanking because they’ve become fixated on things that are of no urgent interest to the majority of that public. British voters, by and large, are neither pro- nor- anti-trans: they’re just more interested in stuff like the pandemic, the NHS and the fate of the economy.

People aren’t even that interested in Brexit: the most recent Ipsos Issues Tracker showed barely a third of voters mentioned it as a top priority. Whatever the outcome of the Brexit process, voters have mostly moved on, and Keir Starmer has proved it. The Remain-voting leader of Remain-backing party has recently been urging Boris Johnson to get on with Brexit — with barely a murmur of protest from his party.

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Brexit, of course, was the adrenaline shot that restarted the Lib Dems’ failing heart in the years after coalition. Under Vince Cable and then Swinson, the party took increasingly stark positions against the policy chosen by more than 17 million voters in 2016. That drew in a new wave of members, the sort of people who spend time on #FBPE Twitter inveighing against extremist elements in British politics and not seeing the irony.

The new Lib Dems were delighted when Swinson promised to “cancel Brexit”, but the old cockroaches weren’t so sure. British history might have been rather different if Swinson had listened to Lib Dems like Norman Lamb, then the MP for North Norfolk, who warned that the “cancel Brexit” stance would help to polarise politics and “open the door” to Boris Johnson to win big.

But the Lib Dems didn’t listen, and actually rushed to open that door: it should not be forgotten that the 2019 election only happened because Swinson believed it was in her party’s best interest to allow Johnson to go the country.

Today, Brexit is not done but, endorsed in a referendum and a general election, it is a settled fact of British politics. That has left the Lib Dems, once again, searching for a purpose. That brings us back to transphobia, and the identity politics that seem to be all the party has to offer.

Log on to the Lib Dem website today the first thing you’ll see is a crowd of earnest young people holding rainbow flags and #LoveisLove placards. It’s the site of a Pride rally, not a political party.

Again, to be clear, this isn’t an argument that the Lib Dems should take a different position on gay rights, trans rights or any other part of that rainbow-flag agenda. For a party targeting younger, degree-educated urban voters, there’s a certain sense in that positioning, especially when Starmer is so carefully trying to avoid Tory attempts to draw him into a culture war where he can be painted as the head of a “woke liberal” party.

Nor is that different position really an option for Ed Davey, the Lib Dems’ sober new leader and a cockroach who first worked for the party in the early 1990s. One of the things that makes the Lib Dems different is their insistence on internal democracy and rules. The party machinery is a network of committees and boards, all with real internal power. If a small group can control an official “Specified Associated Organisation” such as LGBT+ Lib Dems, they can and do help set party policy and priorities.  Weaning the Lib Dems off identity politics probably isn’t an option for Davey.

A better approach would be to put the rainbow flags in perspective: make them part of the Lib Dem offer — but not all of it. Once, not too long ago, the Lib Dems were the most effective think-tank in British politics, an outfit relentlessly churning out policy ideas that were perfectly sensible but just a little too far ahead of their time for bigger parties to embrace.

Yet Davey has taken the leadership of a party that has little to say about the bread-and-butter issues of politics and government that still motivate the typical voter. The party did develop some sound policies last year — insulating low-income homes; a £10,000 training allowance for all adults — but these were inevitably drowned out by noise about Brexit.

The irony of Lib Dem irrelevance on policy today is so sharp you could shave with it.

If it were to be revealed that Dominic Cummings was a card-carrying Lib Dem who used to sit on the Federal Policy Committee in the early 2000s, no one familiar with the party in those days would be remotely surprised. Industrial Strategy, regional policy, unpicking pension tax perks for high-earners and obscure local government reform: these are all things Lib Dems spent years talking about, to no avail. Anyone looking for the policies that flesh out the Johnson-Cummings promise of “leveling up” could do worse than look at the unread policy papers that Cable and others used to churn out.

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Likewise on the green economy.  It has been reported recently that the PM has become fascinated with the role that hydrogen could play in a new low-carbon economy.

If only he’d attended a few Lib Dem conferences in the cockroach days, when Lib Dems enjoyed nothing more than a day dreaming about the carbon-free economy of 2030. When I chaired a fringe meeting on energy policy at last year’s Lib Dem conference, everyone enjoyed it when a very detailed row broke out between audience members about the precise size of hydrogen molecules; Davey, a panelist, cheerily joined in. This is a party that takes the detail of policy seriously.

What happens to the Lib Dems next will depend in part on who is left in the party. The FBPE crowd were largely not “proper” Lib Dem cockroaches; many of them were happy to have a membership card and a direct debit, but not for them pounding the pavements delivering Focus leaflets or going to conference for Glee Club. There are still some very serious Lib Dems in local government, however, and I suspect many of the old cockroaches are still there, even if some younger types with blue hair and pronouns now make more noise.

Will that be a solid enough foundation on which Davey can start to rebuild? And if so, what will he construct?  What is the role for the Liberal Democrats in a political system that is starting to look at least partially post-liberal? A fair bit depends on what Starmer does, but all the signs are that he’s listening to his very clever policy chief Claire Ainsley and trying to reconnect Labour with the values of the voters it lost to Johnson last year: Rule Britannia, VE Day and even Get Brexit Done.

Some Lib Dems may think that leaves a gap in the market for a truly progressive party: more rainbow flags and BLM slogans, and rejecting voters who believe the “wrong” things. In other words, offering sort of politics that Americans call “liberal left”.

As an outsider who runs a centrist think-tank, I’d suggest the Lib Dem aim should be something else: to make the case for a rather older idea of liberalism, one where personal freedom and responsibility go hand-in-hand and people are trusted to make their own choices within a clear set of rules.

The two big parties are quietly agreeing a broad consensus that the size and power of the state should grow: assuming Johnson leads his party into the next election, don’t be surprised to see him battling Starmer over who can promise to do the most, spend the most, in the Red Wall and elsewhere. After all, money is cheap and the huge challenge of the pandemic demands a new paradigm, right?

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The Tories are facing a new revolt on the Right

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Economically, we have already entered the new world: the Conservative Party is waging political war on allies and institutions in order to obtain the power to use state spending to support companies favoured by ministers and their super-bright advisers. Likewise the rules and instructions rolled out in response to Covid-19, some of which constitute a remarkable extension of state power in daily life.

Who speaks for the dissenters, for those who’d like some more checks and balances on the people in charge? Who will make the case for rules on the role of the state in markets and in people’s lives? I am no liberterian but the absence of a clear liberal voice in British politics unnerves me sometimes. And as someone who still thinks Mill’s On Liberty is probably the most important book I’ve ever read, it saddens me to see “liberal” attached to causes and ideas that are keener to smother dissenting opinions than protect them.

Is there yet a role for a liberal Lib Dem party? Do the Lib Dems want to be that party? Here, Davey might want to pay attention to the detail of some recent YouGov polling on those Covid interventions, which asked people if they would follow ministerial encouragement to shop their fellow citizens to the police for meeting in groups of more than six.

No fewer than 43% of Conservative voters would report strangers to the police, and 29% would make a similar call about neighbours; 15% of Tories would even call the cops on family members. Lib Dems, meanwhile, were the voter-group least likely to snitch: only 26% would call the police on strangers, 21% about neighbours, and 7% on family.

https://twitter.com/cagyarrow/status/1306920845911224321?s=20

Britain may be heading down the road of post-liberal politics and a bigger state, but liberalism is neither dead nor doomed to irrelevance. Lib Dem cockroaches need to decide if they want to keep scuttling on.

The story of John Law and the Mississippi Bubble is fascinating, dramatic and intriguing. It also offers a wonderful counterfactual. What if the bubble hadn’t burst? What if Law’s gamble with the finances of 1720s France had paid off? With a few tweaks in the course of events, it’s just possible to imagine a world where the French didn’t rebel against their king, where Britannia didn’t rule the waves, and where the United States of America was never founded.

Law was born in Edinburgh in 1671, the son of a banker. Having learned the family trade, like many clever, educated Scots he then left the country seeking advantage elsewhere. In the first instance, that meant London. But after a row about a woman, he fought Edward Wilson in an (illegal) duel in 1694 and killed him with a single thrust of his rapier.

Imprisoned, he escaped and fled to the Continent, where his story really begins. Flitting between Amsterdam and Paris for almost twenty years, Law established himself as an early economist and advocate of financial innovation, as well as a fixture in aristocratic circles where his charm and intellect were highly prized. His greatest argument was that states should move away from money based on precious metal and instead adopt paper currencies based on government debt. By increasing the amount of money in circulation, Law reckoned, rulers could allow traders and investors to do more business, make more money and so pay more taxes.

That was a fanciful notion until 1715. That year, King Louis XIV of France died, leaving behind a country impoverished by years of his profligate spending and foreign wars and ruled by a child, five-year-old Louis XV. His regent was the Duke of Orleans, an acquaintance of Law.

Law persuaded Orleans to let him establish the Banque Générale, which was permitted to issue paper notes backed by gold and silver. It worked, so Law upped the stakes and bet again. He convinced Orleans to let him go global, and the result was the Company of the West, France’s first joint stock company. It controlled trade between France and its holdings in North America, a huge territory along 3,000 miles of the Mississippi from New Orleans to Quebec.

This wasn’t really new, of course. Britain had established joint stock companies in the previous century and the Bank of England, set up after the Glorious Revolution, had been printing paper money for 20 years by then. Meanwhile, the British and Dutch had long-established companies controlling their foreign dominions.

So Law’s innovations allowed a poor and backward France to begin catching up with the global leaders. And for a time afterwards, it looked like it might even overtake them.

Law sold shares in the Company of the West, and the French appetite for them was insatiable. The profits of early colonial settlements, rumours of gold and silver deposits in American soil and Law’s charisma combined to create a feeding frenzy.   Demand drove prices up and up. Shares worth 500 livres at the start of 1719 were worth 10,000 by the year’s end.

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Shareholders became hugely rich, at least on paper. The word “millionaire” was coined for those who achieved great wealth from the Mississippi company.

Orleans was delighted, because Law insisted shares could only be bought with outstanding French government loan notes: people piling into the company shares were effectively helping to pay off the crippling national debt.

So delighted that he granted Law first control over all France’s foreign conquests and trade, and then effective command of the French economy. First his bank was taken over by the crown, which guaranteed its paper currency, though Law remained in control of what was effectively the country’s first central bank. Then in January 1720, Law became the Controller-General and Superintendent-General of Finance.

Law’s historic error was to use his bank — renamed the Banque Royale —  to create too much new paper money to allow people to buy yet more shares in the Company of the West. The paper gains created by ever-rising share prices naturally persuaded some investors to seek to cash in by selling shares and convert their gains into gold.

As share prices began to fall in early 1721, the sell-off accelerated. Neither Law’s bank nor the French crown had enough gold to cover the sales, of course, so Law doubled down again. He banned payments in gold of more than 100 livres and made the paper notes issued by his bank legal tender; his hope was to persuade the French to accept paper instead of gold and it was briefly successful as shareholders did indeed exchange notes for shares.

What followed, of course, was rampant inflation. Law’s last gamble was to devalue his notes by 50%, a policy that saw him dismissed from his post and eventually forced to flee France. Shares in what was generally known as the Mississippi Company, meanwhile, fell back to their original value of 500 livres, wiping out the wealth of the millionaires and many others.

The consequences of the Mississippi Bubble were vast. The financial pain experienced by many of the French helped turn the country firmly against paper money and other suspiciously complex financial novelties: it would be 80 years before the country accepted another paper currency.

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Notably, the French response to a bursting bubble was very different to the British reaction to similar events. For, at around the same time as Law was at work in France, Britain was experiencing the better-known South Sea Bubble, a scheme partly inspired by Law’s apparent early success.

However that financial disaster persuaded the British to strengthen the Bank of England to control the money supply and allow the country to use paper money with confidence. The BoE’s new power helped Britain to borrow at low rates and finance both global military expansion and domestic industry: Rule, Britannia! was written in 1745, celebrating imperial power based on sound finance. These are the foundations of London as a global financial centre.

France, by contrast, stuck to gold and stagnated. Unable to raise capital, French industry struggled and the economy failed to develop. The monarchy was likewise short of cash, able to raise money only by imposing ever higher taxes on people ever less able to pay. The national trauma of the Mississippi Bubble also shattered public trust and confidence in the crown; bursting the bubble cost French rulers not just money but authority.

In 1763, the Seven Years War ended with France humiliated and broke. Louisiana east of the Mississippi river went to Great Britain; Louisiana west of the Mississippi and the Isle of Orleans went to Spain. Defeated on land by Robert Clive and its navy shattered, France abandoned any claim to India, clearing the way for what would become the British Raj.

The following decade, France backed the American revolutionaries challenging British rule in America, in the hope of denting its rival’s global domination. But the cost of that successful effort was the final straw for the Ancien Régime, helping to bring about revolution in 1789.  In due course, French leadership fell to Napoleon Bonaparte, who ended French claims in North America by agreeing the Louisiana Land Purchase with Thomas Jefferson.

All of this, the founding of our modern world, can be partly traced back to that bitter French experience of financial engineering. So what if Law had avoided inflating and bursting his bubble? What if he had resisted the temptation to print more money to fund more share purchases? There’s an important distinction to be drawn between Mississippi and the South Sea Bubble. The British scheme was fraudulent but Law was genuinely trying to improve France’s finances and economy. His failure was not inevitable.

