As you may have already guessed, persevilience is a mashup of perseverance and resilience, “perhaps with a little bit of persistence and patience thrown in”. But our author repeatedly emphasizes that the confection is more than the sum of its parts. His friend Keir Starmer, for instance, possesses both perseverance and resilience, but as Labour prime minister “lacked sufficient reserves in the persevilience bank”. In contrast, Tony Blair had reserves in spades. Whether Andy Burnham is truly persevilient remains to be seen, but the signs during the leadership crisis were at least promising. Like a character in a video game, “Burnham’s persevilience simply overpowered Starmer’s resilience, no matter how hard he fought”.

Even at this early stage in the book, I had a few questions, and not just about how the friendship with Starmer was now going. One of these concerned whether readers were supposed to take any of this seriously, though it appears so: a couple of jokes are included, but most of the book’s content is delivered straight-faced. The publisher’s blurb, reproduced on Campbell’s personal website, even compares Persevilience to Francis Fukuyama’s seminal The End of History, trumpeting that it too “has the potential to enter the bloodstream of political conversation and, ultimately, help us better understand and thrive in the ever more challenging world around us”. (I know what you’re thinking — how very ambumptious — but that’s Alastair Campbell for you.)

My next burning philosophical question concerned what the attribute of persevilience really amounts to, given that our author keeps insisting it isn’t just perseverance plus resilience, plus a few semantic sprinkles. Anyone can take two familiar concepts, put them together, and make up a new name for the conjunction. You may have noticed that I just did. One could also observe that on his smash hit podcast The Rest is Politics, co-hosted with the intermittently prignorant Rory Stewart, Campbell is mostly hubristling and shrugnacious; while in the writing of his books, he tends more towards the mawkward. But is the discovery of persevilience any deeper than this?

To be fair, the former Labour spin doctor does have a stab at defining his big idea for the benefit of future dictionaries. Persevilience, he tells us, is “the ability of an individual, group or organization to turn any situation, setback or meaningful experience into a positive opportunity to grow, to advance and secure their core interests and beliefs”. “Positive”, “grow” and “advance” are doing a lot of heavy lifting here. The aim seems to be to connect the concept of persevilience firmly to Left-liberal values and role models — that is, to differentiate it from its suspiciously conservative-sounding conceptual relatives — and much of the rest of the text bears this interpretation out.

More from this author

The cult of AI armageddon

By Kathleen Stock

Fittingly persevilient heroes offered up for contemplation include Campbell’s close friend, the magazine editor Lindsay Nicholson, who lost both her husband and young daughter to cancer; the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous, Bill Wilson and Dr Bob Smith; and Nelson Mandela in his Robben Island days (“he was persevilience in human form, and is now persevilience personified in historical form, for all time”). And whereas Campbell thinks perseverance and resilience are “words of drudge and struggle”, persevilience “is all about hope and progress”, requiring regular doses of optimism and joy.

If you focused only on these particular sections of the book, you might conclude that persevilience is distinguished from its more mundane ancestors by being aimed only at noble social causes, and thrillingly set to “Things Can Only Get Better” by D:Ream. But here we hit a bump in the road; for after a lot of uplifting, air-punching rhetoric, Campbell suddenly admits that persevilience can be dedicated to nefarious ends too.

Through evidently gritted teeth, he states that sworn foes such as Donald Trump and Nigel Farage — regularly excoriated on The Rest is Politics — also make the cut. Trump has survived scandals and shootings; Farage has weathered a car crash and a plane crash; both have achieved great political success. Campbell does not flinch from his unpleasant conclusion: “I must reluctantly accept that I cannot stop [persevilience] being applied to certain people just because I disagree with their politics or don’t like the cut of their jib”.

At this point, I longed to ask: but why must you accept this, Alastair? You have made this whole thing up, after all. Can’t you just make it refer to whatever you want? You don’t need to allow that there is, by your own lights, evil in persevilience (even if, as a matter of spelling, this is literally true). It’s your word!

Yet still our hero insists on facing the unwanted conclusion: “persevilience can be used for bad as well as good, wrong as well as right”. And with this admission, the book collapses; for its main selling point was clearly conceived as a guide to changing the world for the better, in a soggy, progressive sort of way. It wasn’t supposed to turn into The Art of the Deal halfway through.

