So far, more than £700,000 has been spent on the festival team’s staff costs, and there’s not even an agenda for the project. The festival’s boss, however, says the event will prove cynics wrong and bring the nation together with “a bit of joy and hope and happiness”. What exhibits could achieve that worthy aim? Our writers have a few suggestions…

Customs officials
Polly Mackenzie, Director of Demos

Our little islands have had customs officials for more than 1,000 years. Yes, we were pioneers in free trade, but we were pioneers in tariffs, taxes and tick-boxes long before. And now, thanks to Brexit, we are going to be hiring a new generation of customs officers — not least those needed to man a flotilla of boats in the Irish Sea to police our new internal trade border.

Customs officers are precisely the kind of people we should be celebrating in our Festival of Brexit, and not just because this vast make-work scheme could eradicate unemployment completely. Working at a customs post appears to be so catastrophically dull that it catalyses creative genius. An astonishing number of our greatest poets and writers worked in customs — more than enough to fill an exhibition hall: Robert Burns, Geoffrey Chaucer, William Congreve, Daniel Defoe, John Dryden, Thomas Paine, Adam Smith.

We will need to celebrate these people if we’re to have a hope of recruiting all the customs officers we need. We’ll call them national heroes, perhaps even name a new tariff after each one of them.

Suggested reading

How 'The Favourite' failed Queen Anne

By Polly Mackenzie

And let’s hope history will repeat itself. The bright young minds will rebel against the tedium of trade; I mean, can you imagine training your brain to differentiate between frozen and super-chilled garlic? Working up the energy to care about the percentage of non-domestic sugar permitted in an export under Rules of Origin restrictions?

In search of intellectual stimulation they will start to write. And thus, from the ranks of HM Revenue & Customs will emerge another explosion of literary talent and insight. Brexit Britain will be a nation of poets.

Ordinary people
Gareth Roberts, screenwriter

My exhibit for the Brexit Festival of Britain will be in honour of the British people that just get on with it without making an exhibition of themselves.

This was — well, within living memory — one of this country’s proudest characteristics, though of course if anybody actually said they were proud of it (or anything else) they were quickly frowned or mocked back into silence, with a healthy dose of “And who does he think he is?”

It sometimes feels today that everybody, everywhere, every day is more in the business of telling you what it is they’re going to do and why they’re going to do it, rather than actually doing it. Mission statements, company ‘values’, businesses and cultural ventures that come on like trailers — still to come, coming up, coming soon, watch out for … Brexit is the archetypal example. Endless talking, no doing. A DVD that’s all special features, but no film.

More from this author

A vision of Britain's polarised future

By Daniel Kalder

Almost everything now comes with a showboating personal angle and a story, more often than not of the sob genre. From TV quiz shows to silly songs, heralded as if they were the living end. It’s rare to pick up so much as a bloody yoghurt without reading the inspirational story behind it. It strikes me that a core British characteristic was not drawing attention to yourself, and turning in the best you can because that’s what you’re tacitly expected to do. If you don’t, be assured that someone will soon make you aware of it, in true British style.

What must ordinary people think of all this announcing and presenting? Let’s exhibit a harried parent readying their kids to be washed, dressed, packed and breakfasted before half past seven in the morning. They don’t have the urge or the time to proclaim, “I’m passionate about using my unique skill set to empower my children, and to optimise solutions according to this family’s values of equality and inclusivity. A lot done, a lot still to do.” No, they just do it, and nobody thanks them for it. Let’s thank them.

An igloo of Brexit 50p coins
Sam Leith, author of ‘Write to the Point: How to Be Clear, Correct and Persuasive on the Page’

The Festival is a perfect opportunity to take stock of all the benefits that our departure from the European Union will have brought us by then. And what better, and more sustainable, way to do this than to make use of all those Brexit 50ps that were minted to commemorate our freedom? A thousand were minted for March 31, and put on ice when it didn’t happen. An unspecified number were produced for October 31, when Brexit also didn’t happen. Rather than melt them down — as is now apparently threatened — we should use them in a historical display.

We should weld them together into an igloo-like structure, across which would be blazoned the slogan on each coin — “Peace, prosperity and friendship with all nations” — and into which visitors would be invited to stroll. Inside, a constantly updated digital graph would indicate the current price to collectors of one of these commemorative coins; alongside the value of an ordinary 50p coin tabulated against the currencies of all those other nations with whom we are friends, tracked right back to the date of our final departure from the Union.

At a glance, you’ll be able to see how many dollars or Euros your 50p will buy you at that moment, and how it has soared from the dog-days of our vassalage. Around this chamber, played on a loop, will be the ringing patriotic words of Harold Wilson’s “the pound in your pocket” speech — showing that Brexit will have represented not a break with the past, but a glorious continuation of Britain’s bulldog spirit.

Dogs 
Simon Evans, comedian and radio presenter

I thought long and hard about the ideal exhibit, but there’s only one real choice. Dogs.

Dogs are of course not merely the best of British, but the best of humanity. And mankind’s domestication of the wolf — and vice versa — is an achievement lost so far back in prehistory that it would be futile for the most chauvinistic of Brits to claim it as our own. We may have our suspicions, but only that.

But still, our relationship with dogs is singular, and characteristic, even to the point of puzzling other nations. The respect in which dogs are held, as well as the affection. No Brit can sleep happily if they can hear the barking of dogs, chained up outside all night on concrete — as common and commonly ignored in other nations as car alarms are in Chelsea.

More from this author

Will our Brexit conflict ever be resolved?

By Giles Fraser

This love transcends gender, age and class. But it is perhaps most keenly felt for working dogs. Surely the most British TV series ever made — can it possibly have even been broadcast overseas? — was One Man and His Dog. An entire show dedicated to sheep dog trials.

Other nations would perhaps nod at that and assume that certain guilty dogs were to be subjected to justice. But we got it. Nor was this a one off, a novelty. It ran for 25 series. At its peak, presented by Phil Drabble, it attracted audiences of more than eight million viewers. My favourite moment came when Drabble asked a shepherd how he communicated so effectively with his border collie when the howling gale surely defeated his shouts and whistles. “Well,” mused the grizzled old fella, “I suppose I just thinks him across.” Drabble simply nodded. He knew.

I could point out that the nation’s love for the glorious variety of breeds suggests that we don’t really have the problem with diversity that those who would denounce Brexit would have you believe. But really, that reads like a rather snippy and defensive point, and this is after all a celebration. And as every proper family in the country knows, it’s not a celebration without the dogs.

A Memorial to the Unknown Remainer
Simon Heffer, writer and historian

A post-Brexit Festival of Britain should emulate the 1951 event — by showcasing British exceptionalism. We are punch drunk from assertions that decline, poverty and misery are the inevitable handmaidens of leaving the European Union. A tonic reminding us of how successful and inventive Britons are is just what is required. After all, the Briton who invented the medium that has recently revolutionised the world — the World Wide Web — is still very much alive, and the rest of us are not dead yet.

So let’s have a display of the fine things we produce and that the world beyond Europe wants, from Rolls-Royces to gin to Tiptree jam. Let’s celebrate our great universities, which are the best in Europe and not only produce the thinkers, entrepreneurs and inventors of the future, but attract students from all over the world. And we can’t demonstrate British exceptionalism without some representation of our financial services industry, which makes, and will continue to make, most of our money — perhaps a barrow-boy boozing champagne.

Despite the current little local difficulties in her family, the Queen remains the ultimate symbol of our exceptionalism: nearly 68 years on the throne, in her 94^th year and still doing a full-time job with no thought of ‘stepping back’. She, her family and all that goes with them also earn a fortune for the country through the huge amounts of tourism they help engender.

But the Brexit Festival must also seek to heal the wounds of the past four years. So somewhere in the show there needs to be the Memorial to the Unknown Remainer, if only to remind us of the perils of trying to ignore that other fine British tradition largely unknown in Brussels, democracy. And it should bear a strong resemblance to Jo Swinson.

Morrissey on a loop
Fiona Sturges, writer and columnist

As surely as night follows day, where there is a celebration of all things British, there will be terrible pop music. Remember Brian May swathed in dry ice on the roof of Buckingham Palace during the Queen’s Golden Jubilee shindig? Or Russell Brand honking his way through “I Am the Walrus” in 2012 at the Olympic Closing Ceremony? A Festival of Brexit featuring flatulently self-admiring performers long past their prime is precisely what the country needs — no, deserves! — in 2022, and there could no better headliner than that bastion of isolationism and self-loathing, Morrissey.

Along with a heartfelt cover of “The White Cliffs of Dover”, there will be aptly-titled classics from The Smiths’ canon including “Barbarism Begins at Home”, “Nowhere Fast” and “I Know It’s Over.” Backing vocals will be provided by Ringo Starr and The Who’s Roger Daltrey.  As is customary for outdoor musical events, the sound will be dreadful, the queues for the bar will stretch over the horizon and the toilets will be flooded by teatime.

It will be glorious paean to the Blitz spirit and a fitting tribute to our freshly liberated isle.

Driverless buses
Peter Franklin, associate editor of UnHerd

First of all, think 1851 not 1951 — the Great Exhibition, not the Festival of Britain. Spend and build accordingly, except don’t do it in London. Pick somewhere up North. York, for instance — the tourists will love it.

Before deciding what to put inside the new Crystal Palace we need to work out how to get visitors to and around the exhibition. If we want to provide a vision of the future, without waiting 10 or 20 years to build a tram network or something like that, then there’s an obvious candidate: driverless buses.

Suggested reading

Who'll have the guts to ban cars from our cities?

By Peter Franklin

For reasons I explain here, this is the technology with the greatest potential to revolutionise public transport. And, yes, such vehicles do actually exist — in fact they’re already being trialled in the UK. An event with millions of visitors is an ideal opportunity to launch a grand effort to get us out of our cars and into faster, cleaner, safer, more accessible modes of transport — not least in the traffic-choked urban North.

If 2022 is too early to pull off a major demonstration project, then let’s wait a few more years — it’ll take that long to construct an exhibition space worth having anyway.

The 21st century Great Exhibition should be where Brexit Britain shows off a new direction to the world — and the show should start from the moment that visitors step off the train.

An exhibition of the Brexit Wars
Ed West, deputy editor of UnHerd

Brexit is a fitting occasion for a national exhibition; the first ever such event in history, the Exposition des produits de l’industrie française, was a product of another great break with the past — the French Revolution. And that all ended well.

Brexit hasn’t led to mass guillotining or civil war, but it has caused a sort of collective mental breakdown. To commemorate this, perhaps we could host a special Interactive Exhibition of the Brexit Wars (2016-20forever) like the Imperial War Museum had the Trench experience. Visitors walk into a cavernous dark room and on the wall are projected giant images of Femi, Mark Francois, Aaron Banks, Gina Miller, Stop Brexit Man, Jolyon Maugham etc. etc. — all those people we might cheerfully have gone through our lives having never heard of if the referendum hadn’t happened.

Visitors might gasp at a mosaic featuring millions of tweets by academics telling us that Britain is literally heading for fascism; by Brits on the continent posting sadface pics of themselves enjoying their last holiday as Europeans; or high-status actors and musicians reminding us what a small, rainy and insignificant island we are; and people — fully grown adults often in positions of authority — telling us how they’re never going to talk to a relative because they voted Leave.

They could also project a selection of those charts Carole Cadwalladr is fond of, showing the web of secret and shadowy interest groups behind the Brexit vote, and New York Times articles reporting how English people want their empire back because that’s all everyone talks about here!

This part of the festival will be paid for by the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Continental food
Marie Le Conte, author of ‘Haven’t you Heard: Gossip, Power and How Politics Really Works’

The mere idea of a Festival of Brexit, intended to showcase what the United Kingdom does best, will feel a bit silly to anyone who has had to endure the past few years of Brexit hell. It doesn’t really matter where you stand on the issue; if there is one thing we can all agree on, it is that Brexit has shown that we cannot agree on anything.

But let’s embrace it. If there is anything I hope to see there in 2022, it is a strong European presence. No, really.

I would like to see a stall selling fresh Polish pierogi, with onions and sour cream, and another one selling Portuguese pasteis de nata. In fact, a whole corner of it should be dedicated to produce from the European Union.

After all, we can only hope that by 2022, our own Brexit psychodrama will have subsided, and we should by then be attempting to mend our relationship with the continent. As Boris Johnson himself mentioned in his speech to conference last year — to awkward silence from the audience — Britain will not be turning its back on Europe entirely.

In fact, it intends to remain a friendly neighbour, and is there any better way to show friendship than by sharing food? The stalls could also be manned by European citizens still living here. They have made their life in this country and deserve to be a part of it.

In years to come, Britain will have to figure out where it wants to stand in the world, but whatever happens, it cannot stand alone; a bit of camembert won’t provide all the answers,  but it would be a start.

The ghosts of local newspapers
Jenny McCartney, journalist and novelist

One stall at the 2022 Festival of Great Britain and Northern Ireland should be a largely commemorative one, adorned with yellowing pictures and reports of smiling couples celebrating their 50^th wedding anniversaries, schoolchildren excelling in various academic and sporting endeavours, local fetes, dance competitions, and outrage at the closure of public services. It would be in memory of all the local newspapers that have closed in the 21^st century (according to Press Gazette, there was a net loss of 245 local UK newspapers in the years between 2005 and the end of 2018).

Many larger regional papers still exist, of course — and in recent years have yet again proved their worth with some brilliant reporting and investigations — but in general the local newspaper is in sharp decline, and as a result much of the connective tissue of our body politic has withered away. Smaller local newspapers were in the main a civilising, uniting influence which gradually made different elements of any community — including recent arrivals — knowable to one another around a shared sense of place.

Unlike memes and rumours on social media, they were also highly accountable to their readers. Their disappearance has often left the workings of local government unexamined, important local events unpublicised, and the successes of businesses, individuals and schoolchildren uncelebrated. Is it any coincidence that, as so many have closed down, we have seen the rapid rise of ‘fake news’ and the growing estrangement — particularly outside London — of ordinary people from decisions of government?

There have been some efforts to plug the information gap — in particular the BBC’s funding for 150 reporters under the Local Democracy Reporting Service — but it will be difficult to revive the newspapers we have lost in print form.

Digital local news is another matter, and perhaps festival-goers could be encouraged to donate a few pounds to help local websites expand and thrive. Or maybe a chunk of festival funding itself could flow there, to help forge closer, more confident communities in the future. The playwright Arthur Miller once defined a good newspaper as ‘a nation talking to itself’. With the creeping extinction of our local newspapers, our increasingly angry, divided country has been showing just what happens when the talking stops.

Save the money and go to the pub
Giles Fraser, associate editor of UnHerd and Rector at St Mary’s, Newington

The Festival of Brexit is a nauseating idea, a pathetic thumb nose to the 48%, and the very opposite of the sort of Festival of National Togetherness that is precisely what we need after nearly four years of bruising self-laceration.

After the English Civil war, the Church of England reinvented itself as the big tent, a space where people could come together in the pews and put their bloody ideological differences behind them. That’s why the Church of England isn’t big on doctrine — for it was doctrinal differences that split families and set communities at war with each other.