Let’s say Law had found a way to stabilise the Mississippi share price without disaster. France in the 1720s would have had the basic elements of a modern capitalist economy: paper money and joint-stock companies. Such a nation would very likely have been a more effective rival to Great Britain during the 18th Century. A better-equipped and funded French military might well have secured a stalemate in India; Britain’s empire would have been a very different, and smaller, affair.

A more even outcome to the Seven Years War might well have seen France keep at least some of its Louisiana territories. Perhaps the same forces that brought about the American War of Independence against Britain would also have triggered an uprising against France there too. But with the two countries united by the desire to maintain control over their American colonies, would the rebels have succeeded?

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In our universe, French support for the revolution helped bring about the birth of the USA.  In the world where John Law’s gamble paid off, the French would have been colonial powers in North America alongside the British, and unlikely to support revolutionary forces there. Similarly, while the removal of the French threat in 1763 fed support for American independence, in a world where the hated rival still fields troops across the frontier the colonists’ desire for separaton would is far more limited.

It seems likely that both the British and French American colonies would still eventually gain their independence, but not as a single, continent-straddling republic and eventual superpower.

Meanwhile, a French domestic population enjoying greater economic growth and international success would have less reason to rise up against the monarchy in 1789, though doubtless the idea of absolute monarchy would still have crumbled eventually. A French revolution in the mid 19th Century, perhaps in 1848?

And in this alternative history, Napoleon Boneparte would still rise to prominence, albeit as the general commanding Royal French forces in a prolonged war with Britain in the early 19th Century. Who would have won those wars? If John Law’s gamble had paid off, it would be hard to bet against France.

If the Mississippi Bubble had not burst, today half the world would speak French, Paris would be a financial powerhouse, and the Gare du Nord would be the Gare du Waterloo, named in honour of the military victory that secured France’s place as the world’s first superpower.

SG Maclean is a historian who lives on the Black Isle in Scotland, which isn’t actually an island. She writes very good crime fiction set in Oliver Cromwell’s England, which isn’t just about Cromwell’s England. She wins prizes for her novels, and deserves more fame to go with them. Especially among people in politics.

On the face of it, Maclean’s Seeker novels are about Damian Seeker, a Yorkshire soldier for Cromwell who becomes the leading enforcer for the Protectorate’s domestic intelligence operation. Slowly and subtly over several books, Maclean explores the essential tension here: how can a fundamentally decent man serve a regime he increasingly recognises as falling short of his own high moral standards?

Seeker’s answers are instructive: because he fought for them once, and against another lot who were worse. But that is not enough to sustain — or deserve — lasting loyalty.

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It is the theme of loyalty that makes the Seeker novels good reading for politicians, who always need to understand why people support causes — and why they stop.

In the end of the series — so far, at least, for there is hope she will write more — Maclean shows Seeker’s break with the collapsing Cromwell regime not as a grand gesture or an exercise in psychodrama but rather the way real people make big decisions — with a resigned shrug.

Cromwell’s story deserves more attention in the Britain that voted for Brexit. It’s a reminder that, no matter what we tell ourselves about our phlegmatic stability, Britain does indeed do revolutions. Cromwell, of course, was no radical from outside the system. A son of the gentry who sat in Parliament, he led a cause that united disgruntled notables and true grassroots revolutionaries — for instance, the Levellers, who were to be marginalised and bitterly disappointed by Cromwell in power.

Maclean’s hero is part of that non-conformist tradition, a Seeker by faith as well as name, he was part of a small, obscure sect before shifting his faith to Cromwell’s cause and its defence against scheming royalists plotting to restore the dissolute Stuart monarchy.

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Such royalists are still a major presence in the England Maclean guides her readers through. Because no revolutionary regime can make its opponents simply disappear — accommodations must be made. The Metaphysical poet Andrew Marvell makes regular appearances as an agent of Seeker’s intelligence operation. Marvell’s precise loyalties were and are unclear: he lionised leading Royalists, but then worked for Thomas Fairfax, the great parliamentary general.

We also meet a young Samuel Pepys, another parliamentarian who converted to Royalism when Cromwell died in 1658.

When that death comes, Seeker is in Bruges tracking the royalist cells that made that city their base while supporting the young Charles Stuart in his designs on the throne amid the shifting backdrop of European politics. This is the setting for the fifth and most recent Seeker novel, The House of Lamentations. It’s a nice way to illustrate the international dimensions of turmoil in British government, as well as a reminder that British leadership worrying about European plots is not a new thing.

The Seeker novels’ lessons for today’s rulers are numerous.  Perhaps the biggest is that taking power is easy enough — just win some big battles — but keeping it is much harder. In the end, the stars of the series are the ordinary folk who lent their support to Cromwell and his cause, but then, tired and resigned, welcome back the Stuart monarchy, albeit briefly. It’s a reminder that while elites take politics and government very seriously, the public on whom those things ultimately depend generally don’t pay too much attention, instead just getting on with their lives. Revolutions are easy to declare but hard to sustain.

When most people think of games played around a table, they probably think of the staples of childhood: Scrabble, Ludo, Monopoly.  Those, according to a scrape of Google data done by a sharp-eyed PR firm, are among the world’s top searches for boardgames online.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I love Monopoly as much as the next student of rentier capitalism, and its lessons are quite relevant to the era of permanent quantitative easing, asset-price inflation and a political class that refuses to address the resultant undercurrent of injustice and anger.

The others are fun too; Ludo, in particular, is delightfully spiteful: the German incarnation — mensch ärgere dich nicht (“Don’t get angry”) is a rather more useful name than the English. Scrabble is OK, but tends to encourage trade in the false coin of sesquipedalianism. Longer words aren’t a sign of cleverness, just proof that you don’t know how to communicate clearly. Short words are good. And can score higher.

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Overall though, I’m afraid I can’t get excited about games where the dice have just six sides and you can actually see what’s happening on the table in front of you. Boardgames are OK, but they are not the game.

For the benefit of civilians, the game is Dungeons and Dragons, and it taught me everything I know about politics, government and journalism. Well, maybe not quite everything, but quite a lot. Enough to sustain a 20-year career in and around Westminster, anyway.

D&D — or AD&D, if you, prefer the Advanced version — is not a boardgame, in that there is no board. There isn’t really anything, in fact, beyond a shared story gradually told between friends over hours, days and months. And dice. Lots of dice, including some quite odd-looking ones.

The lack of physical stuff is arguably the most important, and interesting, thing about D&D and other pure role-playing games. All you have is the story, generally about a quest or adventure undertaken by the characters you imagine yourself to be in a world that exists only in the imagination. There are no screens, no sound effects. There aren’t even any little toy soldiers, painted or otherwise.

Those little toy soldiers are, these days, a big deal. Most of them are made by Games Workshop, a little British business now worth £3 billion and which first brought D&D to the UK. But don’t mistake Games Workshop’s Warhammer 40K minifigure wargaming for something like AD&D. No matter what wannabes such as Tom Chivers might tell you, Wargamers aren’t true nerds, because they still cling to something physical in the real world, and often show some degree of physical aptitude by painting their figures quite nicely.

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Real geeks have no truck with that sort of physical reality, and rubbish painting skills too. All we have is stories, stories that go on for months or even years.

What do you need to sustain interest in that shared narrative for long periods of time? Time, obviously, and often an absence of better alternatives. All those jokes in the Big Bang Theory and elsewhere about socially awkward males playing Dungeons and Dragons because they can’t talk to girls? All utterly accurate, at least in my late-1980s experience.

But more than that, to happily immerse yourself in a prolonged exercise in shared storytelling, you need language, a love of and respect for language and its power. You must understand how to construct a world solely through words, to use language to persuade other people to imagine and inhabit that world, accepting its rules, systems and ways.

Politics usually comes down to words too. Elections are generally won by the people who can tell the best story about the world — or about a world, one that does not yet exist. I wouldn’t want to take this too far, but it’s not hard to look at Brexit and see a national adventure into the unknown in search of undiscovered treasure, led by people who fancy their chances of rolling a 20-sided dice and getting the 20 they need to bring down a dragon in flight.  You may not be surprised to learn that one Michael Gove is a former D&D player.

Nor is he alone at Westminster in that. Some people, perhaps swayed by bad TV and films, sometimes have the idea that politics is dominated by heroic over-achievers, the sort of men and women who in school days were captain of a sports team, prefects, handsome, popular and all the rest of it. And while there are a few such paragons around SW1, they’re quite rare, largely  because the cool, pretty kids often grow up to live happy and fulfilled lives and have no need of the validation that politics can offer.

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We nerds, however, know that Westminster is our place, the home of awkward, clever kids with something to prove, or just a need to put to use the skills we learned rolling funny dice and telling stories about heroes and monsters.

And be in no doubt, those skills are useful and relevant to many aspects of government and politics. The funny dice matter: once you understand the chances of repeatedly rolling 16 or higher to hit an armoured storm giant with your longsword, then a 7 or 8 on an eight-sided dice to do the thing real damage, then you find probability and statistics familiar, if not simple. I suspect that a fair few of the “superforecasters” venerated by a certain Dominic Cummings got their start playing the game.

Then there’s rules. An imagined world needs rules, lots of them. That may seem strange for an exercise in fantasy, but as with good fantasy and sci-fi writing, the fantasy of an RPG must have an internally consistent logic. If someone can just say “I transform into a helicopter and fly away”, there really is no point. So AD&D teaches players to know and understand — and usually follow — rules, because without those rules, the game makes no sense.

This, I and others have found, helps you understand political life both in terms of system and culture. Honestly, if you can absorb rules on character classes, combat, stealth, advancement through acquiring treasure and the process for making a magical axe, the Westminster processes that others find arcane (second reading, committee stage, report, third reading….) are perfectly straightforward.

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Likewise the seemingly strange, unwritten rules of political life and death, the words you cannot say and the words you must say to survive. The idea that a “gaffe” based on a few choice phrases can have disastrous career consequences makes perfect sense if you’ve lived in an imagined world where saying the wrong thing to an 18th-level lich lord brings a rain of fire down on your head.

Westminster’s D&D community has been quiet for many years, not unreasonably ashamed of youthful misadventures with polyhedral dice and pretend paladins. But I am quietly confident that change is coming. The year of the boardgame and the relentless rise of Games Workshop are all part of a trend that will one day allow us to venture out of the dungeons and into the light. The geek shall inherit the earth.

Spool forward to the present day and the contrast in politics can look almost head-spinning. Since polls closed in the EU referendum in June 2016, Britain has had three prime ministers and two general elections, in a span of time that might otherwise have seen Prime Minister Cameron in office until the May 2020 election.

Cameron, like Clegg, is a blurred memory. Jeremy Corbyn and Nigel Farage, who might interest future historians almost as much, are fading from view. Theresa May, who will not trouble posterity, is already gone.

There’s a lot to learn by looking back to that moment in the Rose Garden. The garden isn’t called that that, of course, but does that matter? It is, after all, how people have chosen to remember it. Perhaps that’s what really matters in the end.

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But I wonder if we’re learning the right lessons by looking back on the Rose Garden and the coalition.  I don’t often disagree with UnHerd’s own Peter Franklin, but I have to quibble with his assessment of the Coalition years  as “unusually — almost freakishly — disconnected from what happened next. It’s almost as if they didn’t happen at all.”

Of the main players, Peter offers this enviably sharp verdict:

“Though they were the big beasts of their era, Cameron and Clegg can be seen as an evolutionary dead-end — the last of a line wiped out by a series of cataclysmic events.”

I understand the argument, the narrative it supports, even if I don’t entirely agree with it. More of that in a moment. First, that narrative, which goes something like this: the Rose Garden moment marked a high tide for technocrat centrist elite politicians and their bloodless “new politics”.

Cameron and Clegg, public school and Oxbridge-educated fortysomethings with no real careers outside politics, were able to work together happily because they had more in common than they admitted to voters, and had few ideological convictions to impede their partnership. Together, they oversaw five years of stable government driven its very DNA towards the political centre: a bit socially liberal (gay marriage) and a bit economically conservative (austerity).

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The same narrative says that all those things have now been swept away by a tide of partisan vitriol, culture-wars dividing lines and politicians intent on consolidating their electoral base, not winning over opponents. Boris Johnson, you might think, is the embodied repudiation of the Coalition years. Unlike Cameron and Clegg, this narrative suggests, the current PM has no willingness to compromise with opponents or critics. Far from technocratic centrism, he’s a gut-feel guy who won his majority last year on the tub-thumping populist simplicity of “Get Brexit Done” and leads a government whose illiberalism is captured in a home secretary who used to be quite keen on hanging; the new politics has given way to the old.

Or has it? Looking back, I can’t help but feel that the drama and turmoil that has swept away many familiar characters, terminally changing their career trajectories, hasn’t really changed the fundamentals of politics quite so much.

Vitriol? Well, there’s no disputing that the tone of politics has changed, but only in degree, not nature. The idea that Politics 2010 was a Socratic debate among patricians is for the birds; the happy smiles of the Rose Garden followed the Brown years, when it was commonplace for enemies of Labour’s then leader to debate his mental health, and MPs’ expenses, which made it acceptable to address MPs as thieving toerags. Political twitter may have been a friendly clique in 2010, but wider political discourse was often toxic.

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By Polly Mackenzie

A change of personnel? We’re governed by different people, but not a different type of person.  You can only think that David Cameron (Eton and Brasenose, Oxford) and Boris Johnson (Eton and Balliol, Oxford) are fundamentally different sorts if you go in for Freud’s narcissism of small differences. Perhaps you think Brexit is a tectonic gulf between the two, but it’s easy to imagine (as he himself did) the world where Boris was for Remain, and equally possible to imagine the world where Cameron supported leaving. After all, DC was willing to be pushed by his party into a referendum he didn’t want; a bit more pushing might well have seen him saunter across another red line.