In some ways, it seems absurd to be seriously analyzing this stuff. As the narrative meanders along, the combination of the author’s fierce commitment to his project and frequent repetition of the word “persevilience” becomes exponentially ridiculous and Partridge-like, at times reducing this reader to shoulder-shaking hysteria. How the man could type sentences like “Complacency is a killer of a persevilient mindset” without cracking up entirely, I do not know. Yet at the same time, the book illustrates an interesting fact about modern conceptions of virtuous characteristics, albeit inadvertently: namely, nobody knows whether they are supposed to be valuable as means or as ends.

In antiquity, aspects such as courage and temperance were self-evidently admirable; constituents of a flourishing life, by definition. In early Christianity, too, habits such as charity and prudence were not just the means of getting something from God; on the contrary, they were beautiful and holy in themselves. But as centuries passed, Western culture started to lose the idea that human characteristics could be admirable in this way, regardless of what they led to. Instead, behaviors and attitudes seemed to get their value from contributing to wider desirable ends, either socially or economically or both.

In Victorian times, for instance, industriousness, thrift, and sobriety were prized; each conceived of as likely leading to a more harmonious, economically productive whole. But since the relation between virtue and value was now extrinsic, it followed that you could sometimes use virtuous habits and attitudes for bad ends as well as for good. Industry, thrift, and sobriety could sometimes help evildoers reach their goals more quickly, just as they helped more saintly types.

In today’s liberal and post-Christian climate, neither approach to virtue sits particularly well. There is little agreement about wider social or economic ends: do we want growth, or degrowth? Assimilated social cohesion, or a riot of individuality? Without consensus on shared aims, there is zero chance of agreeing on a particular set of “virtuous” attitudes and behaviors that might count as a useful means — as a useful means to what, exactly? And at the same time, without a classical-style or religious metaphysics, it is hard to justify the lingering sense that some habits and behaviors are just more admirable than others, full stop.

As Alasdair MacIntyre pointed out, what we are left with is a set of outdated intuitions about the virtues, orphaned from the cultural traditions in which they found their original meaning. We can’t decide whether habits like perseverance and resilience are genuinely good in themselves, or whether they inherit their value (or not) from the social goals to which they are directed. And so it is that Campbell’s heart wants to construe persevilience as the preserve of deeply admirable heroes, while his head puzzledly concedes that arch-enemies can be persevilient too.

The lack of grounding is also apparent in his incredibly vague wording about what persevilience really is, and about what it can lead to — the finding of “meaning, purpose, and life satisfaction”, as he puts it at one point. As long as you can’t specify what these things are much more concretely, you leave open the awful possibility — presumably personally devastating to Campbell — that Donald Trump has meaning, purpose, and life satisfaction too.

On the plus side, this also means that the terrifying technocratic future Campbell enthusiastically conjures — a place where principals instruct their students about persevilience, and businesses do “persevilience audit[s]” — is unlikely. Surely even the civil service couldn’t operationalize something this chronically vague. Take my word for it: if you ever hear persevilience being talked about somewhere other than The Rest is Politics, it will be a sign that we are absolutely scrucked.

It is in this context that Burnham’s latest Brexit “bombshell” should be read. Speaking to Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart on The Rest Is Politics, Burnham claimed to have “clear” evidence that Russia interfered in the 2016 referendum — implying that Moscow had successfully tilted the vote towards Leave — while offering no details, let alone evidence. The goal, though, seems clear enough: to delegitimize the referendum result once and for all, and so pave the way for its reversal. And what better pretext than the Russian bogeyman?

This fits a wider pattern. Since the 2016 Russiagate fiasco, it has become standard practice among Western elites, especially in Europe, to blame every unwelcome election result — and above all every “populist” rebuke to their rule — on Russian “disinformation” and “interference”. The campaign has escalated dramatically since 2022. We are told that Russia has for years been running a vast influence operation aimed at manipulating helpless voters. Yet the evidence that this operation has reached, let alone swayed, any meaningful number of them is scant to say the least.