Turning pikestaffs into ploughshares, the Church of England surrendered its theological intensity and transformed itself into the well-meaning community organisers of modern ridicule. The limp handshake and homoeopathic levels of conviction were a price worth paying to bring the country back together. OK, many were still excluded from this Big Tent philosophy — but the basic point that divisive convictions can be traded in for peace was to set the tone for generations to come.

Burke put this especially well when he writes about maintaining ideological truth: “Perhaps truth may be far better [than peace]. But as we have scarcely ever the same certainly in the one that we have in the other, I would, unless the truth were evident indeed, hold fast to peace, which has in her company charity, the highest of virtues.”

The parish church was one place where this was supposed to take place. So too the local pub. So Boris — here is a very Boris thing to do: instead of wasting all that money on some ghastly monument to victor’s justice, why not give us all a few quid to take someone from the opposition down to the local boozer. We need to remind ourselves what we have in common. It’s time to make up.

With that in mind, we’ve asked a number of commentators and contributors to suggests what the party could do to reverse the problem.

Guaranteed home ownership
Peter Franklin, Associated Editor, UnHerd 
@Peterfranklin_

Housing isn’t the only reason for the great generational divide in politics, but it is a huge one, and something the Government can do something about. When your most vivid experience of capitalism is paying half or more of your salary to a private landlord every month, Corbynism doesn’t seem so bad.

The Conservative manifesto should have offered hope for change, but didn’t, but is there anything the Conservatives could offer that Labour couldn’t outflank by promising to spend another zillion pounds on it? Yes. Labour wants us to be tenants of the state — the last thing that socialists want is a surge of home ownership among younger voters. So Conservatives should guarantee an affordable home for every 25 to 50 year old with a record of regular employment.

But how? “Just build more houses” won’t work. The big developers have easily enough planning permissions to build all the houses they want — i.e. not enough to threaten their profits on land speculation. It’s time to break their oligopoly.

Communities should be empowered to purchase land at agricultural-use values and systematically prepare the sites for development. Each plot could be secured without having to fund a lottery win for some lucky landowner; builders would compete on the basis of efficiency and quality, not privileged influence over the planning system, thus bringing down construction costs as well as land costs. Therefore, homes could be offered at a price well below market levels.

Needless to say, private landlords, second homeowners and all absentee property investors would be excluded; meanwhile, local people and first-time buyers would be given priority. The catch for purchasers is that the terms on which they bought their homes would also apply when re-selling them. So, no windfall profits for them either.

Is this capitalism? Perhaps not, but it isn’t socialism either. Rather, it’s a vision for an inclusive, property-owning democracy, and the Conservatives should embrace it — before it’s too late.

Become the women’s party again
Zoe Strimpel, historian and writer

Between the authoritarian narcissism of the new Left and the shrill nastiness of the alt-Right there is a large hole in the market for a decent, principled Tory party. But winning over the young will require more than lame slogans; it will mean reinstating classical liberalism where it belongs at the heart of the Conservative Party. Here are some ways it can honour these — and seduce the young:

Firstly, it should show proper engagement with gender issues, and particularly women’s health. The Tory Party is, contrary to its reputation, the party of women — from the enormously influential mixed-gender Primrose League in 1885 to its two lady PMs, both of whom respected abortion rights.

It should take bold stances on women’s reproductive health and freedom. This means affirming commitment to the abortion time limit at 24 weeks, making it easier to have an abortion by funding more clinics (current wait-times can be traumatic); radically cutting the price of the morning-after pill to £5 (it’s currently £15-£35), and injecting cash into rape crisis centres. Rape crisis provision rose by 9% in 2018 (under Tory governance), but 6,000 victims, including 172 children, were still on waiting lists for help by the end of March this year. Young people, with #MeToo on their mind, care deeply about this.

An entrepreneurial and rich society is not hamstrung by helping the destitute — it’s strengthened by doing so. The Tories should demonstrate seriousness about helping those most in need by injecting mega-cash into tackling homelessness; it’s not just London Lefties who see the tragic increase in people living on the streets and think the Tories will make it even worse. It does not have to be that way.

Classical liberals — aka the best Tories — understand the importance of free speech and freedom in artistic creation and have watched their erosion with horror. Instead of railing at the warriors of woke (epitomised by “millennial snowflakes”), the Tories need to come up with an audacious and positive commitment to free speech.

They should establish a body that oversees the funding of a protected space for arts and institutional life that is completely free of the constraints of PC police. The free speech body should also closely monitor infringements. Thanks to schemes such as “decolonise the curriculum”, inclusion policies and safe space marshalling, universities are particularly stuffed with those who infringe free speech rights — of students, fellow staff and visitors — and those who do so should feel the consequences.

Finally, the Tories should commit to simple, effective schemes that encourage and reward commercial inventiveness and ambition, through a mixture of well-publicised tax breaks, prestigious training schemes and awards.

Suggested reading

Why the young are falling out of love with sex

By Zoe Strimpel

Don’t make the young pay for the old
Mary Harrington, UnHerd columnist
@moveincircles

The Tories should stop treating young people like idiots and tackle some issues head on: the ageing population, the housing crisis, the funding gap in health and social care, and the state of the public finances.

A bold approach would be a “social solidarity bonus”, based on a presumption that if the next generation wishes to inherit a nest egg from granny’s property and assets after she dies, then they cannot simply expect the state to stump up the cost of caring for her as she gets older and frailer.

I am talking, of course, about the “dementia tax”, the much-reviled attempt in Theresa May’s 2017 manifesto to grasp the nettle of the growing adult social care funding gap, by proposing that the value of a pensioner’s home should be included in an assessment of their assets when providing home-based care. At present this is only the case when someone moves into residential care.

To be an authentically conservative policy, the presumption behind the social solidarity bonus should be that families are both able and willing to put effort into caring for one another, rather than relying on the state. And further, that if they do so they should be free to inherit from the older generation without the Exchequer helping itself too liberally to the legacy.

The “dementia tax” should be seen as a last resort: a levy on those who will not meet their obligations. Why should the middle-aged pocket the sale value of granny’s house after she dies while allowing the state to bear the cost of caring for her up to that point?

To support the social solidarity bonus, new incentives could encourage families to upsize to a property large enough to have room for granny — perhaps a relaxation of the tax rules around gifts and inheritance tax, or even grants towards moving house, or stamp duty relief on house sales and purchases. In exchange, families would have to be willing to shoulder more of the obligations of social care.

The move toward multigenerational households would free up the housing market and create opportunities for multi-family households to share costs, resources and communal life — even childcare — freeing up smaller properties and providing a leg up to young people struggling to meet the cost of living and save enough to get onto the housing ladder themselves. It would also help to address the widespread problem of loneliness among the elderly, as it became more commonplace for older people to live in households that also contained children.

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Who gains from the great university scam?

By Mary Harrington

Rescue our towns
Sebastian Giraud, UnHerd contributor and politico
@sebastiangiraud

Go to almost any middle-sized town the length and breadth of the country and the same scene will greet you: dilapidated bus shelters, abandoned paint-flicked shops, a broken window or two and the obligatory betting shop. Regardless how hard small shopkeepers sweat away, making their corner as enticing as possible to those passers-by, they know as well as anyone that they’re up against the app that delivers tomorrow, or the “experience” of a trip to the nearest city centre where everything is manicured, perfumed and glossed to perfection.

What sort of message does it give those young people as they start thinking about what life has in store, that capitalism, the council, those big companies or whoever has hollowed out the heart of their community? That there are more shops that used to be something, and that the only places that seem worth popping into are those that will take your money in exchange for a pint or a betting slip?

No government of any hue have adequately tried to prioritise or grapple with this issue of dilapidated high streets. It is one that urgently needs addressing to prevent the tide of talent scurrying off to large cities, preserve local culture and identity and give every community and the young people that live there a sense of hope and possibility.

This is a natural issue that speaks to the core of Conservative values and an issue the Tories have a real chance to grasp and tackle, and so win the respect of a whole new generation of voter. What is more enterprising than providing bursaries for a young person with an idea to stay within their community to start their business, or providing an incentive for entrepreneurs to take a shop that needs some extra work, rather than the fancier one down the road?

Rather than give unquestioned tax relief for the landlords of empty premises sat waiting for the tides to change, it should be conditional on their shopfronts being presentable and useful to the community: who knows, it may even encourage someone to rent it, or even better, choose to turn it back into a home.

Bring down the barriers
Rakib Ehsan, Research fellow on radicalisation and integration
@rakibehsan

As a millennial, anti-racist trade unionist who could never vote for the current Labour Party but will not opt for the Conservatives this time either, I would suggest a number of steps the Tories could take in increasing their appeal to younger sections of the British electorate.

For all the love I have for my country, I am firmly of the view that the British promise of meritocracy and equality of opportunity is nothing but a distant dream. The UK labour market continues to be plagued by racial and ethnic penalties, and a recent study by the Centre for Social Investigation at Nuffield College found that British blacks and South Asians continued to face labour market discrimination at levels unchanged since the late 1960s.

Fighting this should not be seen as caving into leftist identity politics — it should be seen as a vital pursuit in the name of ensuring a more meritocratic allocation of rewards and opportunities in British society. The Tories should also be more honest over the implications of cuts made to legal aid, and the broader tightening of access to employment tribunals.

A British Conservative Party which seeks to rebalance labour-market relations more in favour of the worker, and is relentless in its pursuit of equality of opportunity, could make some headway with younger voters. It must acknowledge that barriers to upward mobility based on social class continue to persist — and thinking so does not make one a grievance-filled Marxist.

The Conservative Party must show that it is serious about providing a fair and meritocratic system which enables young people to maximise their potential. A party which will invest in technical colleges, as well as offering maintenance grants for talented students from deprived backgrounds. Along with ensuring that public services are well-funded, it must also better support the training of future domestic medical staff and social carers.

Help students get out of debt
Danielle Boxall, UnHerd AudioVisual Producer
@DanniBoxall

Labour captured the student vote in 2017 with its free tuition policy, and promise to wipe all student debt, while the Lib Dems, once the party of students, have never recovered from the coalition’s raising of fees and Nick Clegg’s “Sorry” video (and its subsequent parodies).

Since fees were raised in 2012, graduates in work have been paying the price for their degree with a loan of around £50,000. And that loan is increasing, at a top rate of 6.3% this year, all because the loan now bases inflation against the outdated RPI, making it more expensive than a mortgage — but good luck getting one of those!

It is a completely un-Conservative policy. The debt is building up faster than students can pay it back, and interest is even piled on during the years of study, when students have no means of paying back. Over the years it accrues, and working graduates pay back hundreds of thousands in their lifetime, disincentivising the ambitious young people the party should be aiming to attract. Only the top 17% of earners clear the debt before the 30-year cut off, meaning taxpayers bear the cost of 47% of it. So much for the party of low tax.

In their manifesto, the Tories said they would “look at the interest rates on loan repayments with a view to reducing the burden of debt”. With mass spending already committed to, why won’t the party go one further and finally move over to the Consumer Price Index (CPI), and save graduates up to £16,000 in debt?

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Pity the poor avocado-eating graduates

By Mary Harrington

Tackle the Gig Economy
James Billot, UnHerd trainee
@james_billot

A Conservative Government could work to restore its business-friendly credentials by focusing minds on the UK’s rapidly expanding gig economy. Around two-thirds of the country’s 4.7 million gig workers are aged 16-34, making it an attractive sector for the Tories to make inroads.

They should start by enacting the The Good Work Plan. So far, the government has been sluggish in implementing some of its proposals and even watered down parts of it. In other areas, the Plan does not go far enough. For instance, the right for workers to request predictable hours after 26 weeks of service can, as the TUC notes, be swatted away by their employer. The Tories should introduce a right, not merely a request, for workers at large companies to have predictable hours after the same time period.

So far, so Labour. But where the Tories can distinguish themselves is in creating the conditions for small business to thrive in the gig economy. This is not a dog whistle for banning Uber or Deliveroo, but more needs to be done to tackle platform monopolies that dominate certain industries in this sector. By exploiting network effects, these large companies stifle competition through aggressive price cutting and prevent new entrants from entering the market.

The Tories should use Brexit to update and modernise the 1998 Competition Act, which would prevent excessive concentration in the shared economy and allow smaller companies to challenge the big beasts.

Like it or not, the gig economy has been woven into the fabric of modern working life. As it expands, the Tories cannot afford to be sluggish in dealing with its adverse effects (endless “consultations” won’t cut it) while harnessing its potential. Strategically, it makes sense too: young, urban voters are hardly a demographic that the Tories over-perform in.

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The exploited underclass is revolting

By James Bloodworth

Save the cost of tuition fees
Ben Sixsmith, writer
@BDSixsmith

You can explain to young people that more and more students entering higher education means that it will be more and more expensive. You can explain to them that people who struggled to find good careers after entering the workforce had no immediate obligation to clear their debts. It will make no difference. The plain truth is that, however reasonable a Conservative might have thought it was to raise fees, young people saw and will always see the demand to pay for their tuition as a demand to pay for something that others had for free.

Fortunately, there is a response: you don’t have to pay it, you don’t even have to go to university! The preposterous inflation of the university system, egged on by a gurning Tony Blair, encouraged the rise of credentialism and, thus, an artificial need for a degree which might have been acquired by means which had little to no inherent worth in terms of education and personal development.

Let’s cut our higher education system down to size. People can save time and money, and will not be forced to wallow in student grievances and fears for their adulthood. Give them work experience! Give them work! Hell, give them a few grand and a gap year. Universities are an essential asset for civilisations, but so is the Armed Forces and we don’t demand that everyone join that.

After 30 years in Parliament it is a wrench to be standing down. Sadly, I leave with the House of Commons devalued as an elected chamber and with the image of politicians in general never lower.

I have served under four Speakers, of whom Bercow was most definitely the worst. His love of his own voice, his deliberate attempts to humiliate individual MPs and his bias on EU issues — his foibles are all significantly to blame for the shambles of this Parliament.

I very much hope that our new speaker will be genuinely fair-minded — someone with no favourites, no personal vanity and no wish to be the story. This will help the House of Commons revert to a place where politeness, even in the midst of huge differences, rules.

I believe that ‘modernisation’ moves — such as allowing children in the chamber and voting lobbies, lowering of dress standards, and clapping — have all contributed to the feeling that the Commons is not a workplace but a showground. New MPs need to remember that the traditions in the Commons had a reason for lasting so long. While I don’t expect all the changes to be reversed, it will be up to Speaker Hoyle to look again and exert his own influence. I hope he does.

Move Parliament to Milton Keynes
Philippa Perry, psychotherapist

I think our present system needs to change to something more like jury service, because egos have no place in Parliament. At the very least Parliament could move to Milton Keynes as a deterrent to narcissists.

Our trouble is that the more we appear to be hurtling into crisis, the more the electorate craves certainty. We may mistakenly think we need a bish-bash-bosh approach, and someone to blame. Needing a scapegoat is our most brutal trait, as blame turns to hate and the urge to purge and annihilate.

Let’s have neither rich against poor, nor poor against rich, nor tribe against tribe. We need, more than anything, kindness. To bring the greatest happiness to the greatest number is a tall order, but we could try to bring the greatest kindness to everyone. We could thank the rich for their tax contributions rather than grab it, and use the money to house, tend and feed us all. Let us extend that kindness to the planet.