On the other side of the House, Sir Keir Starmer is a bit different from Ed Miliband, but they’re not members of different species; after the genuine divergence of Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leadership is reverting to the (north London professional) mean. More broadly, the House of Commons has changed a bit since 2010, but not dramatically: there are more women, more BAME MPs and fewer privately-educated MPs. But the place is still heavy with the sort of people whose CVs look a lot like that of Cameron and Clegg.

Twitter might have changed, but politics itself is still done by much the same sort of people who were in charge a decade ago, and often done in a similar way to the same people. Many of those ‘Red Wall’ seats Johnson claimed in 2019 were also Tory targets in 2010. I spent the 2010 campaign tracking Cameron around the country; most of my days were spent in the north-west watching the man try to win over Labour voters who watched football and rugby league. On election night in 2010, a Tory friend said she knew they’d missed the majority because Gedling had stayed red. Cameron may have felt comfortable with Nick Clegg, but it’s not what he wanted. He had to form a coalition with the Lib Dems because he was unable to form a coalition of voters within the Conservative Party big enough to reach from Guildford to Gedling.

What about policy? Surely here we find support for the idea of an essential rupture between the Coalition what came after? Again, I’m not so sure. Cameron and Clegg may have looked good in the garden, but they weren’t entirely the compromising centrists that jolly press conference promised and some people now recall. In part this is because history is written by the former incumbents, several of whom are keen to play up the idea of the Coalition as driven by compassion and moderation.

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Imagine David Cameron had won his referendum

By Peter Franklin

In Cameron’s own book about his premiership, he describes his political approach as “compassionate” more than 30 times and calls himself “a genuine, moderate and liberally-minded One Nation Conservative.”

That would be the compassionate, moderate Coalition that reduced taxes for people earning £150,000 at the same time as making cuts in welfare payments including tax credits and housing benefit. The compassionate, moderate Coalition whose welfare policies led to claims that they would result in in the Kosovo-style ethnic cleansing of the poor. Those claims were made by one Boris Johnson, of course.

What about liberal internationalism?  Cameron in his book says: “My idea was to mark us out as the most open, globalised, free-trading anti-protectionist nation on Earth”. Which sounds nice, but was hardly the reality of Coalition policy.  

As for liberal internationalism, that might have been an accurate description of Nick Clegg’s personal outlook, but it was hardly the reality of coalition policy. David Cameron and his Home Secretary (remember her?) spent five years tweaking immigration rules, promising yet more crackdowns and generally blaming foreigners for stuff that wasn’t their fault.

Even George Osborne now concedes that he and his friend Dave “didn’t make enough of the value of immigration”.

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In 2010, David Cameron first fooled the country

By James Bloodworth

Cameron banged on about immigration even though his own inclinations on the issue were fairly liberal; he just thought he had to talk tough on the subject to keep party and public happy. Draw your own comparisons with the current PM.

A pro-European coalition? Pull the other one. One of the reasons Cameron lost his referendum was that he asked people to vote for the EU membership he’d spent the previous six years slagging off as an undemocratic fetter on the UK economy. Far from “not happening all”, the Coalition years and Cameron’s European policy were the linear precursor of Brexit. That’s not just my verdict either: Osborne has said the referendum was lost because Cameron and Co were too negative about Europe.

Boris Johnson is routinely described, in Brussels and elsewhere, as a Little England Tory brute with no regard for European history or solidarity. But that’s hardly unprecedented. Rewind to Friday, 11 December 2011, and savour the opening paragraphs of the Guardian’s lead story that morning:

David Cameron plunged Britain’s position in Europe into the greatest uncertainty in a generation as he used his veto to block a new EU-wide treaty and left at least 23 other countries to forge a pact to salvage the single currency.

With the apparent blessing of the pro-European deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg — and the subsequent delight of Tory backbenchers — Cameron deployed the ultimate weapon in European summitry at about 2.30am yesterday.

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The 'green crap' lessons of 2013

By James Kirkup

What about economics? It’s early days and the Coronavirus has obviously scrambled the compass, but there are credible signs that the Johnson administration will end up being even closer to the centre-ground of economic policy than the Coalition. Johnson won his election by junking corporate tax cuts put in train by George Osborne and promising to spend more on the NHS. “Levelling up”, meanwhile, is strongly reminiscent of the agenda pursued by the Coalition’s Vince Cable when he was Business Secretary, and often blocked by the Coalition’s higher-ups. Cameron eventually came around to a more interventionist approach to markets, adopting the Ed Miliband energy price cap he once derided. These days some Tory free marketeers (quietly) grumble that Boris’ big-state economics are not a million miles away from the “reheated Milibandism” that Theresa May tried to serve up.

Then there’s climate change. Husky-hugging Cameron and his yellow-green partner talked a good game on environmental policy, but who was it who ended up promising to “get rid of the green crap” on energy bills and effectively banning onshore wind?

By contrast, consider the environmental stance of Boris Johnson. So far, he’s upheld a legal commitment to hit net zero carbon emissions by 2050 even though most voters don’t even know what net zero means (Government polling shows only 35% recognise the term) and certainly don’t know the disruptions that hitting that target will bring to their lives. (Just google “hydrogen boiler”.) Oh, and he’s restarted onshore wind, too. So who is the populist driven by public opinion, and who is the know-all technocrat driving through policies that lack obvious public approval?

I am not denying that things have changed since 2010 — that would be foolish. But the differences between the days of the Coalition and now are easy to overplay, while their similarities are easy to overlook. We should be wary of the idea of historic rupture between then and now, not least because the changes that lie ahead for post-Covid Britain may yet make the differences between the worlds of Dave and Boris look like minor details. Sometimes, the present is more like the past than the future.

In France, Poland and Denmark, they’re trying a different approach during the coronavirus crisis: geese that don’t provide enough feathers can hiss off. Those states have declared that companies that have used tax havens to reduce their tax liabilities will not be eligible for state aid to get them through the current downturn.

Britain hasn’t — so far — announced anything so stark, but quieter echoes of such thinking can be detected in the Government’s emergency bailout measures.

While Rishi Sunak has offered furlough schemes for salaried workers and support for many of the self-employed, the Treasury has so far declined to offer a specific package for people who are self-employed and paid through a limited company of which they are the sole director. That arrangement can have tax advantages to contractors, who pay themselves dividends instead of a salary.

(In the interests of transparency, I should note that some columnists use such a device for their journalistic earnings. I am not one of them.)

The refusal to include self-employed directors in the bailout has caused no little distress and anger; some of those people are contractors to big companies who have insisted that they will only pay fees to limited companies, not to contractors personally.

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Everything we do with tax is wrong

By Dominic Frisby

Yet the Treasury’s view, rarely stated explicitly, is not too far away from that of the French, Poles and Danes: if you choose to minimise your tax bill and pay less in to the state, you go to the back of the queue when the state is dishing out cash.

That’s an interesting place to start a conversation about tax after the crisis. Here, I do not mean the level and allocation of taxation. Those are second-order questions. I mean the purpose and nature of taxation. Never mind how much tax you pay, ask yourself why you pay it.

Historically, the point of taxation has shifted. Originally a tithe extracted by monarchs to support their households, tax became a levy imposed to support certain national endeavours (UK income tax was famously a temporary measure introduced by Pitt the Younger to fund the war against Napoleon) and then… what?

Whatever you think tax is now for, it is a fact of life in any modern economy, because such economies need a state and that state must be funded. But current taxation everywhere goes well beyond that needed to provide a de minimis state that offers nothing more than national defence and the rule of law. Taxes fund services and social security, healthcare and education, a range of activities that would have been unimaginable to Pitt.

But describing the things tax does is not the same as answering that question about why we pay it. Because there are two distinct answers to that question. For some, tax is transactional: you pay in and you expect to get something back.

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Should the rich pay more tax?

By James Kanagasooriam

Anecdotally, I know this idea of transaction is widespread and powerful. I used to work for a newspaper that often argued for a smaller state that spent less and lived within its means. Yet when the Coalition government of David Cameron moved to remove child benefit from higher-earners, we were inundated with angry letters from readers arguing that they had paid their dues in tax, so they deserved to get a regular handout from the Exchequer — even if they did use it to buy a slightly nicer bottle of wine in Waitrose.

Likewise the state pension. Any politician who dares to question perks such as the winter fuel allowance and the seriously expensive triple lock of guaranteed annual rises immediately faces a storm of fury from recipients insisting they have “paid their stamp” and are thus entitled to endlessly rising living standards. Never mind the fact that their “stamp” was spent years ago and their pension payments are funded from taxes levied on today’s workers.

Is tax just a mandatory subscription fee you pay to provide yourself with services you might or might not want and might or might not use?

Another way to see tax is an insurance premium towards a group policy. This view is closer to the narrow financial facts of tax: the amount we pay in is not related to what we get back.

If you’re a privately-educated high-earner who drops dead at 60 without reaching a hospital, you may well contribute far more to the Exchequer than you receive in direct services. And if you’re born disabled or develop a complex chronic condition that limits your ability to work, you’ll very likely cost the state more than you pay in tax.

Government responses to the Coronavirus crisis show that insurance policy paying out, and might just shift, a little, the way politicians talk about tax. By and large, politicians tend to speak of tax as a necessary evil, something they try to do to people without them noticing too much. Hence the continued resonance of that Colbert quotation I began with: it’s used again and again in books and articles about tax, and with good reason — it’s still relevant today.

If you present tax as that necessary evil, tax avoidance and evasion make a certain logical sense. Especially if you believe (rightly or not) that you pay more in than you get back.

That belief is most often found in “self-made” people who have made money in business and appear to believe that their success exists almost wholly separately to wider society. If you built your firm through hard work and grit, who can blame you for losing sight of the social and economic infrastructure that was a necessary condition of your success? Roads, courts, clean air, policing, defence — take them away and see how long any business lasts.

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The hypocrisy of billionaire-bashing

By Justin Webb

(Some small-state conservatives still recall Ronald Reagan’s joke: “The 10 most terrifying words in the English language are ‘Hi, I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.” But as the historian Ian Morris has pointed out, in reality the 10 scariest words are “There is no government, and I’m here to kill you.”)

We don’t just pay tax so we can get stuff. We pay tax so that people — including us — can get stuff when they need it. Like an insurance policy, it only works through the pooling of risk — and contributions. Part of the reason a country like Germany has been able — so far — to absorb the coronavirus crisis better than others is a history of taxation levied and used to provide insurance against disaster: the Germans have almost too many ventilators and testing facilities, tax-funded precautionary capacity that now looks more prudent than wasteful.

Which brings us back to the companies that decide to skip a few premium payments by routing profits through off-shore subsidiaries, lending money between units and all the other clever wheezes. As voters wonder why their states’ insurance policies aren’t paying out as they expect during a fundamental challenge, is it any wonder that politicians feel little urge to help such firms?

But let’s go back to Colbert’s geese for a moment. It may well be politically expedient and even emotionally satisfying to let tax-efficient corporates go under right now. How many tears will be shed in the UK if Richard Branson loses his airline and his island?

But letting the noisiest geese starve won’t bring in so many feathers. The really interesting question about tax after the crisis is whether there’s now a chance to persuade more companies — and maybe some people too — to pay more tax.

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The 'green crap' lessons of 2013

By James Kirkup

If the crisis is demonstrating that tax is an insurance payment that can help protect everyone from grave harm, what is the social status of tax avoiders? The idea of shaming companies over their tax records is now old, and largely ineffective: there are lots of firms whose tax arrangements are famously ruthless and mean, yet how many have been successfully shamed into ending those arrangements? Most just use a fraction of the money they save in tax to employ a few more top-drawer PR folk to answer questions from annoying hacks and politicians, then carry on as before.

What hasn’t been tried enough is approval, the positive moral pressure of acclamation. Some companies don’t pay enough tax, but some pay lots.

According to PWC’s annual Total Tax report, Britain’s biggest 100 firms paid £84.7bn in tax last year, 11.7% of total government receipts.

Yet how many of them talk about their total tax contribution, about how many nurses or ICU wards they funded last year?

HM Revenue and Customs in recent years has experimented with behavioural science to get us to pay our taxes in full and on time. Self-assessment payers get bombarded with messages telling us “by this point in the year, most people have already done their tax return”, and so on.

The aim is “social proof”, the creation of a clear norm that people incline to meet. I wonder if the coronavirus crisis might just offer the chance to do something similar with tax on a much grander scale, part of a new social contract between businesses and the society that is now bailing them out and paying their furloughed workers’ wages.

I’m all for naming and shaming those who don’t pay their fair share of tax. It establishes that paying tax is an intrinsically good and selfless act, something made vividly clear by Covid-19. But we should make much more use of that. Since paying tax is a good thing to do, we should dwell more on those that do it the most.

Let’s have official league tables of the biggest taxpayers, with the winners celebrated and recognised: badges, honours, the lot. Hell, why not name hospital wards after those who did most to fund them? Imagine if the eight new Nightingale hospitals had been named for the eight biggest individual taxpayers in the UK on those league tables? And think how the companies and plutocrats who came lowest on the list might respond. There is more than one way to pluck a goose.