The consequences, however, are not. Across Europe, the specter of “Russian disinformation” has been used to push through sweeping censorship regimes — chiefly via the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) — and “election-management” tools like the European Democracy Shield. The most extreme case came in Romania in December 2024, when the Constitutional Court annulled the first round of the presidential election — won by Călin Georgescu, an independent euroskeptic and Nato critic — on the grounds of alleged Russian interference. The court cited a TikTok campaign in Georgescu’s favor, but no proof was ever offered that it was funded by Russia. Indeed, internal documents later obtained by the US House Judiciary Committee showed that TikTok had explicitly informed the Commission that it hadn’t found “any evidence” of a coordinated inauthentic network.

Suggested reading

Andy Burnham’s Rejoin fantasy

By Wolfgang Munchau

Yet EU elites plainly regard the episode as a blueprint. As former commissioner Thierry Breton put it, with disarming candor: “We did it in Romania and we will obviously have to do it in Germany, if necessary.” Right-populist parties, such as the AfD and the National Rally, are routinely branded “Russian stooges”, with the usual experts already warning of Russian interference in forthcoming elections in France and elsewhere — preparing the ground to legitimize heavy-handed interventions in the electoral process. The same script was run during this year’s Hungarian election, with the mainstream media making evidence-free claims of Russian interference on Viktor Orbán’s behalf. Meanwhile, journalists and analysts have been sanctioned by the EU for “spreading Russian propaganda”, which in practice means dissenting from the EU-Nato line on Ukraine, as evident in the case of former Swiss army colonel Jacques Baud, among others.

The EU, in other words, is at the forefront of an authoritarian trend: invoking a permanent Russian threat to justify a rolling assault on democratic norms, from online censorship to the repression of dissent. It is hardly surprising, then, that Burnham, the Europhile that he is, should borrow a page — or rather a chapter — from the Brussels playbook. As is customary with sweeping claims against Russia, he offered no evidence for his Brexit claims. His statement was nonetheless amplified across the mainstream media. Indeed, pro-EU groups have duly called for Britain to rejoin in light of the Prime Minister’s “revelation”. “We have suspected for years that the 2016 referendum could have been subjected to interference because of how its result helped destabilize a united Europe,” said Richard Kilpatrick of European Movement UK. “Disinformation played a role at the time and it is important to have this public confirmation of those suspicions.”

Public confirmation, or rather evidence, would indeed be welcome — especially since the question has been investigated several times, and nothing has turned up. In 2020, Parliament’s intelligence and security committee published its Russia report. It reached no finding of interference in the referendum, though it blamed the Government for never commissioning an intelligence assessment of the question. Whitehall’s response was that it had seen no evidence of successful interference and therefore saw no need for one.

That same year, Elizabeth Denham, then information commissioner, concluded a three-year investigation into the use of personal data in political campaigning, including during the Brexit referendum, centered on Cambridge Analytica and its parent, SCL Group. Having examined more than 300,000 documents and some 700 terabytes of seized material, she reported that she had “found no further evidence to change [her] earlier view that SCL/CA were not involved in the EU referendum campaign in the UK”, and that her office had found “no additional evidence of Russian involvement” in the material recovered from the companies’ servers.

More from this author

Will Europe ever wake up?

By Thomas Fazi

Another study by the Oxford Internet Institute examined thousands of tweets before the Brexit referendum and also found “little evidence” of Russian interference — though, to be fair, Twitter later revealed that the Russian broadcast RT had spent a total of £767 on adverts during the referendum. Facebook further reported that it had found no evidence of significant Russian advertising on its platform around Brexit, though accounts linked to the Internet Research Agency, a Russian “troll farm”, had spent 97 cents on three adverts shown to UK users (about immigration, not Brexit as such) and together generating around 200 impressions.

Funnily enough, this careful approach was backed by none other than Burnham’s own Foreign Office minister, Stephen Doughty, who, asked by Sky News about Burnham’s claims, said: “Well, the security minister has spoken about this before, and he’s been very clear that they’ve attempted to [but] they haven’t succeeded.” That is a very different statement from Burnham’s; the Prime Minister’s words were carefully chosen to imply, without quite saying it, that Russia had indeed swung the vote. If not, why raise it in a conversation about rejoining the EU?