We can start by being as understanding and kind to our children as possible. Kindness is what they will learn and pass on in their turn.

End anonymous communication
James Kirkup, Director of the Social Market Foundation

If you want to make the experience of being a politician more bearable, ensure that people can only communicate with politicians when they use their own name. Put an end to anonymous communication to MPs.

I don’t mean ban anonymous accounts: far too draconian. I just mean that if you aren’t prepared to put your name and address on a message, that message won’t be seen by an MP or their staff. Electronic communications to parliamentarians and their offices should be automatically filtered: no name means no-one’s going to read it.

I’m fairly militant about free speech but I don’t think free speech includes the right to send anonymous abuse; too many people currently misuse that freedom to send threats and abuse that make many MPs’ lives miserable and are corroding our public life. If people had to use their full name to engage in public conversation with politicians,  the volume and intensity of abuse would drop sharply.

We expect politicians to do everything on the record and in the open, and quite right too: transparency is essential because it ensures they can be held to account for their actions. But if we expect openness of politicians, because it ensures their good conduct, we should accept that a similar standard should apply to members of the public and their behaviour too.

Unshackle MPs from Westminster
Polly Mackenzie, Director of Demos

One of the worst features of being an MP is trekking between home and constituency. Much has changed since the days when Ross Poldark was elected a (fictional) MP, and disappeared to London for months at a time: even the most far flung parts of Cornwall and Shetland can be reached in a day’s travel from London. But we now expect MPs to make that journey at least twice a week. No wonder so many feel so exhausted.

We should bring Parliament into the 21st century by enabling some of its sittings — especially committee sessions — to be held entirely by video conference. MPs from far flung areas should able to conference in to the main chamber for ordinary sittings. And electronic voting should be possible, whether from in the chamber, or from a secure line in the constituency.

Traditionalists will say that you need everyone to be physically present, so that MPs can chat to Ministers in the lobby. But what kind of a system is it that relies on an MP to be charming while walking through a corridor? MPs should be able to make a choice about what best serves their constituents, not be forced to rattle around the Palace of Westminster regardless of whether they’re doing any good.

Look after parliamentary aides
Marie le Conte, author of ‘Haven’t you Heard: Gossip, Power and How Politics Really Works’
Our politics is broken in a thousand and one ways; it’s hard to know how we can go about fixing it, if we ever find ourselves out of the Brexit vortex. But one vital change that’s long overdue would be an absolute overhaul of the way MPs’ staff are employed.

At the moment, each individual MP is in sole charge of hiring, paying and managing his or her aides. This causes all sorts of problems. The hundreds of thousands of pounds spent on salaries makes it look, to the untrained eye, like MPs are racking up huge expenses, for instance. Meanwhile, on top of everything else, MPs are forced to occupy a management position that most were never trained for.

It’s time the House of Commons set up a body dedicated to the hiring and management of parliamentary aides. On a day-to-day basis, the MPs would remain the bosses of their aides — whom they would still pick. But they should not have to deal with anything related to their salary, or what normal workplaces call “human resources”.

This would be a huge weight off the shoulders of MPs but it would also change the life of their staff. The new system would put an end to questionable hiring habits from MPs, a number of whom currently have staff on precarious time-limited contracts that they may or may not renew at any given point.

And, as we have seen time and time again, parliamentary aides bullied or sexually harassed by their MP have no-one to formally turn to, because their MP is their lone boss.

Happy and safe researchers are effective researchers, and effective researchers means effective MPs. The system needs to change to facilitate that safety. That this has not happened yet is a scandal.

Give Parliament a better building
Tanya Gold, freelance journalist

Charles Barry’s neo-gothic Palace of Westminster is a masterpiece, but it is not a fit place for a modern legislature, either practically or philosophically. It was built in the mid-Victorian period after the old palace burnt down and the principles it expresses are those of that time: deference to aristocracy, exclusion of women, and pomposity, all harking back to an idealised past.

The interiors, by Augustus Pugin, are magnificent, but they might encourage parliamentarians to go mad, as he did; how can you govern a real nation from a palace that is a painted construct — essentially a stage set for a play about British domination, on a marsh? The parliamentary chambers themselves encourage masculine grand-standing, which is alienating; shouldn’t we have a circular chamber to encourage consensus?

In any case, it is falling apart, filled with faulty wiring, asbestos, and Victorian pipes that have yet to be replaced. The building caught fire 40 times between 2008 and 2018; fire safety teams patrol it 24 hours a day. The basement was flooded with sewage on the day of the Brexit referendum; the stone is rotting; the toilets stink; it is infested with vermin; the parliamentary archive in the Victoria Tower — the most important archive in Britain — could not be saved in the event of fire. There would be no time.

In 2016 a joint committee compared maintaining the building to “trying to fill a bathtub with a thimble while the water is draining out of the plughole at the other end”. How can a healthy legislature work here, when they do not even feel safe?

Parliament should move to a more suitable building, but it won’t. Instead they squabble about how to tell the electorate what it will cost to repair. Much like the country, it cannot let go of its dreams.

Let MPs have lives
Elizabeth Oldfield, director of Theos think tank

You can’t be responsible for the lives of millions if you don’t have a life yourself. The civil service — committed to flexible working and offering plenty of part-time roles — is great at making sure its employees have a decent work-life balance. It’s time Westminster followed suit.

Improvements have been made, but the house still sits until 7.30 two nights a week — and 10.30pm on Mondays. As well as making any kind of healthy social life impossible, there is good evidence that long hours like these are counterproductive. One review of the consequences of such habits “showed that long hours working, especially when coupled with sleep disruption, caused deterioration of task performance, because it had detrimental effects on such things as rates of error, pace of work and social behaviour”.
The shameful toddler-like outbursts in the chamber could be reduced if MPs simply got more sleep. And their judgement would be better — so these changes are in all our best interests.

Another relatively simple change would be to allow MPs to job share. This would not be without its complications in terms of campaigning and voting, but with a little careful thought and planning, it shouldn’t be impossible.

As well as benefitting those with children or other caring responsibilities, many people have argued that this is the only way to enable people with disabilities to become MPs. In other words, it’s the only way to make sure our house of representatives is actually representative.

Fix Westminster’s drinking problem
Julie Bindel, feminist activist and journalist

In 2017, the so-called Pestminster scandal led to the resignation of Defence Secretary Michael Fallon. He had been accused of “lunging” at a female journalist and propositioning her following a boozy lunch. The case represents an uncomfortable truth: Westminster has a drinking problem.

That was the conclusion of Laura Cox, who, in a 2018 report on the culture of bullying and harassment of House of Commons staff, wrote that, “a ready access to alcohol in the various bars on the premises was referred to (as an aggravating factor) by several contributors”. There are eight bars for MPs alone, with more for the lords. One was actually shut down after a glassing in 2017.

The report had been commissioned following a number of serious allegations — made against some male MPs by members of House staff, almost all of them women. It comes as no surprise, then, that many of the high-profile women stepping down as MPs at the next general election have cited abuse as a factor in their decision.

It’s time we followed Cox’s recommendation and limited access to booze in parliament during the working day. Doing so would make Westminster a safer and more respectful environment for every MP — but for female MPs in particular.

It would also, of course, make Parliament more effective. The Liberal Democrat MP Sarah Wollaston once spoke up about colleagues voting while drunk. Ensuring MPs are sober while they are running the country is a good idea — not just for the sake of their more sensible colleagues, but for all of us.

Liberate MPs from the letter-writers
Peter Franklin, associate editor at UnHerd

The moment a new MP is elected, the letters and emails start pouring in. Hundreds of them. He or she will be expected to reply to every rant, every round robin, every request for help.

Still, that’s their job, isn’t it? Well, no, it isn’t. They are elected as legislators: their job is not to be their constituents’ agony aunt. Their job is to propose, scrutinise, amend, debate and vote upon the laws by which we are governed. It is a vital task — the lifeblood of a representative democracy — and yet the time available for it is under constant pressure from the post bag and the inbox.

MPs are there to serve their constituents, but the letter-writers represent a small fraction of each community. It is true that some correspondents are in real need and that MPs are often able to provide real help. But most of the requests concern matters over which the MP has no direct say.

There’s got to be a better way. If we properly devolved power to directly elected mayors, most issues could be dealt with locally. This would free-up MPs to dedicate their time to those matters that are actually decided in Westminster. Oh, and they might just have a little bit more time for their own families too.

Suggested reading

The abusive inhumanity of our politics

By Polly Mackenzie

Live on an average Londoner’s wage
James Bloodworth, author of Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain

He announced his intention to run as an independent candidate only a few days ago, but Conservative MP Rory Stewart has already been dismissed by some commentators as not being enough of a Londoner to win the contest.

In this age of identity politics, out-of-towner is not an appellation that Mr Stewart is going to wish to find attached to his name during a mayoral contest. Indeed, Sadiq Khan appeared to win the last contest merely by repeating to Londoners that he was the local son of a bus driver.

So Rory needs some kind of policy gimmick to draw media attention away from any focus on his origins beyond the M25. Fortunately, I have just the plan. Following in the footsteps of former Labour MP Dave Nellist, Rory should pledge if elected to live on the average London worker’s wage.

It’s a gimmick — but it might be just enough of a gimmick to set Stewart’s campaign alight.

As well as being paid an average worker’s wage, Stewart would also have to dispose of his comfy house in South Kensington and live among London’s army of penurious renters. However, his descent into England’s proletariat would be softened by the knowledge that it would only be temporary while he served out his term.

We live in anti-establishment times, and such sacrifice and ascetism would surely be rewarded by the electorate, in whose eyes Rory would be transformed from an effete liberal raconteur to a stolid man of the people. This is a winning formula in today’s political climate.

Let Londoners drink on public transport
Claire Fox, Brexit Party MEP and founder of the Battle of Ideas festival

Rory could do with a bit of an image makeover after that Pret a Manger joke, which makes him look like a healthy-eating stick-in-the-mud. One way he could do it would be to reverse the ban on drinking on public transport.

Firstly, it would be a liberal thing to do, in the classical sense, trusting that the vast majority of people can enjoy a tipple without harassing others.

Secondly, it would be a nice vote of confidence in London’s night-time economy, which has faced many pressures in recent years, yet is vital for anywhere with ambitions to be a “world city”. Let partygoers and clubbers enjoy a drink on their big night out and mark out London as a place that likes to let its hair down.

Last, but by no means least, it would be a poke in the eye to Boris Johnson, who likes to claim he’s a libertarian, but whose first move as mayor was to introduce the drinking ban in the first place.

Make the capital a hedgehog haven
Tom Holland, author of Dominion

Just because Rory is moving from Cumbria to London doesn’t mean that he has to leave behind Mrs Tiggywinkle. Despite all its concrete and tarmac, London can be a surprisingly hospitable place for wildlife, and alongside the foxes nosing around our rubbish bins and the migratory birds who flock to nature reserves like the London Wetland Centre, hedgehogs too provide the capital with a touch of the countryside. Even in the very heart of the city, in Regent’s Park, a tiny population of the animals consistently voted Britain’s best loved wild mammal clings on.

Londoners who want our hedgehogs to be saved from extinction cannot leave the task to conservationists beyond the M25. There is a job to be done in the capital as well. The sheer scale of London means that hedgehogs are unlikely to flourish here without a co-ordinated attempt to link their habitats together.

Councils need to be encouraged to allow herbaceous vegetation and shrubs to grow along the edges of parks; public utilities to sink tunnels under roads; householders to open gaps in their garden fences. As a candidate to be mayor, Rory should back the provision across the capital of what the London Wildlife Trust has called “hedgehog superhighways”. The ambition must be to ensure that no hedgehog habitat in the city is an island entire of itself.

A capital that neglects to save its last remaining populations of these enchanting, iconic and authentically wild creatures, at very little cost and inconvenience, will be a capital that has lost something of its soul. I would love to see Rory put this in his manifesto.

Rethink the green belt
Jonn Elledge, editor of CityMetric

The case for rethinking London’s Green Belt will, by now, be familiar to anyone who’s given a thought to the capital’s housing crisis. Short version: we need more homes; we’re not willing to demolish existing streets so we can squeeze them in there; large chunks of the Green Belt are ugly and next to stations, so let’s have at it.

What is sometimes missing from this debate, though, is that a Green Belt with more houses on it might actually be more green. The farmland which fringes the suburbs, after all, tends to be drenched in chemicals which do untold damage to nature. It’s also far less accessible to the public than, say, Victoria Park.

As perverse as it sounds, redeveloping some of that green belt as homes with carefully planned parkland in between might actually increase both biodiversity and suburban Londoners’ access to green space. By reducing the need to commute from far-flung towns like Luton or Southend, it might be more environmentally friendly, too.

This is a hard case to make, of course, but if there’s any higher purpose to an insurgent campaign like Rory Stewart’s, surely it’s to make the case for important but unpopular measures. And if he wants to play on the easy setting — well, he could always restrict himself to promising to build homes on golf courses.

Get Londoners walking and talking
Polly Mackenzie, Director of Demos think tank

Rory Stewart’s main problem is that his brand — walking about and talking to strangers — is about as un-London as you can get. What works on the fells of Cumbria starts to feel weird when hemmed into a Tube carriage with 120 other sweaty souls.

But he has no choice. A brand is a brand, and his policy platform should be to remake London in his image: the best place in the world to walk, and the best place in the world to make a new friend.

#LondonWalks is the easier proposition. Pedestrianise our high streets. Convert our disused railway lines into strip parks, like New York’s high line. Reward families who walk the kids to school. Ban lorries from the roads between 6am and midnight. Allow people to close off any residential streets on Sundays for children to play outside. We’d be calmer, and healthier, if we all got our 10,000 steps a day.

#LondonTalks will challenge us sceptical city dwellers. But we’d be a stronger city if we made more effort to speak, and listen, to each other. Let’s start with a single day, when every Londoner can pledge to say hello to a stranger. Then a day when everyone who doesn’t know their neighbour pops round to say hello. From there, who knows?

The Mayor doesn’t have to just be a technocrat, pulling policy levers. They can also be a leader of social change. London, Rory-style, might prove a refreshing change.

Introduce an annual London census
Jon Cruddas, Member of Parliament for Dagenham and Rainham

The speed at which people migrate into and within the capital is extraordinary, yet it is barely recognised by the state. This is a critical issue for those living in the poorest parts of the city — those with the cheapest rents and house values. It places extraordinary pressures on public services in these areas of greatest need.

The state is totally ill-equipped to track in real time such movement, remaining captive to a ten-year census cycle. The data is outdated before it is even published, given the velocity of change in a city such as London. The best tracker is the school roll — which is inadequate for effective public policy making.

A new baseline for distributing public resources is desperately required, not least because the poorest communities are disproportionately taking the strain in terms of the escalating city headcount. Such a resource would also be invaluable in lobbying central government over all aspects of public policy from health to education, council allocations and policing.

The Mayor should urgently engage the Leverhulme Centre on Demographic Science at Nuffield College to build a new census model for the capital as an innovative, transparent metric to underscore public policymaking for London.