It is said by many observers and participants in the Government’s lockdown policy that the most remarkable thing about a remarkable policy is how successful it has been. Arguably too successful.

Some people in and around government have been surprised, and not always happily, at how widely people have accepted and even embraced lockdown. Many more people than anyone really expected have chosen to heed the government’s messaging and shut themselves away for the duration.

That has deepened the economic impact of lockdown, and led to some unexpected misallocations of resources. Officials expected that around 20% of children would continue to go to school, either because their parents were key workers or because they qualified under the provision made for those eligible for free school meals by virtue of low incomes. In fact, the figure is barely 2%.

One reason the NHS has avoided catastrophic overload is the sharp drop in people presenting for non-Covid reasons. Some industries, such as construction, have all but shut down even though they were not told to do so and might have continued to operate in some form.

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Lockdown is just a holiday from modernity

By Niall Gooch

Elsewhere, lockdown is causing social tension and even protest. Only very small numbers of people in some American states are demonstrating against the curtailment of liberty, but they are demonstrating. The English, by contrast, have accepted lockdown with a wistful shrug and maybe a bit of passive-aggressive grumbling, eschewing riots in favour of settling down with a nice cup of tea to wait things out.

Curious, because I’m not sure how this sort of behaviour fits into ideas of the English, or at least, into English cultural history. Running through that history is the notion of the English as a people with a deep and even unique love of liberty, a desire to be left alone, especially by people in power.

After all, we had Magna Carta, did we not? That extraordinary document echoed down the centuries, with consequences far beyond my scope here. One was probably the Civil War, which in England at least had its roots in the legal reasoning of men such as Sir Edward Coke, that even the monarch was subject to Parliament’s laws. Coke paved the way for William Blackstone, the 18th century judge who defined “the absolute rights of every Englishman” including freedom from unwarranted interference by the state.

These “rights of Englishmen” were a cornerstone of the American Revolution and the establishment of the United States. At least some of the founders believed that their new nation was brought into being to preserve the liberties that supposedly defined England yet which a tyrannical king and his ministers had defiled.

Here is George Mason, one of the Founding Fathers, a delegate to the Constitutional Convention of 1787:

“We claim Nothing but the Liberty & Privileges of Englishmen, in the same Degree, as if we had still continued among our Brethren in Great Britain: these Rights have not been forfeited by any Act of ours, we can not be deprived of them without our Consent, but by Violence & Injustice…”

When our American cousins cry “Live Free or Die” and take to the streets to protest overweening state authority during lockdown, whether they know it or not, they are honouring the tradition of English liberty.

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Will the pandemic kill off libertarianism?

By James Kirkup

That tradition has not entirely died out in England itself, even if many of the English prefer to hallow St George and the nation’s history by ignoring the issue altogether. Or perhaps by grumbling at the lack of a Bank Holiday, a propensity for long weekends apparently being an essential part of our Protestant national character — so unlike the idle French and other workshy southern papists.

But some people still remember, upholding the idea of “freeborn Englishmen” as a band especially committed to personal freedom. One of them is our Prime Minister, whose writings for the Telegraph (I used to help edit them) are shot through with a silvery vein of liberty in the face of an intrusive state.

For Boris Johnson, it is an essential part of the English character that, when faced with pettifogging officialdom giving us orders, we tell the offending bureaucrat to bugger off.

Here is Boris in 2004 when Tony Blair was keen on a national ID card:

“If I am ever asked, on the streets of London, or in any other venue, public or private, to produce my ID card as evidence that I am who I say I am, when I have done nothing wrong and when I am simply ambling along and breathing God’s fresh air like any other freeborn Englishman, then I will take that card out of my wallet and physically eat it in the presence of whatever emanation of the state has demanded that I produce it.”

If Boris Johson has a personal philosophy, it is probably contained in those words. At least until the coronavirus, he saw himself, fame and Cabinet rank notwithstanding, as “simply ambling along and breathing God’s fresh air like any other freeborn Englishman”.

That view of the English character was visible in Johnson’s early, stumbling Covid-19 press conferences, when he resisted initial calls for lockdowns and the rest. “We live in a land of liberty,” he insisted on March 18th:

"We live in a land of liberty… we don't intend to pose… restrictions on people… but we will rule nothing out"

UK PM Boris Johnson says "we will consider bringing further… measures where that is necessary to suppress the peak of the epidemic"https://t.co/1Rs1TN7gTf pic.twitter.com/CDb6epjvKE

— BBC News (UK) (@BBCNews) March 18, 2020

 Not all of his now-famous resistance to lockdown was about personal politics. A big part of the expert calculations put to ministers was about how many people would reject restrictions on personal freedom, rendering lockdown ineffective. Some government advisers counselled that people would simply get bored and resentful about being told to stay at home, so ministers should be wary.

I doubt the behavioural scientists making that calculation explicitly considered Magna Carta, Coke, Blackstone and the “rights of Englishmen”, but the people whose behaviour they were attempting to predict are the inheritors of that tradition, knowingly or otherwise.

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I don't want life to go back to 'normal'

By Graeme Archer

So what to make of the way we have largely accepted and obeyed a polite instruction to put ourselves under house arrest? Why is England, land of liberty, so happy to spend St George’s Day — and maybe many more days beyond — in lockdown?

The search for a definition of the English character is endless and largely fruitless. I used to write about England a lot (for a Scottish newspaper, the Scots often being more interested in Englishness than the English) and have sometimes wondered if the refusal to agree on a common idea of Englishness is, in fact, the defining characteristic of the nation.

Fortunately, there are much better thinkers than me who have looked at this question, doing work that might shed some light on the failure of freeborn Englishmen to resist orders to leave the pub and go home.

One of them is Paula Surridge of Bristol University, who studies the values that underpin voting behaviour and much else besides.

Last month, she spoke to the English Labour Network, which wants Labour to pay more attention to English identity and those voters who think it’s important. More on that in a minute.

Dr Surridge — whose work really should be followed by everyone interested in UK politics — has looked at voters and how they identify themselves. She finds that around 35% of the electorate in England consider themselves to be “very strongly English”.

Within that group, you will probably find the 20-odd % who, in other surveys, are identified as “English not British” or “more English than British”.

However you measure them, these people are very important, politically and otherwise. According to John Denham, a former Labour Cabinet minister who now studies Englishness and the English, almost all of the Labour voters who switched to the Tories last year are from that “very English” group. Until Labour reconnects with England and the English, he argues, it will never regain power. I think he’s probably right about that.

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Is there a future for English nationalism?

By Paul Mason

But how to do that? And what’s this got to do with lockdown?  Back to Dr Surridge.

A lot of her research looks beyond traditional Left-Right divisions on economic questions and incorporates another scale of measuring attitudes: liberal-authoritarian.

Your position on that axis depends on your view of the following five statements:

• Young people don’t have enough respect for traditional values
• Censorship is necessary to uphold moral values
• We should be tolerant of those who lead unconventional lifestyles
• For some crimes the death penalty is the most appropriate sentence
• People who break the law should be given stiffer sentences”

The more strongly you agree with those, the further towards the “authoritarian” end of the scale you fall.

And guess what Dr Surridge found about the “very strongly English”, the group most likely to be celebrating St George’s Day today and to generally embrace Englishness in preference to other identities? The more English you feel, the more likely you are to say that the state and society should tell people what to do, to make them conform and, when they disobey, to punish them harshly.

This correlation between Englishness and authoritarian attitudes strikes me as fascinating, important and underexplored in a lot of political conversation — possibly, in part, because the Prime Minister who seems to appeal so much to authoritarian English voters is so keen to tell a story of them as freeborn lovers of liberty.

Johnson is not unaware of the importance of authoritarian inclinations, of course. Priti Patel isn’t Home Secretary because she likes Brexit. It’s because she used to like the death penalty.

On the other side of the Commons, I wonder what would happen if Sir Keir Starmer managed to reinvent himself as a hardline prosecutor of yobs and petty criminals and shifted Labour’s home affairs posture back to “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime”?  That might go some way to solving Labour’s very grave English problem.

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Every Home Secretary must fight the Home Office

By Stephen Pollard

As for lockdown, this is, of course, just my speculation, but it seems likely that people who think that the majority and its official representatives should be able to tell us all what to do would be willing to heed instructions to stay at home — even on their patron saint’s day. And to make sure others do too, hence all those calls to the police from people informing on others for such transgressions as walking the dog not once but twice a day. So numerous are those calls that the National Police Chiefs Council (NPCC) has had to urge the public to “exercise common sense and only report well-meaning concerns”.

In other words, the police in England, this land of liberty, have had to beg people to stop grassing up their neighbours to the authorities for “simply ambling along and breathing God’s fresh air like any other freeborn Englishman”.

Happy St George’s Day.

Mr Johnson will not be unhappy with that. He’s very interested in the “great man” theory of history — that way of understanding the world that attributes grand events and trends to the actions of a few heroic individuals. He loves the classics with their heaven-born heroes smiting each other hip and thigh in defiance of gods and fate. His hero is Pericles, the “first citizen of Athens”. He chose politics over journalism “because no one puts up statues of journalists”. He wrote a biography of Winston Churchill, the best-known great man of British imagination: he won the war, didn’t he?

Provided he isn’t seen to have screwed up dramatically over the crisis once he’s recovered, it’s quite easy to see how the story of the prime minister who led the response to a deadly disease and nearly died from it himself will weave its way into the British imagination.

But the tale of Boris and the Virus can be told in two different ways. The way Conservatives, in particular, remember it will help decide whether the story unites or divides.

It all flows from a very basic question: why did Boris survive? How people answer that question will say a lot about politics and determine how Britain changes — or does not change — when we finally put coronavirus behind us.

Some will describe a battle of personal heroism, of grit and determination. Even when the PM was in the ICU and his fate was, frankly, uncertain, many people were talking of his toughness, his vigour, how his strong character and boundless appetite for life would equip him to “fight” the virus and win.

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How Boris became the body politic

By Matthew Sweet

I don’t much like that language, though I understand why people use it. I worry it overstates the role that character and personal choice play in medical outcomes. When I wrote elsewhere about this last week, I was slightly surprised by the vehemence and volume of responses. I know that Twitter isn’t Britain and all that but it’s still a bit striking to see people arguing that yes, some people die of various diseases because they just don’t want to live. That even life and death are ultimately a matter of choices made by individuals.

Others, though, will describe how he survived thanks to a huge infrastructure of medical support, provided and funded by many other people — as well as a bit of blind luck. To grossly over-simplify, some people will remember that Boris survived because he wanted to, because of things he did himself while others will say that it was because other people looked after him when he needed it.

The more weight you put on the first explanation, the more likely you are to be somewhere on the Right of the political spectrum. The idea that people choose their fate is popular among conservative-inclined voters. A very good study by the Bright Blue think tank in 2014 found that Tory voters were about twice as likely as Labour people to say that people in poverty are poor because of their own choices: they haven’t done enough to help themselves.

Similar evidence in the US suggests that people on the Right tend to believe that those who enjoy economic success do so largely or solely because of their own efforts.

As Bright Blue put it:

“One key conservative belief concerns the degree of power and responsibility individuals have over their own situation. Conservatives tend to see individuals as agents who can shape and determine their circumstances, and so see them as agents responsible for such circumstances.”

The other side of the old Left-Right binary is a familiar story, best articulated by Elizabeth Warren in 2012 talking about how people get rich:

“You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police-forces and fire-forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory — and hire someone to protect against this — because of the work the rest of us did.”

(This is the speech that led Barack Obama to attempt the same argument with disastrous consequences in his “You didn’t build that” comments. He was talking about the social infrastructure that supports business, but he botched his lines and created a meme that helped elect Donald Trump. Words matter, folks.)

Whether Covid-19 changes politics depends on how conservatives chose to explain Boris’ recovery. If they cling to the idea of people as rugged individuals deciding their own fate, politics will remain divided on its current left-right binary. If they look beyond heroic individualism and accept that individuals exist in a network of social bonds and obligations, we might just see a real realignment and the start of genuine post-liberal politics in the UK.

For the Left, the coronavirus crisis offers little in the way of intellectual challenge. A national crisis revolving around the NHS and requiring collective social effort is likely to feel like validation instead. Jeremy Corbyn’s claim that the crisis proves him right over public spending will be the foundation-stone of a myth built by his devotees that if only he’d become PM, none of the bad things would have happens.

The equivalent retreat to the comfort-zone for conservatives would be to use the Boris story as a validation of individualism. But more interesting, challenging and profitable would be to learn from the obvious fact that the PM did not win his “battle” against the coronavirus alone.

In the modern history of ideas on the Right, some of the most prominent explanations of individual agency lead to an atomised view of society and a minimal state. Think of Ayn Rand (“My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being”) or Friedrich Hayek, who said that “after creating formal equality of the rules applying in the same manner to all, we can leave each individual to find his own level.”

But more recent and more interesting thinkers have begun to test that heroic individualism. Think of John Gray’s Post-Liberalism. Gray, in turn, has paved the way for post-liberal political practitioners such as Nick Timothy, who has recently published his own book, Remaking One Nation: The Future of Conservatism.

What makes Timothy intriguing and original is that he is a Conservative (and a conservative) who enthusiastically embraces the state — and rejects the idea of heroic individual success:

“Nobody, however successful they might be, has succeeded alone. They might have relied on their families to give them love and security. They might have a school, college or university to thank. They might have benefited from the kindness or wisdom of a mentor or employer. They might have been supported by the state, through the welfare system or … a Sure Start centre. Precisely because nobody has succeeded alone, we all have a debt to others. “

Which brings us, circuitously, back to Boris Johnson and how he — and by extension his party — will remember his recovery. It is notable that his short message briefed to the Sunday papers is all about the NHS and the debt that he incurred in illness. “I owe them my life,” Johnson said simply.