Compare all this with the establishment-led Remain campaign, which enlisted most of the mainstream media and the Government itself — which spent more than £9 million of public money on a Remain leaflet delivered to every household. Add to that the EU, which funds many of the universities, research bodies and NGOs that lined up behind Remain, and private actors such as George Soros, who later bankrolled the anti-Brexit campaign to the tune of at least £400,000. In short, the Remainers campaigned openly, lavishly and with the full weight of the state behind them. Which is probably why they have never gotten over the fact that they lost.

It is, of course, possible that Burnham has been shown damning evidence buried for a decade. But how likely is that? The fact that he chose to make his claim to Alastair Campbell, of all people, is ironic indeed, given the latter’s role in the Iraq war debacle. Burnham, it is worth recalling, voted for the war — a war built on claims that could easily have been disproved at the time, and indeed were by many — yet defended his vote for years afterward. Given his record, some skepticism is in order, especially since his latest suggestion is, so far, equally unsupported. And the stakes may be as high as they were a quarter of a century ago — perhaps higher. Then, it was about justifying an invasion to bolster a US-led unipolar order at the height of its power. Now, it is about propping up a liberal establishment facing its deepest crisis since the Second World War.

Little wonder Burnham is so adamant about rejoining: Brussels is the most powerful tool available to discredited national establishments, providing supranational instruments that can be deployed against democratic upheavals, and buttressing transnational financial interests, above all in the City of London, which fought Brexit a decade ago. It is also no coincidence that, on the podcast, Burnham singled out France and Germany as fellow victims of “Russian propaganda” — two countries whose leaders are at historic lows in the polls and who are likewise invoking the Russian threat to shore up their position against populist challengers.

Russia-blaming pays a further dividend too: it cements the rearmament drive. A Russia capable of swinging a British referendum is a Russia against which no expenditure is too great and no sacrifice too onerous. This narrative recasts any critic of Europe’s own choices — the “coalition of the willing”, the pledge to spend 5% of GDP on defense, the ReArm Europe borrowing schemes — as a Kremlin asset.

Indeed, one might argue that this is the real threat to democracy — not a few hundred dollars of Russian adverts, but a political class that would rather write off millions of voters as dupes of foreign propaganda. The 17.4 million who voted Leave in 2016 had profound and legitimate frustrations with the economy, with immigration and with the EU itself, and had voiced them for years without being heard. To recast them, a decade on, as the unwitting instruments of a Kremlin operation for which there is next to no evidence is not a defense of democracy but its negation. It also tells us something about Burnham himself. A prime minister who inherited a country in deep economic and social crisis might have been expected to confront its causes. Instead, his first instinct has been to relitigate 2016 and double down on the path — ever closer alignment with a sclerotic and increasingly authoritarian Brussels — that helped produce the crisis in the first place. That does not augur well for Burnham’s ability, or his willingness, to provide the answers Britain needs.

In practice, however, the division of labour between policy and politics, architect and salesman, has never been quite so benign. Far from being shrinking violets doing what is best, the powers behind the throne have all too often been true believers — feverish sectarians for fanatical causes. Here lies the paradox of the political aide. As misfits, they possess a greater desire for domination than do the exnominated parroters of establishment opinion. It is this quality that endears them to rulers. Donald Trump surely believed that only a batty figure like Steve Bannon was capable of doing something as daunting as draining the Beltway swamp. And yet the zealous aide is his own worst enemy. With no real curbs on his shadowy authority, there is the all-too-real danger of enemies accruing and mistakes multiplying. Ultimately, his unsound decisions catch up with him. So it is that his downfall is just as dramatic as his rise.

Take that political aide par excellence, Thomas Cromwell, who supplied the template for the tragedy of the power-drunk maverick. Half a millennium on, our fascination with the Cromwell story is still going strong. The late, great Hilary Mantel bagged two Bookers retelling it in her Wolf Hall series, which was followed by a Beeb adaptation. Now, the TV series is back with a sequel, Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light, another chiaroscuro romp through draughty Tudor piles enlivened by chiselled persiflage. The upshot of the renewed attention, no doubt aided by the taciturn brilliance of Mark Rylance’s sad-eyed performance, has been a reversal in Cromwell’s fortunes. Long vilified as an intemperate megalomaniac, he has been recast as one of history’s heroes.