Take on the absentee landlords
Peter Franklin, Associate Editor of UnHerd

Rory Stewart won’t win on the strength of his awesome Roriness alone — it just gets him a hearing for his ideas. Luckily, as an independent, he can propose whatever policies he likes — so they’d better be bold and brilliant.

To deal with the charge that he’s too privileged to be Mayor, Rory should take aim at London’s most privileged interest group: the city’s private landlords, in particular its absentee landlords. Our capital is a magnet for the world’s money, but if it’s just used to buy into a restricted land supply, it does nothing for Londoners apart from putting up the rent.

Our capital should be a welcoming and dynamic destination for the world’s most talented people, not a series of empty apartments for idle speculators to put their cash into. If they want to use London bricks-and-mortar as a safety deposit box while making no other contribution, then it’s a service that should be charged for.

So here’s the policy: levy a hefty annual fee on every dwelling above a given value. This would be reduced in proportion to UK taxes paid by the owner — or money invested into a qualifying enterprise. Genuine entrepreneurs would pay nothing, absentee landlords and tax avoiders would pay full whack.

Oh and the proceeds would go to the regeneration of London’s rundown housing estates.

Reform political lobbying
Tanya Gold, journalist

I am bored with personality politics, saviours-of-the-day and people who claim to be different but go on to be the same. Ennui and the willingness to close your eyes on television is not enough; nor is obvious cleverness, nor unusual sensitivity. I suggest this, if Stewart wants to be taken seriously as a political reformer: reform political funding and political lobbying.

People beyond the bubble, which is growing larger each day, think Westminster is a closed shop, and, even if it were only a belief — I’d say it’s only moderately corrupt for now — it would be dangerous enough. You should not be able to buy privileged political access in Britain, but you can; and if it isn’t useful why would you do it?

At an event at Tory Conference — run by a PR firm posing as a think tank — I sat next to a monied man who heckled the very idea of taxing capital. In his hand was an itinerary including a private dinner with a senior Secretary of State. He didn’t pay for it, you say? Don’t be stupid.

Stewart should start with this – it would be worth it.

Build some decent social housing
Jenny McCartney, journalist

The most obvious policy that Rory Stewart should vigorously espouse in his London mayoralty bid is the one that so many politicians before him have fudged or failed at: a highly ambitious campaign of building good-quality social housing.

Stewart sounds receptive to the idea, having said earlier this month in a letter to Londoners that “It is obvious that we need to build far more houses and flats — not just gimcrack boxes, but homes we can be proud of.” But others have said similar things before, only for their promises to get tied up in complicated contracts with developers and elastic definitions; during Boris Johnson’s term as mayor, “affordable” was redefined to mean up to 80% of market rents, terminology that has not exactly proved accurate.

The current gross disparity between social housing supply and demand has helped create an expanding category of “working poor” in London — a throwback to the Victorian era — comprising people who are squeezed economically by high private rents but unable to access social housing. The implied contract between the individual and the state — that of work for basic security — has been eroded.

Potential pledges could be to end “right to buy” on London council properties; create a consumer regulator to enforce standards for social housing tenants; campaign for more central government money to reach new annual targets for building social housing; restrict the purchase of London investment properties by foreign buyers and encourage high-quality, imaginative constructions.

Aneurin Bevan — who, post-war, steered the UK’s biggest ever building programme for social housing — would have wept to see the housing difficulties of many families today. Some very radical, or very old-fashioned, thinking is required. Come on, Rory.

Good schools, not gangs
Ralph Leonard, Nigerian-British writer

London is one of Britain’s “hotspots” for the knife crime “epidemic” that regularly crops up in the news. At the moment politicians are frantically searching for quick, short-term solutions, such as increasing police numbers, cracking down on drill music and expanding stop and search. Arrest and convict may be the cheaper strategy, but it isn’t effective and doesn’t even begin to address the long-term social causes of knife crime.

No single policy will instantly “solve” London’t knife crisis totally, but a radical overhaul of the education system will help significantly and begin the long process of addressing this problem. Making education more attractive would be central to all this.

Education needs to be better and be seen to lead to better things; instead many of London’s schools are overcrowded, increasingly dilapidated and deprived of resources. The best chances are only for the rich.

Rory should pledge to raise the quality and standards of both middling and struggling schools, and demonstrate how being in school and learning makes a difference — and leads to greater material and psychological wellbeing than getting involved with gangs and knife crime. In doing so, Rory must recognise the damaging effects of the austerity cuts brought about by his spurned party, and commit to reversing them, through an ambitious long-term plan to providing the capital’s schools with adequate resources, teachers and renovated facilities.

Don’t just preach feminism — practise it
Julie Bindel, journalist and campaigner

During the Tory Party leadership contest most of the candidates, including Rory Stewart, declared that they were feminists (after Dominic Raab said he was “probably not” one). Quite frankly, I doubt very much that is the case, but if Rory Stewart wishes to truly set himself apart from the Tories, including former leader Theresa May, he could put his heart and soul into developing and maintaining services for women and girls who have experienced male violence in London.

The housing crisis in the capital means that if a woman escapes domestic violence with her children, then unless she is seriously rich, she is going to end up either sofa-surfing or in grotty bed-and-breakfast temporary accommodation. It’s no wonder so many women return to violent men, risking their own lives, when that is the alternative.

Similarly, sexual violence and rape in London is at an all-time high; the conviction rate at an all-time low. And yet at the same time, rape crisis services are being squeezed into nonexistence.

And then there is the issue of women being trafficked into London to be abused in the sex trade. There are barely any services available to these women if they do manage to escape, which means they face deportation. Surely we can do better than that? If Rory Stewart wants to make his mark, he could stand proud as the first ever Tory that took the pandemic of violence against women seriously.

Become an adrenaline junkie
Says Polly Mackenzie, chief executive of Demos think tank

Tomorrow, Theresa May will probably have a lie in. Clean out some cupboards. The day after, she’ll go for a walk. Pop to the shops. She’ll tell herself she’s reconnecting with herself. Taking some time to heal. All of us who’ve lost a job in politics have told ourselves the same story.

By Saturday morning she will be crushingly, blunderingly, exhaustingly bored.

There is no job as fast and all-consuming as politics, and no job in politics faster or more all-consuming than being Prime Minister. In Number 10 if you haven’t made eight decisions before breakfast then you’re doing it wrong. Theresa May has been criticised for being slow-moving as PM, and yet she’s still working at a pace most people would find dizzying.

So my advice to Theresa is to refuse to slow down. Speed up. Don’t pootle in the garden or amble through the South Downs: go cliff diving. Learn to snowboard. Jump from a helicopter. If you want to be really brave, you could try taking out the bins. Find that political adrenalin in a daredevil lifestyle, and – like Ed Balls – you could find a future as a national treasure, after all. Maybe even as the next presenter of Top Gear?

Stay in the Commons
Says James Kirkup, Director of The Social Market Foundation

The first thing Theresa May should do is commit to standing for re-election in the next general election. The recent precedent of former PMs cutting and running away from the Commons at the first opportunity should be reversed. The Commons needs the experience and perspective of those who have held the highest office rather more than the lucrative international lecture circuit does. Stay in the Commons, Mrs May.

What to do there, though? A former PM has a platform and the ability to put things on the political agenda that few others can promote. Mrs May should dedicate herself to tackling domestic violence.

This isn’t really about legislative or administrative action. What she should seek is cultural change.

The furore over a late-night row at Boris Johnson’s flat revealed something grim about Britain: an awful lot of people still subscribe to the idea that domestic strife is no-one else’s business, that someone calling the police because they worry about a neighbour’s safety is to be pilloried not praised.

In the Johnson case there is no suggestion of any wrongdoing, but in too many other cases, where women are abused and killed, there is a history of neighbours, onlookers and even the police deciding that the preceding turmoil was “just a domestic” and looking the other way. That indifference helps get women killed.

Perhaps Mrs May’s finest moments as Home Secretary came when she confronted that attitude among the police. Once she’s free of high office, she should return to that territory, and deliver the same blunt message to the country as a whole.

Confront the realities of her ‘hostile environment’
Says Bidisha, broadcaster and author of Asylum and Exile

It’s patronising, sexist and ageist to suggest that a professional, ambitious woman with a lifelong political career should shut up, pack up, move on and tend her garden or get back in the kitchen. So I’m not going to suggest that Theresa May books a few countryside hikes of a lifetime, makes jam or sets up an allotment alongside that of her supposed opposition, actually Brexiteer ally Jeremy Corbyn, where they can toast the English sunset together with some elderberry cordial.

But I do think we’re in danger of over-sympathising with May, simply because of the political trials of the last few years. She certainly looks much more relaxed and relieved now. But before she was Prime Minister, she was the Home Secretary who introduced the (I believe) racist, sadistic and punitive ‘hostile environment’. She is one of the powerful chief architects of the divided, hate crime riddled England we live in now, not some innocent dupe who was left holding the baby.

I think Theresa May should live out her professional days working in a detention centre for asylum seekers, to see the pain she’s caused up close. Maybe it will humanise her approach somewhat. One can only hope.

Write her memoirs
Says Iain Dale, host of LBC 

We’re not very good at knowing what to do with ex Prime Ministers in this country. In America the country calls on the experience of ex-Presidents from time to time – and they enjoy a special place in the country’s affections and respect. Here? Not so much.

Theresa May would be well advised to take some time out to think about her future. It would be a big mistake to take the first thing that comes along. If Russell & Bromley or Christian Louboutin offer her an ambassadorial role, she should resist the temptation, even if it could lead to the delights of a lifetime supply of free footwear.

She should and must write her memoirs, even if they might not prove as financially lucrative as  those of other former prime ministers. It’s her duty to history to write them, even if the process would no doubt prove painful, rather than therapeutic.

My prediction is that she will set up a charitable foundation to promote women’s participation in politics and the protection of women against domestic violence, slavery and FGM. My further prediction is that her former chief of staff, Fiona Hill, will run it.

Become a councillor for Maidenhead
Says Marie Le Conte, author of Haven’t You Heard? Gossip, Power & How Politics Really Works

After three years in Downing Street, it is still unclear why Theresa May ever wanted to become Prime Minister. She clearly did not enjoy the constant media attention or the endless mingling, and it became very obvious very quickly that managing the expectations of several warring factions was not her forte.

What she has always obviously liked, however, is being an MP. From stuffing envelopes for her local party as a teenager to risking the integrity of the United Kingdom to keep her MPs together, she has consistently proved that she is more dedicated to the Conservatives than even most of her colleagues.

Another area close to her heart is Maidenhead; unlike several of her predecessors, she seems genuinely attached to her constituency, attending church there whenever she can and working as a marshal for the annual Easter race even when she was running the country.

So, what now? She could stay on the green benches as a devoted local champion, but she probably has had enough of Brexit wrangling for several lifetimes. Still, politics is in her blood, and going from No10 to retirement surely is a recipe for madness.

Instead, she could do worse than become a councillor in Maidenhead; attending village fetes, tending to neighbours’ hedge-based dilemmas, and staying well away from the national press.

In a way, it feels like the life she has always yearned for; she just took the long way round.

Do some volunteering
Says Julie Bindel, journalist, broadcaster and feminist campaigner

Theresa May, the sexists might say, should devote her time after retiring as Prime Minister to attending dance classes, and flying to NYC to look at shoes. I would far rather that she did volunteer work with asylum seekers and desperately poor migrants in this country, bearing in mind that she has spearheaded many of the heartless policies that have had a terrible effect on these populations.

May is responsible for the Windrush scandal, which wrecked lives and caused huge distress, and has also stood behind legislation that makes it impossible for asylum seekers to earn a living, whilst at the same time taking away their meagre benefits.

She might also like to spend some time taking calls on a crisis line for the victims of domestic violence.  The Tories, under her leadership, have not only close down refuges by removing resources, but are also responsible for the destruction of the criminal justice system which should be providing protection for the victims, and incarceration for the perpetrators that are a danger to women and their children.

May might benefit from a few days at a Rape Crisis Centre to see how the services operate on a shoestring, since her government took away the majority of funding for these support groups. The majority of Tory politicians do not live in the real world. May’s retirement could be the perfect opportunity for her to dip a toe in the water.

Play to her strengths
Says Tanya Gold, freelance journalist

Theresa May does not have a gift for joy – she wanted to be leader of the Conservative Party – so I cannot see her gambolling in the Isles of Scilly like Harold Wilson or sitting in a Farrow & Ball shepherd’s hut like David Cameron.

Prime Ministers used to stay in the House of Commons after they stepped down – or were ousted by a shrieking mob of wankers – but parliamentary democracy no longer has anything like that kind of lustre. So they skulk off, sulking, often to lament and too often to write a bad memoir.

My suggestion is that May should look to her gifts, which are bullying immigrants while pretending not to (the Windrush scandal should be a real stain on her conscience) and being shouted at by infantile men. She should become the head waitress at the awful London restaurant School Dinners, which serves school dinners to men too old to be at school, and like a good caning. It is as despairing as Brexit: “without a doubt the worst meal I have ever had in a London restaurant,” is an average review. It was as awful as the Paddington “fellatio cafe” which never actually opened. She could refuse to admit ethnic minority boys until they show her their papers.

School Dinners has closed down, but that only adds to the pathos.

Nothing
Says Peter Franklin, Associate Editor of UnHerd

What should Theresa May do next? Hmm, let’s see now… how about… nothing? Nothing at all, in fact.

One of the best things about May is that she became Prime Minister at a sensible age: 59. The trouble with young, energetic leaders of the Emmanuel Macron and Justin Trudeau variety is what to do with them afterwards. You don’t want them haunting public life like the spectral Tony Blair or hiding in sheds like the sheepish David Cameron. It’s unseemly.

However, a mature leader – having done his or her last big job – can retire just like normal people do.

Having bungled Brexit and a general election, Theresa May is out on her ear slightly ahead of schedule; but a couple of years on the back benches and she’ll be good to go. There’ll be the inevitable memoirs of course, some charity work and such like, but other than that we need never hear from her again.

One would like to think that our ex-leaders would become wise elders, drawing upon their experience at the pinnacle of power to think deep thoughts about the system of the world. It says something about the shallowness of our politics (or perhaps the omertà of the establishment) that they have so little to share. Even Barack Obama, that most cerebral of ex-Presidents, hasn’t had much to say so far.

Therefore, let’s not demand too much of Theresa May. She’s only had three years in office, but it must have felt like thirty. She’s earned a long, happy and peaceful retirement.

Today, the Tories are facing a similarly momentous leadership race. We asked our contributors which pair should be plotting their next moves at this critical juncture.

Norman for PM, Halfon for Chancellor

Peter Franklin, Editor of UnPacked

The Granita deal was much more than a strategic alliance to win a leadership contest. One of either Blair or Brown would have won anyway – and either would have become Prime Minister in 1997. Nor was it a grand bargain between rival ideologies. The two men’s philosophical differences weren’t that great at the time – and though exacerbated by subsequent rivalry, they look trivial set against Corbynism.

What really was significant about the Pact was the coming together of tribes, the melding of cultures, the reconciliation of temperaments. Out of that came a political ‘offer’ – New Labour – that was bigger than either man, with appeal across party lines, class distinctions and different parts of the country.