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We've cosied up to China for too long

By Nick Timothy

That is an acknowledgment that even the most heroic individual does not rise — or fall — alone. But will that acknowledgement carry through into a wider revision of Conservative thinking around public services and collective provision? That would be no surprise: Tories have been trying to embrace the NHS since David Cameron became leader in 2005. A post-crisis settlement where the Tories seek to define themselves as the party of the NHS would be a logical, if extremely difficult, aim now.

Most contemporary Tories would have little trouble embracing the NHS: the number of ideologues who actually want to break it up or sell it off is vanishingly small. More novel and challenging would be a Tory rethink about welfare.

Even though some Tories have recently tried a new approach to welfare — think of Iain Duncan Smith and Universal Credit — they have stuck with the idea of rational, autonomous individuals deciding their own path. Universal Credit was premised on the idea that claimants were deciding not to work more because the financial return wasn’t there. Even Tory welfare reformers thought welfare was a question of choice.

We may well be about to see unemployment temporarily pass the three million mark, with hundreds of thousands of people now needing benefits to get by. And all through no fault or choice of their own: can you really hold people personally responsible for being sacked by employers whose business has been shut down by a pandemic? Those Conservative attitudes to claimants will surely be tested in the months ahead.

So far, post-liberalism is a fringe element on the British Right, so politics remains broadly familiar. The 2019 election opened up the possibility for these things to change, but then the virus hit and all the emergent thinking about “levelling up” and the Tory embrace of the state was thrown into the crucible.

Are we heroic individuals who decide our own fate, or social animals whose outcomes are inextricably bound up with — and partly dependent on — the actions of others? Boris will likely get his statues one day. And how the story of his illness and its happy ending are told by his friends might just determine the history of Britain after the virus.

When and if the coronavirus crisis is contained, there will be many reckonings and re-evaluations, not least about the relationship between the state, individuals and markets. In this, Boris Johnson’s decision to order pubs, clubs and restaurants to close — and the seemingly inevitable follow-up, lockdown — will be significant.

It is well-known that the Prime Minister is inclined to want to keep the state out of mundane personal business. He also likes to court people who like to go out for a drink, hence his regular schtick about free-born Britons’ ancient right to a pint of beer. His reluctance to see the state telling people what to do was abundantly clear in his Mother’s Day press conference, when he spoke breezily about the joys of being out and about on a fine sunny day.

But Johnson’s worldview is a topic for someone else. What interests me is other people. What does it say about human nature that despite repeated urging and warning, despite a bombardment of information, people continued to congregate and mix in ways that put them and others at non-trivial risk of a potentially fatal disease?

And what, in turn, will the necessity to ban such congregations mean for our future understanding of the way the state should view and treat people as they go about their economic lives?

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How coronavirus exposes our fragility

By James Kirkup

I am not a libertarian, but I think libertarianism deserves some acknowledgement for its optimism about human nature. In short, this suggests that when people are left to their own devices, they will, in the end, do sensible, collaborative and even kind things.

Here’s David Boaz of the Cato Institute in The Libertarian Mind:

“The great insight of libertarian social analysis is that order in society arises spontaneously, out of the actions of thousands or millions of individuals who coordinate their actions with those of others in order to achieve their purposes.”

Free marketeers, explicitly or otherwise, tend to rest their argument for unfettered market interactions on the idea that these are dealings between rational actors. In markets, as in life, people left to make their own decisions will, in aggregate, make spending choices that benefit themselves, thus allowing markets to price and allocate resources in the most efficient way.

This is the ‘rational agent’ theory of economic behaviour and it’s one of the most fundamental ideas of our age. It’s the basis for most economics teaching and the foundation of most ideas of market operation, regulation and consumer law (even if there are quite a few people who argue, quite persuasively, that it’s wrong).

Now let’s go back to the people, in London and elsewhere, who last week continued to crowd into pubs and gyms.

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Why did they do it? Why was it necessary for Boris Johnson, instinctively liberal, to order the pubs to close? You only need to take such measures if people are either not nice or not rational. Neither explanation bodes well for libertarianism or free markets.

How rational were the choices made by those pub-goers or the folk crowded into parks and markets? Were they coolly assessing the pleasure they would derive from a few drinks or a stroll with friends, and assigning it a value that outweighed the risk they and others would face resulting from their choice?

If so, I think that raises a significant problem for libertarian views of human nature as benign. People who think their enjoyment of a pint of lager justifies risking the lives of others do not measure up to that nice idea that, left to our own devices, we generally do the right thing.

Or here’s another explanation for pub-going in a time of coronavirus. Maybe the people who continued to mingle were being neither good nor bad but merely inaccurately estimating the consequences and costs of their actions. Here we get to those other economists, the behavioural ones, who argue that we make our allocative choices not on the basis of neat, orderly mental spreadsheets weighing cost and benefit, but because of messy, complicated human frailty.

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The decision to keep going to the pub during a pandemic looks a lot like an illustration of what Daniel Kahneman called the availability heuristic, the tendency of people to over-state the probability of familiar things they can easily imagine, and underestimate the chance of hard-to-concieve things happening.

How many of us can easily conjure up a simple mental picture of an invisible virus spreading exponentially through a population of tens of millions, and be clear in our minds about who we might be harming by popping down the local for one last pint or a walk in the park? I don’t think the Londoners who continued to go out drinking or strolling were callous. I think they just couldn’t easily conceive the potential consequences or the probability of those consequences.

The choice to go on going out was, in other words, hard to describe as rational, even in the narrow terms of rational choice theory. And if people aren’t rational about a situation that risks tens of thousands of lives and deep damage to our society and economy, how much weight should we put on the idea of rational actors in future?

Arguably, this shouldn’t even be a debatable point. There’s a good case to be made that the 2007/8 financial crisis should have put more of a dent in the idea of rational economic actors.

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When no less a figure than Alan Greenspan admitted that markets did not work the way he had believed they did and that he had “made a mistake in presuming that the self-interest of organizations, specifically banks and others, was such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders” then policymakers the world over should have shown more scepticism about ‘rationality’.

Maybe this time really will be different. Maybe this time, when the dust settles on the graves of the last Covid-19 victims, we can start a serious conversation about how and why human beings really do what we do. And about the role of the state in markets that are made up of frail, human people who we cannot expect — or require — to be either nice or rational.

I am no fan of narrow, classical, rational agent economics, but I do admire the optimistic view of humanity that underpins the libertarianism that is its intellectual cousin. I like to think that with a bit of help, most people will mostly make the right choices. But the refusal of many people to do the sensible and altruistic thing over coronavirus leaves me gloomily wondering about that.

If people cannot be trusted to make decisions that can make the difference between life and death, if they and others must be protected from the exercise of their free will in something so fundamental, where else should restraint be imposed by the state, for the good of the individual and society? Put it another way: once you’ve closed pubs and banned people from going outside, imposing, say, a tax to deter people from consuming sugary drinks is going to seem like a very small thing indeed.

This, not the size of the state or the tax burden, will be the real change the virus brings to countries founded on liberal ideas of human nature.

That might be an easy one for you to answer. But what about dinner four days from now, or six? The fact that many people would find that second question hard or even impossible might just tell us something about the way Britain will be changed by Covid-19.

When I started reporting on politics almost 20 years ago, Tesco and the people who shopped there every Saturday were pretty much the centre of the electoral universe. Tony Blair was almost supernaturally attuned to Tesco shoppers, their concerns about petrol prices and the rest. Tesco, driven by its big-box edge-of-town stores (which also sold petrol), was the company of the moment; even political journalists knew that one pound in every seven spent on British retail went to Tesco.

Then the financial crisis and competition in the market changed British grocers and the way we shop. People suddenly short of cash, or just worried about cash, become reluctant or unable to spend a big slice of their weekly disposable on one big shop on one day. Lidl and Aldi arrived, mostly in the centre of towns in small- and medium-sized stores, not in big boxes. Incumbent supermarkets, too, chased shoppers who wanted to shop more often, to spend smaller sums more frequently.

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Tesco tried to keep pace with consumers, with Tesco Metro, a shift that meant many things, including a reduction in staff numbers.

Essentially, Britain became a nation of just-in-time shoppers, making regular and even daily trips to the shops for that night’s dinner. A few years back, the Co-op found that 27% of us chose our evening meal on the day; only 9% of people in its survey planned their meals a week ahead.

Waitrose has also noted the death of the weekly shop​, observing that a staple of the high street is shrinking and maybe even disappearing:

“Just a few years ago, an average Waitrose would open with around 200 big trolleys and 150 shallow ‘daily shopper’ trolleys lined up outside. These days the tables have turned, with 250 shallow ‘daily shoppers’ and just 70 big trolleys needed.”

More recently, the aversion to the weekly shop and to preparing to feed ourselves has sparked a new trend in food retail: recipe boxes, where someone else plans and weighs and measures the components you need to prepare your evening meal — Hello Fresh, Gousto, Mindful Chef.

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Not only do we no longer want to fill our cupboards with food, we can’t be bothered to measure and weigh the stuff either.

This shift surely informs Britain’s response to the coronavirus emergency, and will shape the way that emergency changes us. When the crisis really hit, how many people didn’t have enough food in the fridge or cans in the cupboard to last out the 14-day isolation period Boris Johnson asked of any household with a symptomatic resident?

To anyone — and yes, the younger you are, the more likely this is to be true — who relies on that daily trip to the shop, perhaps on the way home from work, the idea of spending two weeks cut off and relying on the kindness of friends is almost inevitably daunting, even frightening.

Some might shrug and assume that online-ordered supermarket fare will arrive from a truck as ever. But the reality of two-week-long waits for a delivery slot will come as another reminder of the simple and, at times like this, terrifying fragility of modern lives predicated on just-in-time and on-demand services.

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This isn’t (just) about brittle urban millennials who won’t cope if Amazon Prime can’t get them their plant-based dinner in the next three hours. In the past week, I’ve heard two friends, middle-aged London professionals, announce that they’re buying cars for the first time. Having relied on shops walking distance away and public transport, both have abruptly decided they need the ability to drive themselves and their families to, well, anywhere else if they needed to. Maybe all that stuff that Marie Kondo persuaded us to get rid of had uses — psychological and practical — after all.

The coronovirus has reminded such people of that fragility, the feeling of security that some of us have traded away for a convenience lifestyle. How else to explain panic-buying toilet paper and dry pasta? Narrowly speaking, such actions can be rational, but a better question to ask is more fundamental: why are they necessary?

Relying on just-in-time delivery along global supply-chains to feed and clothe and support us by buying little and often is a little bit like flying. It’s a huge source of freedom and progress, but also a risk to which we deliberately blind ourselves. For many people, the only way to be comfortable with sitting in a metal box full of highly-flammable fuel 30,000 feet above the earth is not to think about the incredible number of things that have to go exactly right to make it possible — and so about the things that could go wrong.

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This, of course, is speculation, but I think the psychological impact of our empty cupboards at a time of national trauma could just be a counterweight to the widely-observed idea that the virus will renew faith in the state. I think we may well emerge from this horror with a newfound tendency towards household resilience, to the minor but important feeling of self-sufficiency, of security, that comes with a cupboard full of food. Do not be surprised if the coronavirus eventually brings the shopping trolley trundling back into the heart of our national life.

Meanwhile, when (if) we ever get back to talking seriously about Britain’s post-EU political economy, I wonder if British farmers will find it just a little bit easier to see off the “Singapore” Brexiteers who wonder if we couldn’t do without them and just import more of what we eat. Of course we could, but could we ever feel comfortable doing so? I’d bet on shorter, stronger supply chains coming into fashion on the other side of the emergency.

And for Ms Kondo, perhaps a well-stocked house does not always spark joy but it does come in handy at times like these. Just as there are no atheists in a foxhole, there are no minimalists in a time of plague.

Early in 2007, as he prepared to replace Tony Blair, Brown made a trip to India to talk about its place in the world and its dealings with the UK. Brown being Brown, his starting point was big-picture economics and history, which is why he was talking about China.

Remember, this was 13 years ago. No one outside the telecoms sector had heard of Huawei. The coronavirus was years away. Xi Jinping wasn’t even a member of the Politburo Standing Committee. The world was waiting to see what China would become.

At this point, predictions that the BRIC group of emerging economies would attain global prominence were still novel, with India and China considered future superpowers. Somewhere in a chat with travelling reporters about the India trip, Brown was drawn into comparisons with China, which he (correctly) suggested would lead in economic growth.

But, someone asked him naively, what about democracy? A historian by training, Brown argued that over time, an ever-richer China would be “drawn into” the Western system of international trade and finance. That might not mean elected government in Beijing, but it would make China a relatively normal country to deal with, part of the club of developed nations in most important ways.

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The following year, as PM, Brown went to Beijing for the first of several visits, hailing the possibilities for mutual enrichment from UK-China trade. During the great financial crisis, Brown repeatedly tried to weld China into a new global architecture, hoping that its emerging economic might would help steady a Western order teetering under the weight of debt.