Today’s Conservative Party needs a Granita deal of its own – by which I don’t mean a cynical stitch-up between rival candidates, nor some unlikely meeting of closed minds. Collusion between careerists is inevitable; compromise between purists impossible.

No, the only fruitful dialogue to be had is between principled but open-minded people, with different but compatible, perspectives. If the individuals involved also happen to vary greatly in personality, background and presentation, so much the better.

Of course, Blair and Brown struck their deal after 15 years in opposition and four consecutive election defeats. Their Conservative equivalents must do so while their party is in government and amid the radical uncertainties of Brexit. It’s a tall order.

There is no Tory Blair and Brown right now – and perhaps not ever. It might just be too late for the Party to save itself. But if there are two Conservative MPs I’d love to see sit down together and shamelessly eavesdrop upon, it’s Jesse Norman, the MP for Hereford and South Herefordshire, and Robert Halfon, the MP for Harlow in Essex. The two men are as different as their constituencies – the genial, patrician scholar versus the energetic champion of working class conservatism. I guess it’s a silly comparison, and certainly an inexact one, but one could see them as the Edmund Burke (Norman) and Benjamin Disraeli (Halfon) of the 21st century Conservative Party.

There is a lot of pressure on the Conservatives right now to pick a side – not just on Brexit, but in a wider culture war of which Leave and Remain are just aspects. The Party must resist the temptation – it needs all of its supporters: middle and working class, young and old, leave and remain.

The party needs to become good collectively at what Norman and Halfon are good at individually – appealing to different wings of a winning Conservative coalition. Just as there’s no conceivable Conservative majority without both of their constituencies there’s no viable Conservative offer that doesn’t combine their intellectual and emotional dispositions.

I ought to disclose that I know both of them a bit – enough to say hello to, but not well enough to know whether they talk to one another very much.

If they don’t, I hope they put that right. They have a lot to talk about.

Johnson for PM, Rudd for Chancellor

James Bloodworth, journalist and author of Hired

Since I’m a Labour voter, no Tory would suit me better in the top job than Boris Johnson. Amber Rudd as his Chancellor might even lend his government an air of competence and normality.

This might sound counter-intuitive, given how much the Left detests Johnson. But bear with me. Some of the dislike is based on his Etonian background – which he can hardly be blamed for. But the real animus against him is a product of his opportunism. He is, even for some within the Tory party, an unprincipled charlatan – someone who will do and say just about anything to reach the top. Just imagine how the Left could capitalise on the division he’d cause on the Right.

Johnson is relatively clever, but this won’t worry Labour too much. Judging by his gaffe-prone stint as foreign secretary, Johnson will soon serve up some easy hits for the opposition.

If he were to emerge as the next PM, we could expect a brief honeymoon period in which his popularity – already high for a politician – surges. But beyond that, the unpredictability that makes Johnson a compelling TV personality and newspaper columnist will be ill-suited to the task of guiding Britain smoothly through its current political turmoil.

And if Labour were to replace Corbyn – now 70-years-old – with a more pragmatic, business-like and less polarising figure, a chaotic-seeming Johnson government could soon find itself ousted.

Gove for PM, Norman for Chancellor

Gove for PM, Hancock for Chancellor

Marie Le Conte, author of A Guide To Westminster Gossip

Lidington for PM, Margot James for chancellor

Rachel Cunliffe, Comment and Features Editor at City A.M.

The newly minted International Development secretary and utter underdog Rory Stewart gets my vote to be the next prime minister on three counts.

First, he actually understands the complexities of leaving the EU and reassuringly hasn’t been dragged into the game all the other candidates seem to be playing in order to out-Brexit one another – as evidenced by his spectacularly meticulous take-down of why trading on WTO terms would be a disaster.

Second, he’s by far the most qualified from a foreign policy perspective, with a varied career at the foreign office (he essentially ran a province in Iraq), detailed knowledge of Middle Eastern politics, and an impressive list of languages including a variant of Persian. We keep hearing about the importance of a “global Britain”, but he’s the only candidate with the credentials to secure the UK’s place in an ever-more globalised world.

Third, he admitted to smoking opium at a wedding in Iran. I mean, what? Even Boris couldn’t come up with a better anecdote.

Stewart is, however, something of a character from another century. For chancellor, the Tories need someone effortlessly modern. Enter Liz Truss, one of the few Conservatives who actually seems to understand how the internet works. From lambasting EU digital directives to championing the gig economy, Truss is the millennials’ politician – votes the Tories desperately need to start winning.She’s an energetic free-marketeer which would help balance Stewart’s old-world conservatism. Oh, and she’d be the first woman to ever hold the role – what a coup for the Conservatives.

Overlooking the overlooked

James Bloodworth, journalist and author of the Orwell Prize nominated book Hired

If only May had acted upon those promises she made in that first speech as leader – the one that has become reduced to her ‘citizens of nowhere’ dig – things could have been so different.

In that keynote, delivered to a conference just after the Brexit vote, she surprised all the complacent neo-liberals in her party by lamenting the “division and unfairness all around”.

“Our society should work for everyone,” she told conference delegates, before running through a list of areas in which it wasn’t.

“If you can’t afford to get onto the property ladder… if your pay has stagnated for several years in a row… if you’ve been trying to say things need to change for years and your complaints fall on deaf ears, it doesn’t feel like it’s working for you.”

May took digs at fat cats, tax avoiders and “citizens of nowhere”, pledging to tackle the injustices of low pay and precarious work.

The rest is history. All these promises fell by the wayside as her premiership progressed. Sure, the Taylor Review of Modern Working Practices – which May’s government commissioned – did come up with some interesting and proactive suggestions. And the government promised to at least consult on all but one of Matthew Taylor’s recommendations. But then… nothing.

This was her great opportunity. This is where she could have made a difference to the lives of so many of those people who had voted in the referendum for change. But like so much else, workplace reform was gradually subsumed by Brexit.

So Brexit created Theresa, then destroyed Theresa. And it also contributed to her greatest failure as PM: that signal failure to significantly improve the lives of the ‘left behinds’ she pledged to serve back in 2016.

Her intransigence

Polly Mackenzie, director of Demos

Theresa May’s failure is all Ken Clarke’s fault. He accidentally gave her a brand identity when he was caught on camera calling her a “bloody difficult woman”. She loved it. Her team loved it. Conservative MPs who spent their teenage years pining over a Margaret Thatcher poster loved it. Bloody difficult woman, Mrs May thought: that’s who to be if I want to be loved.

She was always intransigent, as Home Secretary. But once “bloody difficult” got hung around her neck, she revelled in it, sticking to positions as rigidly as the Tin Man in the Wizard of Oz, who got rusted into paralysis by unexpected rainfall.

She fought and argued, unblinkingly, for her withdrawal agreement long after it was dead, long after the body was rolled through the crematorium and the ashes were scattered.

I can understand why she clung to the belief that intransigence would, in the end, pay a political dividend. It seems to be the path to popularity in politics today. The No Deal Brexiteers refuse to budge, even if that risks no Brexit at all – and yet their tribe love them. Jeremy Corbyn built an entire political career out of never changing his mind and young people chant his name at festivals.

The problem, Theresa, is that intransigence only works for ideologues. You can’t be rigidly pragmatic, any more than the Tin Man could start dancing without having his joints oiled. In your resignation speech, you stressed the importance of compromise: the whole point of compromising is that you have to bring people together. If no-one will join you on the dance floor, you need to find a different song. We can only hope the next Prime Minister will do so.

The hostile environment

Bidisha, writer, broadcaster and film-maker

Theresa May’s biggest failure was as Home Secretary, not as Prime Minister. In 2013, she gave a now-notorious speech at the Home Office, introducing the central tenets of the ‘hostile environment’. To me – and this is just my opinion – it was a racist, aggressive, inhumane and sadistic warning. The hostile environment has persisted since then, unabated. It has fanned the flames of (what I see as) an increasingly openly racist, xenophobic and insular England. It has worsened with Brexit – for which it laid the groundwork.

I’ve reminded myself of that Home Office speech when, over the last three years, I’ve started feeling sympathy for Theresa May as Prime Minister. Well – not sympathy, exactly, but a kind of wonder at how she manages to get up every morning, put together an outfit and get through her day of work. She inherited the ultimate ‘glass cliff’ job: cleaning up a man’s stupid mess. David Cameron’s opinion poll on Brexit was callous and dangerous.

May might have convinced herself that she should and must and could ‘deliver Brexit’. She might have shown a steeliness, and an impressive poker face, in calling a snap election that caused her to lose her mandate – and in repeatedly forcing votes on the same unsatisfactory deal. But she does not have the fine shrewdness and responsiveness of the true political survivor – and neither did her predecessor.

May’s resignation speech showed, finally, an awareness of her own isolation and powerlessness. But ultimately, this is a mess of Cameron’s making. Brexit is a mistake and a catastrophe that poisons anyone who touches it, be they Tory, Labour or anything else. May’s departure is simply another inevitable episode in an unpleasant and unnecessary crisis – one that reflects the growing darkness of the political landscape.

The backstop

Helen Thompson, professor of political economy at the University of Cambridge

Theresa May’s departure was probably inevitable from the moment she lost her gamble to establish a Conservative majority big enough to get her withdrawal agreement through the House of Commons.

But she made one crucial misjudgement after the general election. In December 2017, she accepted the EU’s demand that the terms of the UK’s departure include a commitment that nothing would change on the Irish border. After an uproar, she redefined her backstop so that it applied to the whole of the UK, rather than just Northern Ireland – but this alteration left unaltered the commitment to prioritise the Irish border.

Whether the move was justifiable or not, in subordinating Brexit to another claim, May damaged the supply and confidence arrangement with the DUP; gave her ERG critics a permanent line of attack; fuelled the concern among part of the Leave coalition that she was pursuing Brexit in name only; and gave those in Parliament who want to stop Brexit reason to think it could be abandoned. In this political environment, she needed considerable good fortune.

The Commission President, Jean-Claude Juncker, tried to help her with the concessions made before the second meaningful vote, but did not reckon on Geoffrey Cox’s intervention. John Bercow repeatedly tried to thwart her – and managed to, right up until his refusal to take Gareth Snell and Lisa Nandy’s amendment on the third meaningful vote. But Cox was articulating the backstop’s legal logic, and the Speaker had his opportunity because the backstop gave anti-Brexit MPs a justification to keep fighting.

She chose in December 2017 a way of delivering Brexit that had little chance of success and has now paid the price.

Her empty words

Paul Embery, firefighter and trade union official

Theresa May’s finest two moments as prime minister were her inaugural and valedictory speeches. The rest was abject failure.

Her maiden address on the steps of Downing Street in 2016 hit the sort of unifying note that appealed not just to traditional Tory voters but also to those in the working-class Labour heartlands. She spoke of leading a One Nation government, tackling poverty and putting the interests of working-class families before those of the rich and powerful.

This was buttressed by her first Tory conference speech as prime minister, in which she railed against the international elites, untrammelled markets and the concept of being a “citizen of nowhere”. It was a pitch towards those who were, let’s say, not entirely sold on the idea of a liberal, cosmopolitan, borderless world dominated by global corporations.

She had parked her tanks squarely on Labour’s lawn – and some of us inside the Labour party saw danger ahead.

But the rhetoric didn’t match the reality, and her premiership quickly reverted to stale Tory dogma. Most destructively, she continued David Cameron’s programme of austerity, which had always been as needless as it was damaging, and caused suffering to the very people she claimed to be standing up for.

In her departure speech, she mentioned the tragedy of Grenfell Tower and the need to ensure that such a disaster never happens again. These words will ring a bit hollow to those, like me, who work in the fire and rescue service and have witnessed the savage cuts that have been inflicted on our industry over recent years.

On Brexit, she made all the right sounds early on. She had no choice but to affirm that the UK would leave the EU, if necessary, without a deal (frankly, no prime minister could do otherwise without handing an effective veto to the EU). But when the time came, she bottled it. And from that moment, her credibility was shot.

Her final address emphasised the value of compromise. It has its place, of course. But in trying to please everyone, you sometimes end up pleasing no-one. As, in the end, she discovered to her cost.

Her untruthfulness

Tim Bale, professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London and Director of the Mile End Institute

After the initial surge of sympathy provoked in my sentimental old soul by Theresa May’s tears at the end of her speech in Downing Street, all I could think of Oscar Wilde’s words on Charles Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop: “One must have a heart of stone,” Wilde wrote, “to read the death of little Nell without laughing.”

It was a speech of epic self-delusion and self-justification, followed by a veritable flood of hypocrisy from many of those who had made her life – indeed, all our lives – a misery for the last two years. Ultimately, though, they aren’t to blame for the mess the country and the Conservative Party is in today. She is. Where, then, did it all go so terribly wrong?

It was as soon as she stepped through the door of Number Ten Downing Street. Instead of turning round and telling people, particularly in her own party, the truth – namely that the referendum was a close run thing, that people had voted Leave for a myriad of different reasons, that the Irish border was bound to prove problematic, and that, more generally, the EU-27 weren’t going to allow the UK to have its cake and eat it – she decided to present herself as Brexitier-than-thou.

Quite why we can only guess. There are a number of possibilities, even leaving aside the temptation to cast her erstwhile adviser, Nick Timothy as the serpent.

Perhaps it was pure partisan opportunism – the thought of the Tories pulling off Brexit and pulling in many of the four million voters who had supported UKIP in 2015. Perhaps it was the need to prove her personal bona fides after playing the role of reluctant Remainer in the referendum campaign. Perhaps it was her tendency, after five years as Home Secretary, to see everything through the prism of immigration: Vote Leave stressed it; therefore the referendum was won on it; therefore free movement must end; therefore hard Brexit.

From that initial decision everything else flowed.

Her lack of persuasiveness

Jenny McCartney, Journalist and Author

I do not doubt that Mrs May loves her country, as she avowed this morning, and has a strong conception of duty and public service – why else would she have so stoically endured the vitriol constantly poured upon her? The trouble was that the country did not feel as if Mrs May loved it. In that she resembled one of those parents who find themselves tragically estranged from a child for whom they had a powerful internal affection, but seemed unable fully to translate that affection convincingly into words or, often, deeds. 

It was Mrs May who, in 2002, warned that the Conservative Party was in danger of becoming ‘the nasty party’. Yet, in the immediate aftermath of the Brexit vote, her delay in assuring EU nationals of their secure future in the UK indicated a lack of emotional intelligence at a time when the country badly needed such direction. So too did the human distress caused by the Windrush scandal, which stemmed from policies put in place during her time as Home Secretary.

The ‘precariat,’ despite her post-referendum assurances, have felt no more secure under her time in office. Her task of enacting Brexit was a thankless and fiendishly difficult one, but under her direction the UK, at key points, has also seemed an unnecessarily ungenerous place. 

May has great doggedness – an important quality in political life – but an absence of persuasiveness. That proved a dangerous combination. The doggedness repeatedly drew her back to preferred solutions – but without the ability to persuade others of their merits and absorb their concerns, repetition did not improve the outcome. Yet if May’s flaw has, in large part, been sincerity without communication, we must guard now against falling into the opposite trap, and possibly a worse one: a Prime Minister who can communicate without sincerity.

The system

Peter Franklin, editor of UnHerd’s UnPacked column

The political obituaries have already been written: Theresa May was a terrible Prime Minister.

Well, they’re right about that – but for the wrong reasons. Her mistakes and weaknesses, though many and significant, were not crucial mistakes or fatal weaknesses. They did not make all the difference. Rather the most obvious failure of her premiership is a failure of the entire political system: government, opposition, media, every bit of the machine – all the way up to the EU itself, whose collective, history-changing decision it was to make an example, not an ally, of Brexit Britain.

Our own politicians have made that pathetically easy for them. There is not a single faction of any size in this parliament that has shown genuine leadership on Brexit – and precious few individuals. They have wilfully confused compromise with betrayal, and principle with their own self-interest.

Together they made Theresa May’s job an impossible one. It’s hard to look back over the flowchart of her decisions and identify an alternative pathway that would have produced a different result. Given the system she was operating within, she was doomed from the moment she lost her majority – and she’d quite possibly have been doomed if she hadn’t called the snap election.

But this is not to absolve her from all responsibility. Rather, what she’s to blame for is not primarily the decisions she made, but those she didn’t make. The original sin of her premiership was not doing anything about the system that made her downfall inevitable.

There were attacks on the previous regime, but they were petty ones – from the very public humiliation of George Osborne to the ‘not invented here’ abandonment of promising policy initiatives like the Northern Powerhouse and the Life Chances Strategy. At the same time, she left in place many of the worst policies of the Cameron era – such as the counter-productive ‘Help to Buy’ scheme for aspiring homeowners (which is in fact a subsidy for the big developers); the sinking student loan system; and the white elephants of Hinkley Point C nuclear power station, HS2 and Heathrow expansion.

Despite promises of “an economy that works for everyone”, there was no obvious sign of any fundamental shift in the priorities of the system – not in infrastructure investment from London to our other great cities; not in education spending from the bloated university system to the under-resourced technical education sector; not in the tax burden the parasitic rentier class places on those struggling for a stake in the productive economy.

From Whitehall and Westminster, where the power-hoarding and hucksterish culture of politics became more entrenched than ever, to the still left-behind communities that Theresa May imagined would swing behind her insubstantial rhetoric, it became obvious that, in her words, “nothing has changed”.

The failure to deliver Brexit is both a symbol – and ultimately the result – of that much bigger failure.

Jeremy Clarkson
Nominated by James Kirkup, Director of The Social Market Foundation

The Liberal Democrats are looking for a replacement for Vince Cable. The Independent Group has made Chuka Umunna its ‘chief spokesman’ but isn’t yet a full political party. Centrism needs a leader.

That leader should be Jeremy Clarkson. Yes, Jeremy Clarkson. Bear with me.

I am a centrist. We like political compromise and policy based on evidence, not ideology: just do ‘what works’ and leave philosophy to philosophers. We haven’t had the best time of late.

One reason is that centrists tend to be like me: metropolitan wonks who focus too much on the detail of policy and not enough on how voters will see that policy.  I spent years writing clever columns about the merits of a liberal immigration policy; in 2017, I thought (and still think) the ‘dementia tax’ was a good policy, because it’s better to tax the houses of asset-rich pensioners than the incomes of asset-poor workers. Smart, eh?

Then there’s Brexit, which brings me to Clarkson.

Guess how he voted in the referendum? What he thinks about leaving? He’s a Remainer: a treacherous, bleating, Britain-hating public schoolboy millionaire liberal Remainer, who thinks Brexit is a “clusterfuck”. He’s basically David Cameron, but less fat and with slightly better jeans.

And guess what? It doesn’t matter. He’s still Jeremy Clarkson, the bloke’s bloke, the bloke with the cars and the crap jokes and the stupid comments about foreigners and the bad jeans.

And he’s got exactly what centrism needs: an understanding of – and a love for – the stuff that millions of ‘ordinary’ voters are interested in.

Last month, when Theresa May was pictured awkwardly trying to play pool with her Italian counterpart, Clarkson had a Twitter-rant that sums up why centrism needs him:

I’m shit at pool. But I know how to hold the cue at least. What I cannot understand is how you can be the prime minister when you don’t. Seriously, how can you get to the age of 62 without EVER playing a single game of pool? It’s impossible. 

How can you know what normal people think if you’ve never played pool?

The last thing centrists need is more smart policy and more clever people: we’ve got that covered.  We need leaders you could go down the pub and have a laugh with – and who would be down the pub having a laugh even if they didn’t want your vote, because that’s what they like doing. Because that’s what people do. #JC4PM

Howard Jacobson
Nominated by Tanya Gold

When regarding the agonies of Brexit, I dream, idly, of a clever Prime Minister. George Osborne may fantasise that I am talking about him. I am not. I am talking about Benjamin Disraeli, who wrote novels, split the Tory Party, re-established it with one nation Conservatism – still a fantasy that endures – passed reforming legislation and still made good jokes. For instance this on William Gladstone: “He has not one single redeeming defect”. Or this: “I must follow the people. Am I not their leader?”

Was the kindness, the imagination, and the wit of the novelist the key to Disraeli’s brilliance? I don’t know, but sometimes I fantasise that Howard Jacobson is prime minister. He wouldn’t do it, of course, not being a f*cking inadequate, but I cannot get the idea from my brain, especially when watching the dishonest idiots on BBC Parliament.

I dream that he would actually think, deeply, about things, and act with one eye on history, and the other on Count Tolstoy. He hates social media, which is right; I imagine he is sound on climate change, also right; he would re-open libraries, and make wonderful speeches. I wonder if the subjects of Elizabeth I felt the same way as I would under a Jacobson premiership: soothed, because their leader was that rare thing in politics – not a fool.

Tracey Emin
Nominated by Bidisha, writer, broadcaster and film-maker

Having followed her varied, beautiful and highly skilled work for decades now, I have a lot of respect for the artist Tracey Emin and would love to see what she’d do with the top job.

I interviewed her for Radio 4 about a decade ago and she was thoughtful and gentle, very cultured and with a naturally international mindset. She combines many qualities and has overcome many challenges, which I think would garner people’s respect, and also speaks to an inner strength and steady, laudable ambition.

As a former Young British Artist she has come through the New Labour era of the financial boom and Cool Britannia’s soaring cultural capital. Indeed, that period made her rich and famous. However, her early years were humble and marked by family issues (her philandering father had an entire other family secreted away), lack of opportunity and multiple instances of rape and sexual violence.

She has fought her way up from modest beginnings, gender violence, lack of opportunity and the low expectations of others to emerge as a great artist with a wide-ranging body of art, self-knowledge, maturity and self-belief. She has withstood howls of derision from many people, who believe that what she creates is not art, to emerge as a tough, experienced woman who is sure of her gifts and determined to carve her place in the world.

I respect those qualities in a leader.

Jurgen Klopp
Nominated by James Bloodworth – author and journalist

Westminster needs more people with “helping syndrome”, the epithet coined by the Liverpool FC manager Jurgen Klopp to describe himself.

As a Liverpool supporter, I’m obviously biased. But the 51-year-old German exudes a warmth and intelligence that is sorely lacking in our politics at the present time.

I haven’t chosen Klopp solely on the basis of his sporting affiliations or personal magnetism, however. His political views chime with my own: Klopps is on the Left without being a fanatic. He talks in terms of first principles rather than ideological dogma.

“I’m on the Left, of course,” Jürgen Klopp tells the journalist Raphael Honigstein in Klopp: Bring the Noise, his book on the Liverpool manager. “More Left than middle. I believe in the welfare state. I’m not privately insured. I would never vote for a party because they promised to lower the top tax rate,” Klopp adds.

Moreover, Klopp is a pro-European who emits none of the intellectual snobbery that seems to animate some of his fellow Remainers. Klopp told the Guardian in 2018 that he didn’t believe the English had become an inward-looking people post-Brexit. “I don’t see it,” Klopp told the paper.

Charisma, intelligence, as well as respect and civility towards one’s political opponents. Westminster could do with its own Jurgen Klopp.

Martina Navratilova
Nominated by Julie Bindel, journalist and feminist campaigner

Martina Navratilova, one of the finest sportspeople in the world, is brave, principled, and the antithesis of hypocrisy. In other words, nothing like a politician.

I first saw Martina on TV at Wimbledon in 1976. I was 14 years old, and crippled with self-hatred and shame for being a lesbian. Martina did not feminise her appearance, unlike other female tennis players, and was proud of her muscles. I had her clocked as a feminist, and suspected she was a lesbian long before she came out in 1981.

In 2010, I had the honour of interviewing Martina, shortly after she revealed she had breast cancer. As ever, Martina had her eye on the bigger picture, and used her diagnosis to encourage women to look out for warning signs.

More recently, Martina has spoken out about the unfairness of male-bodied trans-women competing against natal women in sport. Martina does not have a bigoted bone in her body, but even so, she was immediately accused of ‘transphobia’. But Martina did not back down, and continued to take a principled stand on this issue.

When she came out as a lesbian, Martina lost every single one of her sponsors; today, she is facing bullying and unjust criticism. But Martina takes it on the chin, because you can’t keep a good woman down. If Martina were our Prime Minister, the country would not be in the mess it is today.

Alexei Sayle
Nominated by Matthew Norman, political satirist and columnist 

The moment Alexei Sayle established himself as one of the great lost leaders came on Question Time a few years ago. An audience member raised a matter of typically inexpressable tedium, and for the only time in the borefest’s history, a panellist gave the perfect response. “I don’t care about that,” he said. “Ask someone else.”

Those who recall such national humiliations as Tony Blair’s musings on the murder trial of Deidre from Coronation Street would appreciate a PM under no compulsion to have an opinion about everything, and brazenly unconcerned about pandering.

Sayle’s claims extend beyond that. He wouldn’t remotely want the job, which should of course be a formal prerequisite for having it. If he did, he’d  acknowledge Britain’s diminished status by cancelling Trident, and use an alarmingly capacious knowledge of military hardware to remodel the armed forces in keeping with the needs of this geopolitical age rather than the one that ended in 1990.

His rage, intelligence and hilarious deployment of distinctly unparliamentary language would reignite public interest in politics to levels unseen since he was remoulding the country’s comic sensibilities in the early 1980s.

He would also be the first PM since Churchill with genuine literary talent. Alongside his fiction, he has published two glorious volumes of memoirs (Stalin Ate My Homework, and Thatcher Stole My Trousers). Who wouldn’t give one kidney at least for a  third, Bercow Kissed My Ringpiece, covering the Downing Street years?

Ronald Blythe
Nominated by Harry Mount, editor of The Oldie

At 96, Ronald Blythe remains our greatest living expert on the British countryside.

Fifty years ago, he wrote his masterpiece, Akenfield – Portrait of an English Village.

He invented the name Akenfield for his fictional Suffolk village. But his recorded interviews with locals – from teenagers to retired farmhands in their 80s – gave a crystal-clear, undeniably true picture of the brutal horrors of country life in the late 19^th and 20^th centuries.

I interviewed him this year and, half a century on, he remains a supreme listener – a quality distinctly lacking in Parliament.

Talk to an MP and they usually talk at you and avoid asking questions. I was amazed, at the Oldie Literary Lunch at the Ilkley Literary Festival last year, to see Alan Johnson, another candidate for the best Prime Minister we will never have, ask questions – and keep on asking them – of his neighbour at lunch before giving his speech.

How do you ever learn anything if you don’t ask questions and don’t listen; and don’t read books – another thing MPs aren’t much cop at?

Blythe doesn’t just read constantly; he writes, too – over 30 books so far, and he’s planning on writing more.

When I interviewed him, he modestly said, “I was a listener and a looker.”

He still is.

Claire Tomalin
Nominated by Deborah Orr, journalist

Many former journalists go into politics. That’s not surprising. The two disciplines often attract people with similar interests and passions. The journalists who used to be editors – who have experience of managing a team, juggling a mix of information and priorities, maintaining a vision of how everything fits together – are better placed than the mere writers to make the transition.

I’d never actually wish that, after she resigned as literary editor of the Sunday Times, Claire Tomalin had become a politician – her career as a biographer has been too valuable, too dazzling for that. But Tomalin would have made a superlative prime minister. Anyone familiar with her writing is aware of its remarkable intelligence – an intelligence leavened with the empathy that enables her to understand how human talents and human flaws tend to coalesce to make a unique, sometimes dark, sort of creativity or genius. No one could doubt that she has the skill with words to communicate the original thoughts and ideas that her prose writhes with.

But Tomalin’s resilience is stunning too. She has achieved so much. Becoming the preeminent biographer of your generation, having been born a woman in 1933, takes stamina. To do this while your personal life is marked by tragedy after tragedy – pain and loss that most of us don’t even experience once – well, Tomalin is a human among humans. Claire – you’re only 85. It’s not too late.

Malorie Blackman
Nominated by YA novelist, Lisa Williamson

The next generation deserves a leader who listens to and values their opinions. For the past three decades, Malorie Blackman OBE has done just that. Since publishing her first novel in 1990, she has given a voice to under-represented children and young adults in her fiction, television writing and tireless campaigning.

In a Young Adult sector dominated by white authors and publishers, Blackman’s impact has been revolutionary. Some of her books, like the wildly successful dystopian Noughts and Crosses series, tackle racism head on, while others feature black children simply getting on with their everyday lives or having the sorts of adventures previously reserved for white readers. It’s a deceptively simple yet powerful approach that has changed the landscape of children’s literature.

The 2013-15 Children’s Laureate uses her platform to promote reading for pleasure, to highlight opportunities in the creative industries for young people of all backgrounds, and encourage and empower them to write their own stories. Meanwhile her words continue to reflect issues facing young people in the UK today – just look at the emotional response her award-winning Rosa Parks episode of Dr Who spurred last year: it indicates the power of her work.

I doubt Malorie would want to touch the PM role with a bargepole, but, my gosh, wouldn’t it be fabulous if someone who put the well-being of our children first was in charge for once? They’d certainly get my vote.

Louise Casey
Nominated by LBC presenter Iain Dale

Great prime ministers have visions. They know what they want to achieve and they understand the measures necessary to achieve it. They lead from the front. They can articulate their vision to enable voters to buy into and support it. They don’t shy away from controversy or confrontation. They lead public opinion, they don’t follow it.

Step forward Dame Louise Casey. Known as the most untypical of civil servants she first came to the public’s notice as the Blair government’s Homelessness Czar. She became the driving force to combat Anti-Social Behaviour and headed the Respect Task Force before being appointed Victims Commissioner. She then took on the Troubled Families initiative and wrote a report into the Rotherham Grooming scandal. In each of those jobs she shook up the system, adopting the maxim that in order to create an omelette you have to crack a few eggs.

Louise Casey eschews party politics, but she is a natural born leader. She doesn’t stand for any nonsense, and is an original thinker. I’d say that’s just what the country needs as we look for a replacement for Theresa May. What a shame she isn’t in parliament.