Brown was succeeded in No 10 by David Cameron. In his early days as PM, Cameron had a meeting the Dalai Lama, spiritual leader of the Tibetan people whose country China claims as its own. That 2012 meeting put UK-Chinese relations into deep freeze, and Cameron spent the next three years seeking a thaw. In 2015, he declared a “golden era” in Anglo-Sino relations, drank pints in a Buckinghamshire pub with a visiting Xi Jinping, and signed Britain up to the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. As an ex-PM, Cameron has spent some time trying (with, shall we say, mixed success) to establish a $1 billion UK-China investment fund.

This week, Boris Johnson decided to set aside warnings from American politicians and some of his own colleagues to allow Huawei, a Chinese telecoms firm, to help provide the country’s future telecoms network.
Brown, Cameron and Johnson are quite different politicians and very different characters. Yet all three have reached what is essentially the same view of China: engagement is in Britain’s interests.

My reason for starting with Brown’s prediction that China would gradually normalise in its dealings with the West is that this analysis underpinned a great deal of Western policy towards China in the past couple of decades. Consciously or otherwise, many of our leaders have dealt with China on the basis that working and trading with China is the best way to draw the Chinese into a world order that was largely built by Western nations over decades in which primacy flowed peacefully from Britain and its empire to the US.

That, I suggest, is quite a bet to make, possibly the biggest gamble of the post-Cold War era. And right now, it is not looking like a winning bet.

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China under Xi has largely defied those optimistic predictions about normalisation. Much of that is down to Xi himself, who has captured power within the Chinese Communist Party more comprehensively than most analysts expected. The Chinese system isn’t democratic but it is still intended to have checks and balances. Xi has largely set them aside and established a personality cult around his leadership.

Meanwhile, technological mastery has allowed China to expand state oversight and control to levels scarcely understood by many in the West. Far from moving towards Western norms, China has moved further away from them in the past decade. That smiling Chinese gentleman who cheerily supped a pint with David Cameron in The Plough near Princes Risborough is the near absolute-ruler of a regime that has imprisoned a million of its own people in re-education camps and controls the everyday lives of a billion more to an extent that actually deserves the over-used term “Orwellian”.

All of which rather raises the question: just who are we kidding when we think we have influence over China?

More importantly, the unspoken assumptions that “they” will become more like “us” have combined with distractions such as Brexit to obscure a more pertinent — and uncomfortable — question: how much influence does China have over Britain?

The Huawei decision has brought one bit of that iceberg-sized question into view, but much more lies unseen beneath the surface. The 5G network may be the technological sinews of a modern economy, but a modern Western democracy like Britain relies on other, more important, sorts of wiring too.

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One of the sinews of modern Britain is its education system, which does not just provide education but income and, sometimes, influence too.

Once upon a time, British leaders liked to think that education was a vital aspect of the country’s “soft power”, in part because by educating people from other countries who might use their education to achieve wealth and power at home, Britain was creating future allies and partners.

In 2014, for instance, a House of Lords select committee (chaired by Lord Howell, then father-in-law to Chancellor George Osborne) concluded: “The UK’s education sector is a major contributor to the UK’s soft power. Students returning to their home countries can be the UK’s “greatest ambassadors”.

If that view were correct, what would be the significance of recent figures showing that there are now more than 130,000 Chinese students at UK universities? They are the biggest non-EU group of students, and far more numerous than the 27,000 Indians studying here.

Chinese student numbers in the UK are up a third in five years. Has British soft power over China risen accordingly? Or have those rising numbers meant the precise opposite, that Chinese influence over Britain has grown?

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The Chinese student population of Britain is a significant contributor to the HE sector, paying much higher course fees than British peers. At some universities, one in ten undergraduates are from China and half of all students on some postgrad courses.

Analysis by Times Higher Education suggests that Chinese fees total £1.7 billion, around 5% of all university income. Some institutions derive more than 10% of their income from Chinese students.

Not long ago, the prevailing official view of such figures would have been either indifference or even mild celebration at significant export earnings and the scope for soft power projection via Chinese graduates of British institutions.

But slowly, that view is shifting. More British politicians are considering a simple fact about Chinese students: they are, by and large, in the UK at the whim of the Chinese government. Should Beijing decide to slow or even stop the flow of Chinese students — and thus, money — to British universities, what effect would that have on those universities? And what could or would the British government do in such a situation?

These questions should be central to British thinking about engagement with China, yet they have mostly been addressed by a few foreign policy specialists; the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee last year investigated Chinese influence over British universities. That is a good example of parliamentary scrutiny working well, but also one that raises questions about why what is essentially a matter of domestic policy (the integrity and autonomy of British institutions) was considered by a foreign affairs body. Doesn’t China’s potential sway over an important bit of Britain count as a domestic issue?

These questions are quietly troubling parts of the British intelligence community but not yet, by and large, MPs and peers.

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Huawei and, to a much lesser extent, the university issue has focused a few political minds on Chinese influence, but how many people in Parliament have looked in detail at the experience of Australia’s recent dealings with Xi’s China?

There obvious differences between Britain and Australia in a Chinese context: Australia is closer and more important to China, and home to a significant Chinese community. Yet the Australian experience of Chinese influence should still be studied more closely in the UK, and not just in the context of education. Australia’s universities are even more dependent on Chinese money than Britain’s, and face painful questions about whether they have allowed their teaching and research to be swayed in favour of Chinese interests. There are darker stories too, of academics who say things China doesn’t like facing abuse and of sensitive Australian scientific and technical research being used to enhance China’s domestic surveillance state.

There are also questions about Chinese interference in Australian politics and dramatic warnings from Australian spooks. Duncan Lewis, a former head of the Australian intelligence service, said in November that China is seeking to “take over” Australia’s political system through its “insidious” foreign interference operations.

Such warnings have, in turn, sparked active debate in Australia about whether it is racist to raise concerns about Chinese influence. If such concerns receive more attention in the UK, ask yourself what the way we conducted our national conversation about Brexit suggests about our ability to sensibly debate our relations with China.

Professor Kerry Brown of King’s College London, a leading China expert and a former British diplomat in Beijing, says Australia’s experience offers a clear lesson to Britain over China: “Ensure you know the tale that you want to tell about yourself before you dally with a country which will already be clear about the story that they have for you.”

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Do we have such a story? Or have we collectively undertaken a hugely significant set of interactions with an emerging global power without anything resembling a strategy?

Chinese money helps sustain British universities. Chinese technology will help sustain our telecoms networks. Chinese investment is flowing into London’s prime real estate market and commercial property too: much of Canary Wharf is Chinese-owned. So too are football clubs, wind farms, oil rigs and much else besides.

Gordon Brown had a point when he said that is a “huge opportunity” to be had in British engagement with China. But perhaps it’s not primarily an opportunity for Britain.

Sometimes the most important thing about these deals is that they’re bad choices by Chinese investors, who end up losing cash on failing British firms: Pizza Express, House of Fraser and Thomas Cook have all had Chinese investment. And in general terms, being open to international investment remains overwhelmingly beneficial to Britain.

But China is different. Despite those fond notions that it will become more “normal” and play by our rules, it is not doing so and shows no sign of doing so.

It is important not to overcook this analysis. Caveats abound when considering Chinese influence. First, all big countries want to influence other countries and there is nothing inherently wrong with that, though no other authoritarian state has the sheer clout of China. Second, China isn’t always very good at meddling and influencing: attempts to bend others to its will can and do backfire. Third, China has little to gain and much to lose by overdoing its influence work; things like the rule of law make countries like Britain and Australia wealthy states worth trading with — unravelling the deepest wiring of Western states would do little to benefit China.

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Fourth, and possibly most important, China’s actual aims via its influence policies are not wholly clear. Yes, some talk excitedly of Xi’s Chinese Dream amounting to a global vision but that does not mean China seeks global dominion. Strategic conflict between China and the West is possible in this century, but that does not mean it is inevitable.

And of course, the whole edifice could yet crumble: the party may lose its grip, demography, an environmental or health disaster, or some as yet unknown systemic threat could jam China’s economic engines.

But not yet. As things stand today, Xi’s China is attempting, with fair success, something that a Western worldview might consider impossible: achieving first-tier wealth for hundreds of millions of people without also granting them political freedom. And that wealth begets power and influence over others.

The three most important words in British politics in this century to date have been “Take Back Control” and our current national project is, in theory at least, dedicated to restoring the sovereign autonomy of the country, Britain’s elected leaders once again making the final decisions about things that affect Britain and the British.

Yet even as politicians have fixated on Brexit and Europe, they have — often without much reflection or debate — set the country on a course where some of the decisions that can affect Britain and the British will be made in China.

Those who spent time with Boris Johnson at the end of his premiership all reported that, whatever else was true of the man, he could always see the funny side. He might be watching a decade in office come to an end, but he still took a certain mordant pleasure in the fact that his undoing sprang from the victory that put him in power in the first place.

Some close aides even thought that the departing PM took real pleasure in his final days, settling down in his study — Dilyn wheezing away in the basket at his feet — to write two versions of the last speech he would give in the job. Someone else would lead his party into the 2029 election.

The first text set out the familiar argument, the one he’d made many times before, for accepting the new EW[1.  England/Wales]-US trade partnership. The other argued for rejecting the deal and the restrictions it would put on the nation’s ability to expand its trading relationship with China. “This great nation must always be free to chart its own course — even if some fresh Odysseus will now be steering the vessel,” that speech went.

Having finished both drafts, Johnson hauled himself to his feet, whistled Dilyn up for a last stroll around the garden and stepped out into the roasting sunshine of the summer of 2029 — yet again, the hottest on record. “Been a good run, eh boy?” he asked the dog as they went. “Now, which one of these should I give them?”

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The dog, as usual, said nothing, but everyone else seemed to have an opinion. The question, it was said over and over, was dividing the nation over its place in the world. But it would now fall to someone else to answer it.

Historians, of course, were divided on how good a run it really was. Politically, the Johnson Decade had been close to triumphant: two thumping election victories and something approaching a genuine realignment of the political system; the Conservative Party he left behind bore very little resemblance to the one he’d first joined in the Commons in 2001. It had even acquired a new name, albeit an informal one: the National Party.

On the debit side of Johnson’s historical record was the small matter of which nation that referred to. Since the referendum vote for Scottish independence in 2022, the name “United Kingdom” had been in question, even though the Scots hadn’t entirely left. Equally unfinished was the story of Northern Ireland, since 2026 part of the Irish Federation and subject to the “joint sovereignty” of London and Dublin.

Yet the voters of England had proved remarkably relaxed about the fragmentation of the UK, some reasoning that this was, after all, how democracy was supposed to work: they wanted to leave so they left. A few old-school Conservatives grieved their loss, but rather more of the party saw the departure of the Scots in particular as an electoral gift of epochal proportions.

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And indeed, it had looked for most of the Parliament that began in 2024 as if the Conservatives would canter to a third solid win; Johnson’s party had actually lost a few seats to Emily Thornberry’s Democratic Labour Party, though some of those gains were down to her deft absorption of the Liberal Democrats. As a result, Guildford, Esher and even the disgruntled of Tunbridge Wells had gone red.

Yet more than enough of the Tory gains of 2019 had stayed blue in 2024, even though — or perhaps because — the reasons they voted Conservative in 2019 had faded. “Get Brexit Done!” Johnson had said in 2019 and in a sense, he delivered handily. Less than two months later, the UK’s membership of the EU ended.

The policy wonks and a few independent-minded Conservatives at Westminster pointed out that “leaving” on January 31st was only the start of a new phase of EU wrangling, but not for the first time, they overlooked the retail politics.

Team Johnson managed Brexit Day with the same discipline they employed in 2016 and 2019. Across the country, EU flags were ceremonially hauled down from public buildings (many had only been flown there for the first time a few weeks before, but who notices such details?), Johnson’s face was everywhere under the slogan “Job Done”. The Red Arrows flew over Big Ben trailing red, white and blue smoke and no one was surprised when Downing Street issued instructions to all public buildings — schools, hospitals, council offices — to fly the Union flag for the rest of 2020. (Inevitably, some public bodies objected, generating the sort of attention-grabbing row that worked so well over that £350 million a week.)  And once Brexit was “done”, every poll showed the salience of the European issue dropping steadily. Of course, there remained a vast job to do on trade, but voters didn’t get excited about trade policy — for now, at least.

For the rest of the 2019-24 Parliament, Downing Street mercilessly hammered home the message that the PM was the man who had kept the political system’s promise to the electorate. In a world of spice and conmen, here was a reliable workman who delivered for “his” people and the places where they lived.

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Again, the wonks in the Westminster village said Johnson’s record on his primary challenge, narrowing the productivity gap between the south-east of England and the rest of the UK, was mixed. In his early days, he forced the Treasury to replace its “Green Book” rules that funneled public investment towards the south-east (because that’s where the biggest, quickest returns came) and cheerily borrowed billions to fund “quick win” transport upgrades (bypasses and bridges) that made driving around much of the Midlands and the North just a little more pleasant. Not transformative, perhaps, but was that surprising for a problem 50 years in the making?

Politically, Johnson surprised some by working well with Labour mayors in Manchester and Sheffield, inviting them to attend Cabinet committees as part of a strategy some likened to Gordon Brown’s “Government of All the Talents” schtick.

He even signaled he was prepared to talk about devolving more power to the English regions (“Every town should be a powerhouse”) but progress towards that goal was derailed by the Scots. They voted for independence by — what else? — 52% to 48%. For a time, the vote looked like capsizing the Johnson premiership, but his quick move to argue strongly that Scotland should not return MPs at the next general election framed the debate and captured the imagination of many of “his” voters.