Katharine Birbalsingh
Nominated by Peter Franklin

Michaela Community School is a state secondary school in the London borough of Brent. About a fifth of its pupils qualify for free school meals and almost half speak English as a second language. It has also been rated by Ofsted inspectors as outstanding in all categories. Oh, and the school opened its doors just five years ago.

Michaela’s founding Headmistress is Katharine Birbalsingh – the inspirational leader of a remarkable institution and an effective advocate for ‘traditional’ teaching methods in a modern setting. Michaela is described in the press as the ‘strictest school in Britain’, but Birbalsingh’s actual philosophy is one of no excuses for bad behaviour.

She understands what so many have forgotten, which is that the atmosphere in our schools, whether of calm or chaos, is ultimately a choice. That also goes for the scourge of screen addiction. Michaela empowers parents to take back control from the smartphone – offering discounted ‘brick’ phones so that they can call their kids without plugging their brains into the internet.

For sticking her neck out, she attracts a lot of flak – to which only one reply is necessary: you do better. We could certainly do with more doers and fewer talkers in Government (though Birbalsingh is a brilliant speaker too). No doubt she’s too busy giving children the best possible start in life to bother with the greasy pole of politics. Still, I can’t think of anyone better to deal with the delinquents of Westminster.

Marco Rubio
US Senator

In the American Senate, the most typical sources for unconventional reporting are my colleague’s stories from back home. Here are a few media outlets to which I also turn:

Our national political reporting frequently tries to find conflict or a political horserace to every story. That can be frustrating to those who just want well reported facts about what is actually happening in our country and communities. It’s why I’m a huge supporter of local news. There isn’t a better source for Florida politics than Sayfie Review. It’s a one-stop shop for everything happening in the Sunshine State, from the Florida Keys to the Panhandle.

The policy quarterlies: National Affairs and American Affairs. In today’s minute-by-minute news cycle, publications that take a step back to understand broader political undercurrents are essential. National Affairs has been my go-to journal for new conservative policy concepts and ideas for years now. American Affairs is the most interesting new publication on the Right, dealing seriously with what nationalism might contribute to our political moment.

The sports site: ProFootballFocus provides insightful analytical information on NFL players. Sometimes the brand name athletes are not the best on the field. Like all analytical tools, PFF numbers have their limits. But as a fan of the science of football it is a valuable site to gain insight on both current players and college prospects.

Helen Lewis
Associate Editor, New Statesman

Every year, I try to give up Twitter, and every year I fail. But my efforts are helped by Nuzzel, an app which shows the most popular links among your friends over the last four, eight, or 24 hours. It’s a useful way of finding what everyone is talking about, without getting sucked into the maelstrom. Even more helpfully, it also digests the most popular links from Friends of Friends, which is a good way to find articles you might not otherwise have seen.

I’m also a big fan of podcasts (I co-present the New Statesman‘s weekly politics show with Stephen Bush) because you can listen to them while cooking, cleaning or running (ha). I plan to catch up on the second series of Slow Burn, about Monica Lewinsky, when I get a minute. America is currently streets ahead of Britain in terms of longform political podcasts – I also dip into the Daily from the New York Times, The Axe Files with David Axelrod and Pod Save America.

I like newsletters, too: Caroline Crampton’s No Complaints is particularly good if you like offbeat stories and medieval manuscript gifs; for celebrity reflections, I enjoy Anne Helen Petersen of Buzzfeed. My own newsletter, The Bluestocking, is where I do behind-the-scenes commentary on my writing, and post too many articles about (separately) Jane Austen and Facebook.

Munira Mirza
Deputy Editor, All in Britain

I’ve been reading (and occasionally writing for) Spiked since it began in 2001. With a commitment to “fighting for humanism, democracy and freedom”, they have been the most consistent champions of free speech in the British media and also foretold the dangers of identity politics. It’s thought-provoking writing across a range of subjects.

I’ve loved watching a new series called Triggernometry. Two affable comedians have a go at serious, lengthy political interviews and it really works. Guests to date include David Goodhart, Joanna Williams, Helen Pluckrose (and me).

Arts and Letters Daily is a treasure chest of articles and essays compiled across the English-speaking media. You can find real diamonds on a diversity of topics – from the poetry of Allen Ginsberg to the semiotics of sleep. The criteria seem to be “whatever makes your brain fizz”. I’d recommend it as a full-fat, luxurious alternative to Twitter over the Christmas season.”

Suggested reading

Let's celebrate the pilgrims, not demonise them

By Munira Mirza

John Rentoul,
Chief Political Commentator, The Independent

You may remember a thing called Google Reader, which was a blog aggregator. It was a website that looked a bit like email. It was ugly but simple, and it told you when a blog or news source had a new post. That was in the heyday of blogs, a brief flowering of eclectic commentary before Facebook and Twitter really took off.

Anyway, Google Reader was much loved by a smallish band of devotees, including me, but was discontinued by Google because it was trivial, non-core and had no prospects of making money. So these days I use an aggregator called Feedly, which does roughly the same thing, using the same semi-obsolete RSS feeds, most of which still work.

That’s how I keep track of Tyler Cowen, Chris Dillow and Mike Smithson, who keep the tradition of blogging going. Cowen in particular, an American polymath, has a genius for spotting fascinating new research in economics and behavioural psychology.

Those are the unconventional media sources that leaven the current obsessions of the parliamentary lobby.

Torsten Bell
Director, Resolution Foundation

With Brexit dominating so much of the news coverage, it’s tempting to escape it all with a good (and ideally very long) novel. But there are plenty of other ways to hear about new thinking and alternative perspectives.

Wonky blogs are a great place to learn about new research, often with handy summaries that may be more use than long papers that are a little too ‘academic’. I’d recommend VoxEU as a good start for economics-related content.

For podcasts, I’d recommend this Tim Harford classic on Radio 4 and Gary Gibbon’s excellent Where Next? on Channel 4 – or if Brexit has kindled a new found interest in international trade, you can try Soumaya Keynes’s (of the Economist) Trade Talks.

Finally, crowdsourcing. At RF we have a culture of sharing around the best reads, which I summarise in a weekly email. Word of mouth (or email at least) beats Twitter hands down.

Bidisha
Broadcaster and journalist

When I’m not ‘wording’, I’m a fine artist making films and photographs. My 2019 resolutions are to make my second film, Cold Reading, following my debut An Impossible Poison (2017) and launch my first photo book, The Last English Dancing Season.

To that end, The Artists Information Company is invaluable as sprawling site of news, reviews and blogs about contemporary art.

I also love the film journal Another Gaze which examines the work of women directors and supports women film critics. When I’m feeling isolated as an artist, I go onto Twitter and follow the #WomensArt hashtag which connects me with the work of amazing visual artists from all eras and countries.

Suggested reading

The growing power of the YouTube Right

By Gavin Haynes

Gavin Haynes
Editor-at-large, Vice UK

Bill Simmons’s fabulously over-resourced Grantland used to be the most anarchic yet carefully curated thing on the net, a place where you had Carles from HipsterRunoff churning out a thousand surrealistic words about the Tour de France. Then ESPN turned off the money hose, and now he has The Ringer, which is still a great grab-bag of meaty pop culture dives but has less of the ring of blank cheques to it.

TrendHunter is still an interesting place to get lost in. It’s an endless rain of gadgets, fads and conceptual architecture.

David Fuller, a former Channel 4 producer, has perked up my eyeballs recently with long form chats with the likes of essayist and technologist Jordan Greenhall.

Popular Twitter account I,Hypocrite offers an excellent weekly video digest of all those talking point news clips that you read about but never got round to watching. In common with many creators, he has become nervy about YouTube’s censorious direction, and fled to grey-net competitor BitChute.

Digg has fallen off most radars in the past decade, but their daily email digest generates more click-throughs from me than anything else. It’s like Buzzfeed for people who haven’t been brain-damaged by the past decade of the internet.

Finally, Reddit/relationship_advice is the need to know place if your significant other is faking a pregnancy, has suddenly discovered scat, or overslept for your granny’s funeral. A classic case of people who shouldn’t be advising anyone advising people whose relationship troubles are so deep they are beyond advice. All together now: “DUMP HIM!”

Emma Barnett
Radio presenter and journalist
New writing and plays at the Donmar Warehouse and Royal Court. For example – the Donmar’s season on power and the first grime musical at the Royal Court left me fired up and gave me windows into new worlds and struggles.

The Slow Burn podcast by Slate – the luxury of taking a deep dive into an old news story you thought you knew is akin to a long hot soak in a much-needed bath.

Steven Pinker
Author and Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard

Our World in Data is a site that portrays our world with data rather than with headlines. The view is utterly different.

News is about what happens, like wars and epidemics, not what doesn’t happen, like peace and health. And it’s about what happens suddenly, whereas the world is often transformed gradually in increments that add up to momentous change.

The economist Max Roser has assembled an astonishing array of datasets about the world, with visualisation tools that make them easy to grasp, and concise commentaries that highlight the major trends and developments and explain why they happened. One comes away from the site with a radically different and far more accurate image of the world and times we live in.

Suggested reading

Test article

By Oliver Kamm

Christina Sommers
Scholar, American Enterprise Institute

” The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.” This quotation is ubiquitous and usually attributed to Albert Einstein. But there is no evidence he said it. According to the indispensable website Quote Investigator (QI), the closest match first appeared in a 1981 Narcotics Anonymous pamphlet. After that, it flouted around self-help circles for a few years. By 1990, newspapers began attributing it to Einstein. Now it’s an internet staple,

QI’s long list of fake quotations is a revelation. Edmund Burke never said, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” Still, the faux aphorism is a favorite on social media. Everyday, throngs of Twitter and Facebook users pass it along. Someone needs to direct them to Quote Investigator.

Peter Oborne
Journalist and author

I find Conflicts Forum, run by Alastair Crooke and Aisling Byrne, essential for understanding the emerging world order. Their subscription press service has a brilliant knack of pinpointing illuminating articles in unlikely places. In addition, Crooke provides a weekly essay which contains the best and clearest geopolitical analysis you will find anywhere. He has been proved right about events time and again.

Middle East Eye, a site I also write for that was founded three years ago, goes from strength to strength. It provides an illuminating new perspective on the Middle East, and its reporting is rigorous and impartial. MEE led the way on the rise of Mohammad Bin Salman, leading onto the Jamal Khashoggi tragedy.

Voice of Rohingya, a Twitter account (@VoiceRohingyaa) gives an appalling insight into the genocide against the Rohingya people. Finally, for British politics I love the Full Fact fact-checking service, while Hugo Dixon’s Infacts is consistently illuminating on Brexit.

Katharine Birbalsingh
Author and headmistress of Michaela Community School

When I want to read interesting viewpoints, I tend to turn to Quillette, the Australian online magazine and The Atlantic Monthly, the American online magazine.

I like Quillette because they are brave enough to question the usual dogma that weighs us all down. I may not agree with everything they say, but they certainly make me think. The Atlantic Monthly comes at news from the other side politically and from the other side of the world. I like the longer style essays that allow the author to delve deep into a subject. Again, I don’t always agree with the writers, but I enjoy the mental stimulation.

I also like watching The Rubin Report on YouTube, where David Rubin interviews someone for an hour about their area of expertise. He always chooses out-of-the-box thinkers and the interview style is conversational and inviting. I look forward to the holiday where I can really indulge in these three things!

Suggested reading

Today's laptop activists seek attention, not truth

By Tanya Gold

Jim Waterson
Media Editor, The Guardian

I always used to read the print edition of York Evening Press after school and I still check its website first thing every morning. Despite relentless cuts by owner Newsquest, it’s a pretty good model of what a local newspaper should be, with reporters who know the community. If you’re a lucky enough to still have a decent local newspaper, then read it obsessively. You’re likely to pick up on trends and stories that London-based papers miss.

Transport shapes everyone’s lives, shapes where people work, and can make a massive different to quality of life. Also, trains are brilliant. London Reconnections is one of the best written most in-depth sites around. Their post explaining Uber’s business model in the capital is well-sourced, meticulously researched, and clearly written.

A culture magazine funded as a corporate project by a shaving business should be absolutely terrible. For some reason MEL Magazine isn’t and it consistently features weird, considered takes on modern online life. And they haven’t ever tried to sell me a razor.

Elizabeth Oldfield
Director, Theos

The podcast I reliably go to when I want to feel informed, inspired and better equipped be some use in the world is OnBeing.

Created by Krista Tippett, a former New York Times journalist and diplomat, it intelligently explores matters of faith, moral imagination and what a wise life looks like now. In our noisy information environment most outlets fight for attention by being louder, shorter, simpler and seemingly shallower.

Refreshingly, Krista has grown a faithful and engaged audience by interviewing the hidden influencers, the people too busy making the world a better place to spend time on self-promotion. Listening to it helps snap me out of imposed urgency and reminds me of the fundamental questions: what does it mean to be human, how do we want to live, and who will we be to each other?

Sarah Sands
Editor, BBC Radio 4’s Today

On Twitter, I follow mostly individuals, usually reporters, often the number two or three in the pecking order who are doing a lot of unseen work. For political websites, I’m not wildly unconventional. I go to the usuals: from Politico and the FT, to ConservativeHome, Slate, and The Hill to name a random a few.

Otherwise, I read National Geographic, and look at BBC Security Correspondent Frank Gardner’s Instagram for bird pictures and sunsets. I also like Eyob Derillo at the British Library on ancient illuminated manuscripts.

When it comes to podcasts, Brexitcast and Beyond Today from the BBC, as well as David Axelrod’s The Axe Files. Finally, Dead Ringers and anything to do with Tom Service on BBC Radio 3.

George Nixon
Producer, UnHerd’s Confessions

Anything that does serious financial journalism, from Trump’s trade war to the black market in sand, and puts it in plain English is a godsend. Planet Money does it best. My favourite is #870 on Trump vs Red Tape, which features every regulation Potus has axed since taking office, set to the sound of REM’s “It’s The End Of The World As We Know It”.

What turned a star NFL Tight End who played in the Super Bowl into a convicted double murderer who hanged himself in his cell? Gladiator, a podcast from the The Boston Globe, is a series which produces more questions than answers. But the tragic story of Aaron Hernandez, of how a troubled background and superstardom can be a toxic mix, is compellingly told. Hernandez once busted someone’s eardrum as a 17-year-old university freshman in a row over a bar tab, only for the charges to be dropped after the university’s lawyers got involved. The lesson: when you’re a star, some actions don’t have consequences.

And UnHerd’s own Peter Franklin shares five tips on how to use Twitter without losing your mind

Ah, Twitter! Is there any social media site that’s more hated by its own users? We’re all addicted, of course – but here are some harm reduction tips for 2019.

Firstly, don’t argue with strangers. Obvious really, but all the same, just don’t.

Secondly, and further to the above, turn off your mentions – or at least restrict them to people you follow.

Thirdly, though Twitter is a truly horrible forum for debate, it’s a brilliant noticeboard. Try following fewer individuals (especially ranters, emoters, edgelords and news junkies) and follow more publications (especially those that publish and link to the work of thoughtful, insightful writers).”

Here are a couple of suggestions:

The New York Times is not exactly the most unheard-of publications – but for links to some of the impressive analytical journalism and infographics available in the world today, follow @upshotNYT and @NYTgraphics accounts.

On the other side of US political aisle, but very reasonably so, is the Institute for Family Studies. For links to eye-opening social research (and to brilliant writers and researchers like @lymanstoneky and @wilcoxNMP), follow the Inst. Family Studies account.

Breaking my rule about individual accounts, I can gratefully recommend Sunder Katwala’s – who manages to tweet about Brexit, immigration and other divisive issues without being divisive. I don’t always agree with him, but his tweets are a peaceful island in a roiling, angry, snarky ocean.

Fourthly, get a reader app like Pocket that allows you to quickly download articles from Twitter links.

Fifthly, once you’ve got something grown-up to read, get off Twitter.

Suggested reading

On Twitter, I too become an arse

By Giles Fraser

Steven Pinker
Author and Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard

Our World in Data is a site that portrays our world with data rather than with headlines. The view is utterly different.

News is about what happens, like wars and epidemics, not what doesn’t happen, like peace and health. And it’s about what happens suddenly, whereas the world is often transformed gradually in increments that add up to momentous change.

The economist Max Roser has assembled an astonishing array of datasets about the world, with visualisation tools that make them easy to grasp, and concise commentaries that highlight the major trends and developments and explain why they happened. One comes away from the site with a radically different and far more accurate image of the world and times we live in.

Christina Sommers
Scholar, American Enterprise Institute

” The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.” This quotation is ubiquitous and usually attributed to Albert Einstein. But there is no evidence he said it. According to the indispensable website Quote Investigator (QI), the closest match first appeared in a 1981 Narcotics Anonymous pamphlet. After that, it flouted around self-help circles for a few years. By 1990, newspapers began attributing it to Einstein. Now it’s an internet staple,

QI’s long list of fake quotations is a revelation. Edmund Burke never said, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” Still, the faux aphorism is a favorite on social media. Everyday, throngs of Twitter and Facebook users pass it along. Someone needs to direct them to Quote Investigator.

Peter Oborne
Journalist and author

I find Conflicts Forum, run by Alastair Crooke and Aisling Byrne, essential for understanding the emerging world order. Their subscription press service has a brilliant knack of pinpointing illuminating articles in unlikely places. In addition, Crooke provides a weekly essay which contains the best and clearest geopolitical analysis you will find anywhere. He has been proved right about events time and again.

Middle East Eye, a site I also write for that was founded three years ago, goes from strength to strength. It provides an illuminating new perspective on the Middle East, and its reporting is rigorous and impartial. MEE led the way on the rise of Mohammad Bin Salman, leading onto the Jamal Khashoggi tragedy.

Voice of Rohingya, a Twitter account (@VoiceRohingyaa) gives an appalling insight into the genocide against the Rohingya people. Finally, for British politics I love the Full Fact fact-checking service, while Hugo Dixon’s Infacts is consistently illuminating on Brexit.

Katharine Birbalsingh
Author and headmistress of Michaela Community School

When I want to read interesting viewpoints, I tend to turn to Quillette, the Australian online magazine and The Atlantic Monthly, the American online magazine.

I like Quillette because they are brave enough to question the usual dogma that weighs us all down. I may not agree with everything they say, but they certainly make me think. The Atlantic Monthly comes at news from the other side politically and from the other side of the world. I like the longer style essays that allow the author to delve deep into a subject. Again, I don’t always agree with the writers, but I enjoy the mental stimulation.

I also like watching The Rubin Report on YouTube, where David Rubin interviews someone for an hour about their area of expertise. He always chooses out-of-the-box thinkers and the interview style is conversational and inviting. I look forward to the holiday where I can really indulge in these three things!

Jim Waterson
Media Editor, The Guardian

I always used to read the print edition of York Evening Press after school and I still check its website first thing every morning. Despite relentless cuts by owner Newsquest, it’s a pretty good model of what a local newspaper should be, with reporters who know the community. If you’re a lucky enough to still have a decent local newspaper, then read it obsessively. You’re likely to pick up on trends and stories that London-based papers miss.

Transport shapes everyone’s lives, shapes where people work, and can make a massive different to quality of life. Also, trains are brilliant. London Reconnections is one of the best written most in-depth sites around. Their post explaining Uber’s business model in the capital is well-sourced, meticulously researched, and clearly written.

A culture magazine funded as a corporate project by a shaving business should be absolutely terrible. For some reason MEL Magazine isn’t and it consistently features weird, considered takes on modern online life. And they haven’t ever tried to sell me a razor.

Elizabeth Oldfield
Director, Theos

The podcast I reliably go to when I want to feel informed, inspired and better equipped be some use in the world is OnBeing.

Created by Krista Tippett, a former New York Times journalist and diplomat, it intelligently explores matters of faith, moral imagination and what a wise life looks like now. In our noisy information environment most outlets fight for attention by being louder, shorter, simpler and seemingly shallower.

Refreshingly, Krista has grown a faithful and engaged audience by interviewing the hidden influencers, the people too busy making the world a better place to spend time on self-promotion. Listening to it helps snap me out of imposed urgency and reminds me of the fundamental questions: what does it mean to be human, how do we want to live, and who will we be to each other?

Sarah Sands
Editor, BBC Radio 4’s Today

On Twitter, I follow mostly individuals, usually reporters, often the number two or three in the pecking order who are doing a lot of unseen work. For political websites, I’m not wildly unconventional. I go to the usuals: from Politico and the FT, to ConservativeHome, Slate, and The Hill to name a random a few.

Otherwise, I read National Geographic, and look at BBC Security Correspondent Frank Gardner’s Instagram for bird pictures and sunsets. I also like Eyob Derillo at the British Library on ancient illuminated manuscripts.

When it comes to podcasts, Brexitcast and Beyond Today from the BBC, as well as David Axelrod’s The Axe Files. Finally, Dead Ringers and anything to do with Tom Service on BBC Radio 3.

And UnHerd’s own Peter Franklin shares five tips on how to use Twitter without losing your mind

Ah, Twitter! Is there any social media site that’s more hated by its own users? We’re all addicted, of course – but here are some harm reduction tips for 2019.

Firstly, don’t argue with strangers. Obvious really, but all the same, just don’t.

Secondly, and further to the above, turn off your mentions – or at least restrict them to people you follow.

Thirdly, though Twitter is a truly horrible forum for debate, it’s a brilliant noticeboard. Try following fewer individuals (especially ranters, emoters, edgelords and news junkies) and follow more publications (especially those that publish and link to the work of thoughtful, insightful writers).”

Here are a couple of suggestions:

The New York Times is not exactly the most unheard-of publications – but for links to some of the impressive analytical journalism and infographics available in the world today, follow @upshotNYT and @NYTgraphics accounts.

On the other side of US political aisle, but very reasonably so, is the Institute for Family Studies. For links to eye-opening social research (and to brilliant writers and researchers like @lymanstoneky and @wilcoxNMP), follow the Inst. Family Studies account.

Breaking my rule about individual accounts, I can gratefully recommend Sunder Katwala’s – who manages to tweet about Brexit, immigration and other divisive issues without being divisive. I don’t always agree with him, but his tweets are a peaceful island in a roiling, angry, snarky ocean.

Fourthly, get a reader app like Pocket that allows you to quickly download articles from Twitter links.

Fifthly, once you’ve got something grown-up to read, get off Twitter.

Part One

New Year, New Media – part one

By Various

Marco Rubio
US Senator

In the American Senate, the most typical sources for unconventional reporting are my colleague’s stories from back home. Here are a few media outlets to which I also turn:

Our national political reporting frequently tries to find conflict or a political horserace to every story. That can be frustrating to those who just want well reported facts about what is actually happening in our country and communities. It’s why I’m a huge supporter of local news. There isn’t a better source for Florida politics than Sayfie Review. It’s a one-stop shop for everything happening in the Sunshine State, from the Florida Keys to the Panhandle.

The policy quarterlies: National Affairs and American Affairs. In today’s minute-by-minute news cycle, publications that take a step back to understand broader political undercurrents are essential. National Affairs has been my go-to journal for new conservative policy concepts and ideas for years now. American Affairs is the most interesting new publication on the Right, dealing seriously with what nationalism might contribute to our political moment.

The sports site: ProFootballFocus provides insightful analytical information on NFL players. Sometimes the brand name athletes are not the best on the field. Like all analytical tools, PFF numbers have their limits. But as a fan of the science of football it is a valuable site to gain insight on both current players and college prospects.

Helen Lewis
Associate Editor, New Statesman

Every year, I try to give up Twitter, and every year I fail. But my efforts are helped by Nuzzel, an app which shows the most popular links among your friends over the last four, eight, or 24 hours. It’s a useful way of finding what everyone is talking about, without getting sucked into the maelstrom. Even more helpfully, it also digests the most popular links from Friends of Friends, which is a good way to find articles you might not otherwise have seen.

I’m also a big fan of podcasts (I co-present the New Statesman‘s weekly politics show with Stephen Bush) because you can listen to them while cooking, cleaning or running (ha). I plan to catch up on the second series of Slow Burn, about Monica Lewinsky, when I get a minute. America is currently streets ahead of Britain in terms of longform political podcasts – I also dip into the Daily from the New York Times, The Axe Files with David Axelrod and Pod Save America.

I like newsletters, too: Caroline Crampton’s No Complaints is particularly good if you like offbeat stories and medieval manuscript gifs; for celebrity reflections, I enjoy Anne Helen Petersen of Buzzfeed. My own newsletter, The Bluestocking, is where I do behind-the-scenes commentary on my writing, and post too many articles about (separately) Jane Austen and Facebook.

Munira Mirza
Deputy Editor, All in Britain

I’ve been reading (and occasionally writing for) Spiked since it began in 2001. With a commitment to “fighting for humanism, democracy and freedom”, they have been the most consistent champions of free speech in the British media and also foretold the dangers of identity politics. It’s thought-provoking writing across a range of subjects.

I’ve loved watching a new series called Triggernometry. Two affable comedians have a go at serious, lengthy political interviews and it really works. Guests to date include David Goodhart, Joanna Williams, Helen Pluckrose (and me).

Arts and Letters Daily is a treasure chest of articles and essays compiled across the English-speaking media. You can find real diamonds on a diversity of topics – from the poetry of Allen Ginsberg to the semiotics of sleep. The criteria seem to be “whatever makes your brain fizz”. I’d recommend it as a full-fat, luxurious alternative to Twitter over the Christmas season.”

John Rentoul,
Chief Political Commentator, The Independent

You may remember a thing called Google Reader, which was a blog aggregator. It was a website that looked a bit like email. It was ugly but simple, and it told you when a blog or news source had a new post. That was in the heyday of blogs, a brief flowering of eclectic commentary before Facebook and Twitter really took off.

Anyway, Google Reader was much loved by a smallish band of devotees, including me, but was discontinued by Google because it was trivial, non-core and had no prospects of making money. So these days I use an aggregator called Feedly, which does roughly the same thing, using the same semi-obsolete RSS feeds, most of which still work.

That’s how I keep track of Tyler Cowen, Chris Dillow and Mike Smithson, who keep the tradition of blogging going. Cowen in particular, an American polymath, has a genius for spotting fascinating new research in economics and behavioural psychology.

Those are the unconventional media sources that leaven the current obsessions of the parliamentary lobby.

Torsten Bell
Director, Resolution Foundation

With Brexit dominating so much of the news coverage, it’s tempting to escape it all with a good (and ideally very long) novel. But there are plenty of other ways to hear about new thinking and alternative perspectives.

Wonky blogs are a great place to learn about new research, often with handy summaries that may be more use than long papers that are a little too ‘academic’. I’d recommend VoxEU as a good start for economics-related content.

For podcasts, I’d recommend this Tim Harford classic on Radio 4 and Gary Gibbon’s excellent Where Next? on Channel 4 – or if Brexit has kindled a new found interest in international trade, you can try Soumaya Keynes’s (of the Economist) Trade Talks.

Finally, crowdsourcing. At RF we have a culture of sharing around the best reads, which I summarise in a weekly email. Word of mouth (or email at least) beats Twitter hands down.

Bidisha
Broadcaster and journalist

When I’m not ‘wording’, I’m a fine artist making films and photographs. My 2019 resolutions are to make my second film, Cold Reading, following my debut An Impossible Poison (2017) and launch my first photo book, The Last English Dancing Season.

To that end, The Artists Information Company is invaluable as sprawling site of news, reviews and blogs about contemporary art.

I also love the film journal Another Gaze which examines the work of women directors and supports women film critics. When I’m feeling isolated as an artist, I go onto Twitter and follow the #WomensArt hashtag which connects me with the work of amazing visual artists from all eras and countries.

Gavin Haynes
Editor-at-large, Vice UK

Bill Simmons’s fabulously over-resourced Grantland used to be the most anarchic yet carefully curated thing on the net, a place where you had Carles from HipsterRunoff churning out a thousand surrealistic words about the Tour de France. Then ESPN turned off the money hose, and now he has The Ringer, which is still a great grab-bag of meaty pop culture dives but has less of the ring of blank cheques to it.

TrendHunter is still an interesting place to get lost in. It’s an endless rain of gadgets, fads and conceptual architecture.

David Fuller, a former Channel 4 producer, has perked up my eyeballs recently with long form chats with the likes of essayist and technologist Jordan Greenhall.

Popular Twitter account I,Hypocrite offers an excellent weekly video digest of all those talking point news clips that you read about but never got round to watching. In common with many creators, he has become nervy about YouTube’s censorious direction, and fled to grey-net competitor BitChute.

Digg has fallen off most radars in the past decade, but their daily email digest generates more click-throughs from me than anything else. It’s like Buzzfeed for people who haven’t been brain-damaged by the past decade of the internet.

Finally, Reddit/relationship_advice is the need to know place if your significant other is faking a pregnancy, has suddenly discovered scat, or overslept for your granny’s funeral. A classic case of people who shouldn’t be advising anyone advising people whose relationship troubles are so deep they are beyond advice. All together now: “DUMP HIM!”

Emma Barnett
Radio presenter and journalist
New writing and plays at the Donmar Warehouse and Royal Court. For example – the Donmar’s season on power and the first grime musical at the Royal Court left me fired up and gave me windows into new worlds and struggles.

The Slow Burn podcast by Slate – the luxury of taking a deep dive into an old news story you thought you knew is akin to a long hot soak in a much-needed bath.

George Nixon
Producer, UnHerd’s Confessions

Anything that does serious financial journalism, from Trump’s trade war to the black market in sand, and puts it in plain English is a godsend. Planet Money does it best. My favourite is #870 on Trump vs Red Tape, which features every regulation Potus has axed since taking office, set to the sound of REM’s “It’s The End Of The World As We Know It”.

What turned a star NFL Tight End who played in the Super Bowl into a convicted double murderer who hanged himself in his cell? Gladiator, a podcast from the The Boston Globe, is a series which produces more questions than answers. But the tragic story of Aaron Hernandez, of how a troubled background and superstardom can be a toxic mix, is compellingly told. Hernandez once busted someone’s eardrum as a 17-year-old university freshman in a row over a bar tab, only for the charges to be dropped after the university’s lawyers got involved. The lesson: when you’re a star, some actions don’t have consequences.

Now read Part Two

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By Various