At that election, the flag of St George was displayed at every Johnson rally. The man himself said he was “sad to see our Scottish friends go” but “determined to seize the opportunity to let England be heard properly at last”.

And, in an election that became a fight about who was best attuned to the English, Johnson vs Thornberry wasn’t really much of a contest. Newspaper columnists talking about “English nationalism” couldn’t dent the appeal of Johnson’s New Conservatives. The party won a higher share of the BAME vote than ever before, vindication for Johnson’s insistence that the election and the end of the Union were a chance to build a new idea of “England for all”.

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Having survived and even mastered such events, what could possibly bring down England’s champion?

The downfall, of course, had its roots in Brexit, and the trade freedom it delivered. Getting a really significant trade deal with the US became the prime focus of British trade and even foreign policy, but it did not come quickly. The re-elected President Trump, to the surprise of precisely no-one, proved less generous in negotiation than he had sounded before formal talks began. When Congress got involved, the talks got all the more painful.

And then, the real trouble started. The 2024 general election was followed by a more surprising outcome: the election of President Donald Trump — Jnr. And his running mate, Donald J Trump. Having failed to strike out the 22nd Amendment limiting a president to two terms, the Trumps decided to go around it, having noted that the amendment was, to say the least, ambiguous about what happens if a two-term president is then elected VP.

And the third act of the Trump drama shook the world, escalating the simmering trade war with China to boiling point. And that meant some harsh choices for US allies. As the younger Trump put to Johnson at a meeting in early 2028: “We’re in a fight and you’re either with us or against us.”

In practical terms, that eventually boiled down to a simple choice for Johnson and what remained of the UK: impose “punitive” tariffs on China, or accept that there would be no US trade deal and quite possibly no trade of any sort, since the US would apply tariffs to English goods and services.

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Given the scale of Chinese trade and investment with the UK by the later days of the 2020s, this was no small choice. A leaked UK Joint Intelligence Committee assessment that Chinese “non-state actors” acting at the direction of Beijing could “cripple” the UK’s communications network and wider economy “within 24 hours” sharpened the choice to a razor’s edge.

And this is how we leave Boris Johnson, preparing to end a decade in power with a bit of valedictory oratory on the parched yellow grass of Downing Street. The leader of a nation that was smaller yet prouder than when he found it, and about to make a choice he made possible: between two global trade superpowers for whom most voters held little affection. It is also a nation consumed with a new debate over the next question that followed from that harsh choice: whether or not to seek to rejoin the European Union.

“Glad some other bugger has to sort that one out,” the departing PM muttered to his faithful dog as they stepped out into the gardens.

In 2011, a junior Conservative MP published a pamphlet, The Case for Real Capitalism, which anatomised the failures that led to the global financial crisis and — by implication — the policy responses that followed. Jesse Norman had been elected for the first time the previous year, and no one took much notice of his work; but looking back, he may well be considered a prophet whose foresight ought to have been perceived by his own party.

If it had been, UK economic policy might have been more sustainable, British business and regulation more sensible, and society happier. Oh, and the Conservatives might not have taken the better part of a decade to wake up to some of the realities of markets, economics and politics that the new Boris Johnson government is starting to recognise.

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But back then, the Conservatives didn’t even have a majority — let alone a decisive one. Those were the days of the coalition, which saw regular disagreement between its Conservative and Lib Dem partners, not least about markets and their role. Vince Cable, the Lib Dem business secretary, was a bete noir for many Conservatives, because he articulated a sharp critique of capitalism. In the autumn of 2010, he enraged many “free market” Conservatives when he declared: “Capitalism takes no prisoners and kills competition where it can.”

Facing the coalition across the Commons was Ed Miliband. It’s strange to think now, in these post-Corbyn days, but Miliband was then regarded as a leftist intent on a radical break with economic consensus. Early in his leadership he said businesses could be divided into “predators” and “producers”, an analysis that again drew intense criticism from some Conservatives.

Yet in The Case for Real Capitalism, here was a Conservative author offering an assessment of the UK economic model that shared an awful lot with that of politicians his party scorned.

There were, and are, significant differences, of course. Whereas many on the Left regard an open market economy as inevitably unfair and unbalanced, Norman’s view was that capitalism in its pure form can deliver precisely the same harmony and balance that the Left associates with direct action and provision from the State.

“Capitalism relies on, and so demands, trust. It does not exist to make the rich rich,” Norman wrote, explaining how many Western versions of capitalism had gone badly astray, bereft of moral purpose, short on competition and heavy on rent-seeking incumbents. This, he said, was not real capitalism but “crony capitalism”: “Crony capitalism has two key features: business activity loses any relation to, and often clashes with, the wider public interest; and business merit is separated from business reward..”

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To read Norman’s words today, is to be struck by how familiar his criticisms and themes are. Eight years before the US Business Roundtable confirmed that even the almighty American CEO class sees capitalism in its current form as fraying its own “social licence”, Norman was itemising the “crisis of capitalism”.

A former BZW banker who later specialised in corporate governance, Norman wrote about the history of the public limited company.This is one of those subjects that appears arcane — and therefore only of interest to nerds like me — but it really is fundamental to any debate about capitalism, since it goes to the very basic question of what business is for.

As Norman remembered, the right to “incorporate” as a limited company — where the financial liabilities of owners are capped — was originally a privilege granted by Parliament, one which carried responsibilities and obligations: “Incorporation was a privilege that conferred economic benefits, and the purpose of the charter was to ensure that these benefits were in the sovereign’s, and later in the public, interest.”

Today’s companies are struggling to demonstrate “purpose” and explain how they are motivated by something wider and deeper than simply making money for their owners. In 2011, Norman was remembering a history that many are just learning now.

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In a similar vein, he locates executive pay in a social context: it’s not just about “what the market will bear” and it’s not a private matter between executives and owners. There is, if you’ll pardon the reference, a social aspect to the market for executives: “Pay is a litmus test of social norms, and excessive pay — the separation of business merit from business reward — is a hallmark of crony capitalism.”

Possibly Norman’s most prescient — and complex — observation was about the interaction between ideas of competition and community. Years before Amazon and Sports Direct stood accused of sucking the life out of provincial towns in order to cut the prices paid by consumers in richer places elsewhere, here was a Tory MP talking about community and culture being more important than aggregate national wealth:

“The official view of competition is a neoliberal one based on price competition and the possibility of market failure, conceived nationally. Among other things, this means that other social goals, and regional or local priorities, tend to be disregarded. Local democracy, and a community’s ability to shape its own culture, are relegated to the sidelines. Local shops are undermined by the big supermarkets, which have low prices at the till but impose significant external costs on the communities around them…. if culture matters, then local shops and services matter.”

Norman was a philosopher before ending up in the City, and his paper also reaches into the intellectual underpinnings of Conservatism. Correctly recalling that Margaret Thatcher was not the narrow neoliberal some now imagine her to have been, he points to a long tradition of Conservatives criticising unbridled markets and corporate excess — from Salisbury and Bonar Law to Macmillan’s The Middle Way.

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As the Johnson government explores a new variant of Conservatism that it hopes will retain the support of “new blue” voters — whose recent experience of British capitalism has not always been positive — many Conservatives will find themselves brushing up on, or just reading for the first time, such history.

As a non-partisan centrist and advocate of a rather different approach, I’ve been enjoying the recent spectacle of Tory free-marketeers rapidly trying to re-cast their belief in a small state and non-intervention as an abiding passion for higher public spending and ambitious industrial strategy. Welcome to the social market economy, chaps.

But if those chaps had listened a bit more to one of their own some years ago, they wouldn’t need to be undertaking such rapid political contortions today. The logic of Jesse Norman’s overall analysis of where Britain’s political economy stood at the start of the decade would have allowed the Conservatives to take a much shorter path to understanding the political economy — which many have only managed to do in the last few days.

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“We are well into the NASTY decade: Noxious Austerity Stretching Ten Years. It may not prove to be that long. But however long it is, the policy response to the UK’s current economic malaise cannot simply consist of measures to restore growth and battle deflation. Rather, the goal should be to wake up and smell the coffee: to address the economic realities of the 21st century by changing some of the key features of our market economy and, especially, our culture over time. We need, then, to do two things: to make the moral case for real capitalism, and take resolute and sustained action against crony capitalism.”

The need for a moral capitalism. Purpose-led business. Excoriation of “noxious” austerity. A focus on local economies and interests. All of these ideas are commonplace today; they are, if I can presume to say so, among the foundation stones on which UnHerd itself is built. But remember, The Case for Real Capitalism was published in 2011, when Jeremy Corbyn was an eccentric backbencher, place-blind technocrats dominated economic policy, and the word Brexit had not been coined.

Nevertheless, what makes Norman’s pamphlet so interesting and important is not its prescience; he was not, after all, the only person in British politics outlining such a critique of capitalism. What matters is that he was a Conservative making that critique — and more significant, still, is how his party responded to that critique. Norman was not penalised for his thinking, but nor was he properly rewarded with real influence. He eventually became a junior minister, and is now in the Treasury, still outside the Cabinet.

His work from 2011 should be recognised as significant, not because of the influence it had, then, but because of the influence it didn’t have. His party did not learn the lessons he offered, and paid the price in the years that followed. Yes, they’re still in office today and perhaps about to start addressing the questions of Norman asked then. But just imagine what might have been if they’d paid more attention to one of their own back then and got started on that work a lot sooner.

The key figures in the history lesson are none other than David Cameron and Ed Milliband.  From here, it looks as if history will remember Cameron as the gentleman amateur who bet  — and lost — Britain’s EU membership on his own charm, and Miliband — if it remembers him at all — as the Labour leader who buried Blairism and helped keep his party out of office for a decade.

In fact, both men did things in 2013 that tell us a lot about how the politics and economics of “Net Zero” would play out. Net Zero has, with remarkably little debate, moved from a fringe demand to a mainstream and almost universal political commitment. But the story of 2013 should raise questions about how durable the new consensus will be.

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Start with Cameron and his environmental journey. Possibly the first thing Cameron did as Conservative leader in opposition was go to the Arctic and pose with sledge-dogs. The hapless huskies were part of his “vote blue, go green” schtick, using environmentalism to “decontaminate” a Conservative brand that a certain T May had described as “nasty”. But that was 2006. What about 2013?

Well, 2013 was the year that a “senior Conservative source” told a couple of newspaper reporters over a nice lunch in Westminster that Prime Minister Cameron had given a clear order to his ministers regarding energy bills: “Get rid of all that green crap.”

To be clear, I was not one of the reporters at lunch that day, so I cannot swear to the accuracy of that quote. But I don’t know if anyone has asked Sir Michael Fallon, then the energy minister, where he was at the time that nice lunch was taking place; perhaps he has an alibi. Perhaps.

Anyway, let’s assume — and this isn’t much of a stretch, trust me — that Cameron had indeed said something about “green crap” to his colleagues. That remark signals the end of Cameron’s environmental journey — which covered a lot of ground, but came to its conclusion rapidly.

Back in the happy, almost innocent days of 2006, greenery was, Cameron fairly calculated, a nice-to-have add-on to a politician’s offer. Saying you cared about huskies and icecaps was a way to say you were generous and decent. And that was about it. Greenery didn’t obviously entail any actual policies that would directly affect voters’ lives.

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Of course, even before Cameron took office in 2010, he had started to learn that it wasn’t that simple. Greenery then meant onshore wind: turbines, often in places where Conservative voters really didn’t want them to be.

Still, that didn’t bother everyone. What bothered just about everyone in the early years of the decade was the cost of living: after the financial crisis, real wages were falling and household bills were political. Bills for things such as gas and electricity.

And one reason those bills were as high as they were was the range of environmental tariffs that the Cameron coalition and its Labour predecessor had added on. The rationale here had seemed clear enough: there were many things that governments wanted to achieve and someone had to pay for them. General taxation wasn’t an attractive option — initially too visible, and then simply impossible given the state of the public finances. So consumers had to foot the bill.

Or rather, the bills: the energy company obligation, to support energy efficiency in poorer households; the warm homes discount, meant to help with the costs of fuel bills, again for poorer households; the renewable obligation, the EU’s emissions trading scheme; the carbon price floor; the feed-in tariffs; the smart meters. All told, the Cameron government reckoned, they added £114 to the typical bill.

And in 2013, with people feeling the pinch, £114 was all it took to turn David Cameron, husky-hugging vote-blue go-green David Cameron, into a potty-mouthed pocket-book politician, intent on saving voters money not saving the planet.

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So the first part of the environmental policy lesson of 2013 is that green promises sound good when they’re first made, but sticking with them when they turn into financial pain for the electorate is far from easy. Remember Cameron’s “green crap” when you hear his successors talking about when they’ll take the country to Net Zero, and ask: who’s going to pay for that, and who’s going to tell them they’re going to pay?

The Miliband of 2013 completes the lesson about energy policy, populism and policy. At the Labour conference in September of that year, he announced that if he were made PM in 2015, he would enact a legal freeze on domestic energy prices.

For all the excitement the announcement caused — more on that in a moment — the plan wasn’t really so radical or startling. The year before, that notorious radical socialist Sir John Major had called for a windfall tax on the profits of the energy industry.

The Miliband promise caused something approaching chaos inside the Conservative Party. I was the Telegraph’s political editor at the time and at the Tory conference the following week I did my rounds of breakfasts, lunches, dinners and drinks with Cabinet ministers. I found precisely no unity on how to respond to the price freeze promise. Some were outraged by the idea of the state trying to “fix” markets. Some thought the energy firms were a bad advertisement for capitalism and making profits that were not economically justified. And some just thought the Miliband policy would be popular so the Tories should match it.

In the end, Cameron came out against a price freeze — it was simply not something a Conservative could ever do, he thought. But nothing is forever in politics, and less than four years later, another Conservative leader, May, decided that Toryism was flexible enough to accommodate a price cap for energy.

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Remember, in all this, that some of the bills Miliband — and May — promised to limit were driven upwards, in some part, by the environmental policies they pursued and decided that customers should fund.

The year 2013 matters so much because it offers several connected lessons for the politicians promising to lead us on the journey to Net Zero. The first is that few political promises survive first contact with voters’ falling incomes. The second is that if you’re going to do things that cost voters money, best to get their permission first — because they’ll find out in the end, and when they do, they won’t be happy. And the third is that anyone who hopes to rely politically on “market forces” to allocate the resources needed to address big issues like climate change is taking a very big gamble indeed.

Now that he’s settled into Downing Street for five years — or, who knows, 10 — it will fall to Boris Johnson to learn these lessons; getting to Net Zero by the middle of the decade will require the 2020s to be a decade of genuine transformation. So far on the environment, Johnson has belied the charges of cheap populism levelled at him elsewhere, sticking with Net Zero as a promised goal. But right now, the politics of the environment are still relatively easy: commit to a goal still many years away and if in doubt, talk about photogenic distractions like turtles and pangolins.

But if he goes the distance and approaches a decade in office, he will either have to find a way to solve the green political riddle that defied Cameron, or admit defeat, just as his old school chum did.

Whether people agree or disagree with that statement opens a window onto one of the issues that politics doesn’t talk about enough, yet which matters a great deal.

The politics of transgenderism are under-explored for several reasons. Politicians’ timidity in the face of activists’ ferocity is one big factor. But there’s another, revealed in today’s UnHerd Britain data — that it’s a fiendishly complex issue that doesn’t fit easily into the narratives and categories that structure so much of British political debate. Or at least, political debate at Westminster.

Even a quick glance at the results at the UnHerd Britain results shows how enthusiasm for, and scepticism about, teenagers being able to change their gender at will are not distributed along conventional party lines.

Yes, the places where there is greatest support for that opening statement lean to Labour: Bethnal Green and Bow, Islington South and Finsbury, Jeremy Corbyn’s Islington North. Here, well over half the respondents are happy for children to “self-identify” as male, female or something else. Fewer than one in five people express any doubts.

But look at the other end of the spectrum and you’ll find that some of the places where people are most sceptical are also solid Labour. In Doncaster North and Wansbeck in Northumberland, well over a third of people are not persuaded that children should choose their gender.

Tory seats split in a similar way. Chelsea and Fulham and the Cities of London and Westminster are near the top of the “agree” list, yet true blue places such as Buckingham and South West Surrey are among the most sceptical.

This probably helps to explain why neither party has found the trans issue a comfortable one to accommodate. Even though both Labour and Tory leaderships (at least, Theresa May’s) have in recent years enthusiastically embraced calls for self-ID, both parties have also faced significant internal resistance.

Among the most organised sceptics of trans orthodoxy have been women from the trade union movement, traditional left-wingers who set up the Woman’s Place UK campaign. They have been surprised to find themselves fighting on the same side as social conservatives; Tory David TC Davies has become an unlikely hero to some lifelong left-wing feminists because of his willingness to air their concerns about this issue in Parliament.

What, if anything, unites the places that share similar perspectives of transgender issues?

A superficial analysis would conclude that this is just part of the “anywheres vs somewheres” debate that is en vogue in parts of Westminster. That’s the same story that dominates a lot of Brexit analysis, where Remainers are all urban sophisticates and Leavers all nativists in bleak post-industrial backwaters. Yet just as Phillip Cowley and Rob Ford brilliantly showed on these pages recently, a closer look at the transgender polling shows this issue can’t be neatly slotted into the “rich liberal cities — poor conservative towns” template either.

Yes, scepticism about that gender question is strong in some places that really have been “left behind” — Clacton in Essex and Boston and Skegness in Lincolnshire are, among other things, physically isolated, as much by dismal transport connections as by geography.

But what about Wolverhampton South West, barely 20 miles from Birmingham, and the Selly Oak seat where support for gender change is substantially higher? Wansbeck can not easily be written off as a north-eastern throwback. The seat is centred on the relatively affluent market town of Morpeth, home to better-off Newcastle commuters. (I went to the town’s comprehensive school; it was hardly Brideshead Revisited, but nor was it a Geordie version of Deliverance.)

Meanwhile, South West Surrey and Bracknell are safely inside the (large, affluent) London commuter belt. Bracknell is barely 40 miles from central London; the train takes little more than an hour. These are not the “left behind” towns of metropolitan media imagination, but they have significant doubts about a change in social mores that some people living just a few miles ago might consider unquestionable.

For the most enthusiastic supporters of transgenderism, there can be “no debate” — accepting the fluidity of self-defined gender is a given, something that posterity will judge was both inevitable and enlightened.

Yet it’s striking that in only in seven of all the constituencies did a majority (more than 50%) agree with that opening statement; everywhere else, the majority either questioned a staple of trans orthodoxy, or expressed no view. Some in the “Neither” column will be wary of expressing a view, but most will not yet have engaged with the issue in depth.

“No debate”? This poll shows that the debate about gender in 21st Century Britain is not just unresolved. It has yet to even begin in earnest.

According to Ipsos Mori, Corbyn sets records for public disdain: 62% disapprove of his record and his net score is miserable -39. But Johnson is hardly the people’s darling: 44% give him an unfavourable rating and his net rating is also underwater, at -8.

Could it happen? Could they both lose — personally? By that I mean: could they both lose their Commons seats, sacked by their own former constituents? It is, of course, wildly unlikely, but this is 2019, and you know what that means about political probabilities.

***

It was shortly after 2am on 13 December that British politics opened the door to a new circle of hellish turmoil. After inspecting the piles of votes on the tables in Islington Town Hall, and accepting that the grinning Lib Dems weren’t bluffing, Jeremy Corbyn’s agent quietly confirmed to his candidate what they’d suspected for a few hours: “You’ve lost.”

To describe that loss — confirmed by the returning officer at 2.30am — as seismic was not hyperbole. When the Lib Dems announced they were pulling their campaigners out of Islington South to allow Emily Thornberry (“our fellow Remainer”) a clear run and focusing their fire on the Labour leader (“Since he won’t get off the fence on Brexit we’re going to knock him off,” said Jo Swinson), no one took them seriously. Yes, they’d won Islington in the (worthless) European elections, but Corbyn had held Islington North for 36 years, claiming almost 75% of the vote with a majority of more than 30,000.

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At best, the Lib Dem push against Corbyn was supposed to help Swinson rebut Tory claims that “a vote for the Lib Dems is a vote for Jeremy Corbyn in No 10”, allowing the Lib Dem press office to counter: “If we’re so cosy with Corbyn, why are we trying to decapitate him?” (The use of the word “decapitate” was of course deliberate bad taste to get the strategy more publicity. Successfully, as it turned out.)

And somehow, it worked. On a night when Kensington also turned yellow and Twitter blazed with the hashtag #RemainersRevenge, the Lib Dems leapt from barely 5% of the total to beat Corbyn by 195 votes.

At Conservative Campaign Headquarters, there was disbelief at the Corbyn result, but not outright jubilation. For one thing, the Lib Dem surge was much bigger than the campaign planners had expected, which was sending all the models haywire. CCHQ had, of course, been quietly resigned to a few Lib Dem seat gains (sorry, Zac) but the central forecast had suggested that a solid night for Swinson was actually a net positive for the Tories.

By drawing a good chunk of the Labour Remain vote away — but not enough to get near winning — the Lib Dems would help some Conservatives retain their seats in Remain-leaning southern parts. But the sort of earthquake that might topple Corbyn could change things in ways the Tory scenarios barely anticipated.

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Anyway, even as Tory officials tried to work out what the earthquake meant for them, an asteroid struck. The Prime Minister was in his car on his way to the seat for the Uxbridge and South Ruislip count when the call from the Tory agent came. It was short and bleak: “It’s going to happen.”

By the time Boris Johnson arrived at his own count, his team had told him to prepare for the worst. Despite all the CCHQ bombardment of the seat with online ads, despite all the pavement pounding by London Tories dragged in from across the capital, his majority of not much more than 5,000 had gone.

For that, Johnson could thank Donald Trump and that moment at the Nato summit when he put his arm around Johnson’s shoulders and declared: “Hey London, this is my guy, such a great guy. When he wins again, and he’s gonna win, win so big, we’re gonna do great things, maybe the best it’s ever been. He’s my guy and he’s gonna make Britain great again, just like we’ve done. Vote Boris, London, vote Boris.”

Those presidential words turbocharged the Uxbridge campaign of Labour’s Ali Milani. An army of students, youth campaigners, minor celebrities and one elegantly-dressed lady in dark glasses who said she was from “just outside Reading” all flocked to Uxbridge to urge residents to “stop Boris selling us out to Trump”.

On her regular visits, the lady from Reading proved especially good at persuading traditional Tories to switch sides, seeming to know just what made them tick. No one could quite put their finger on it, but she seemed quite familiar too, although as she wasn’t much for small talk or personal chitchat, no one ever found out her name.

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And so it was that as the sun, eventually, rose on Friday the 13th, Britain found itself in a new and — for once the word was justified — extraordinary new form of political chaos. With almost all the results in, the BBC exit poll said that the Tories would still be the biggest party, with 316 seats. (Just one less than Theresa May got in 2017, though no one could find her for comment.)

Despite that outlier in Uxbridge, Labour slumped and were projected to end up with just 230 seats, while the Lib Dems — who came close to beating Labour’s overall vote share — were forecast to have 39, behind the SNP on 44.

Though pundits, civil servants, voters and most MPs went into a turmoil of confusion and sometimes panic, the Labour team were relatively calm in those first hours — almost as if they’d been preparing for something like this. Just in time for the 7am bulletins, Labour’s John McDonnell spoke to TV reporters to set out what would happen next:

“Jeremy remains our leader. He was elected by our members and they want him to remain as our leader. He may have been cheated out of his seat by the Conservative media working hand-in-glove with the bankers in the City and MI5, but he remains the spiritual leader of the Labour movement, our moral guide. He has told me that he feels liberated from the confines of Parliament and will be spending his time among the people of Islington and this country, so that he can lead them from the places where they live and work.

“No, he won’t be speaking directly to the media today, or for the foreseeable future. What he’s doing now is much more important than that.

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“The party in parliament will be led by deputy leader, Rebecca Long-Bailey, who has asked me to serve as her chief of staff and representative in the talks that must start immediately about forming a progressive alliance government to lead a country that has decisively rejected Boris Johnson and Donald Trump’s Tories and which must now have a chance to have its say about the Tory Brexit plan too. When we form that government, Rebecca will be the Prime Minister, but she will govern in Jeremy Corbyn’s name and true to his ideals.”

On the Conservative side, there was no comparable statement or clarity. By 7.45am, no fewer than five people had suggested that they would now lead the Conservative government that would ask the Queen for a chance to demonstrate that it had the confidence of the Commons. Dominic Raab was first out of the blocks, quickly followed by Sajid Javid; neither even mentioned Johnson in their statements. Priti Patel did so, but mostly she talked about Margaret Thatcher.

David Davis surprised many people by convening a press conference where he talked about the SAS and being good in a crisis, concluding: “I am ready to serve again.” His moment was rather spoiled when TV gallery directors cut away from him, however, because at that exact moment Nigel Farage spoke to the cameras outside the Red Lion and revealed that he’d thought long and hard about it and was in fact willing to accept a peerage and the premiership for long enough to see Britain out of the EU without a deal at the end of January.

Financial markets were having none of it, however, and after initial panicked falls, the pound was rising sharply again as traders decided the turmoil meant no Brexit in January and quite possibly ever. They were encouraged in this by tweets from Guy Verhofstadt in Brussels suggesting that the EU27 should unilaterally suspend the Article 50 process.

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Of Johnson himself, there was no sign. He was still, technically at least, Prime Minister, and so remained shut up in Downing Street. The No 10 press office issued a brief statement saying that the PM was consulting officials and no further comment would be made. Off the record, Tory officials briefed journalists that the only conversation going on in No 10 was about how a minority Conservative government would reconvene Parliament and bring about an immediate dissolution with a new general election in January; Johnson would be a candidate, though they declined to say where. There was no question of changing the Brexit timetable, they insisted.

Yet equally, off-record, “sources” at Buckingham Palace insisted that the Queen was constitutionally bound to consider all the possibilities; officials were seeking an urgent conversation with Sir Graham Brady of the 1922 Committee to ask just who, if anyone, was actually Conservative Party leader at that moment.

In the Palace view, the possibilities to consider included Long-Bailey, Swinson and Nicola Sturgeon somehow assembling a government that could govern at least long enough to reset the Brexit process, most likely by way of a referendum but possibly by simply asking the EU to stop the clock. The only sad certainty was that the Monarch would not be making her annual New Year trip to Sandringham.

That was the state of play just after 8am when another snap dropped on the Press Association election wire, bringing one of the results that had been delayed due to ballot boxes being delayed when a van crashed on a slushy Scottish road. A split second later the news flashed up on phone screens across Westminster: “East Dunbartonshire: SNP GAIN…”