What’s more, to contemporary sensibilities, Cromwell appears as a meritocrat. Here is the story of a plucky parvenu, a fellow of “base degree” as he himself put it, who rose to the very top through sheer skill.  It’s a rags-to-riches tale that has beguiled the very best. The German historian Geoffrey Elton’s mid-century view, now discarded but explosive at the time, was that Cromwell yanked England out of its mediaeval past by ushering in the “Tudor Revolution in Government”. Cromwell himself cultivated that image. This is the Cromwell of Holbein’s stern portrait, a mandarin hard at work with his quill and papers, unflecked by emotion, begetting England’s modern bureaucracy.

Truth be told, he did no such thing. As Diarmaid MacCulloch, his no-nonsense biographer shows, Cromwell was the quintessential mediaeval fixer, a hard-nosed, power-grubbing politico. There was nothing modern about the way he went about gobbling offices, hogging the king’s calendar, and staffing all echelons with loyalists. The rationalisation of the Privy Council as a modern cabinet of sorts, which Elton credited him for, in fact came in the way of Cromwell’s progress. He thrived in the cut and thrust of court life, its perils and possibilities, much as his descendants have done. The maverick political aides of our century — from Alastair Campbell to Dominic Cummings — really are a throwback to this Henrician world of old. Properly speaking, they are the Cromwells of today.

His modern heirs, of course, aren’t quite up there with the OG. Cromwell could be quite unsentimental in his handling of adversaries. For prophesying against the royal mésalliance with Anne Boleyn, for instance, the Catholic nun Elizabeth Barton was hung and beheaded, becoming, according to MacCulloch, “the only woman in English history to have her severed head placed among those spiked on London Bridge”. Then there was the fire and fury brought to bear on the Pilgrimage of Grace, the popular uprising by conservatives protesting social change.

Such bestial blitheness pointed to a willingness to tear up the rulebook if the occasion demanded it. But while Cromwell was a disruptor, he was also a diplomat. During his teenage stint as a globetrotting merchant, he absorbed tongues like a sponge, and in due course became “the best Italian in all England” — a linguistic ability he turned to good account by becoming Cardinal Wolsey’s protégé and later Henry VIII’s advisor during his break with the Bishop of Rome. Cromwell’s savoir-faire extended to delicate situations as well. It was as a marriage broker that he got into the good graces of England’s ruler, dealing with his breakup with Katherine of Aragon; the marriage to Boleyn, and then her beheading; and finally his wedding to a German princess, Anne of Cleves. It was the latter foray into matchmaking that proved his undoing. The well-upholstered Henry, in that innocent age before Ozempic, couldn’t get it up with Anne. Poor Cromwell became the fall guy.

Suggested reading

Alastair Campbell won't stop spinning

By Alwyn Turner

Throughout his brief decade in power, what was never in doubt was Cromwell’s ruthlessness as Henry’s enforcer. He proved capable of accelerating the pace of history without losing his grip on power — no mean achievement. Many historians have typically explained away some of his more radical measures as the work of a manipulative Machiavelli, loyal to no calling but his career. We now know, however, that Cromwell was that rare thing, a true believer, something of a fanatic even. His Protestantism, or more accurately his evangelicalism, was serious business. The historian Dominic Selwood wasn’t too far off the mark when he described Cromwell’s creed as the “Islamic State of his day”.

The same fanaticism can be glimpsed in Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s enforcer and latterly has-been podcaster. In recent years, he has tried to present himself as no more than a ventriloquist for New Labour, but at the time, Campbell appeared to be a true believer. Blair certainly thought so, describing his first encounter with the former tabloid hack as some kind of coup de foudre. Campbell had “clanking great balls”, Blair wrote in his memoirs. A rather abrasive character, Campbell was prepared to bare them at the slightest provocation, as he did during his war of retribution against David Kelly, the weapons inspector who accused Campbell of “sexing up” the Iraq dossier that made the case for the invasion that New Labour was itching for. Soon after, Kelly committed suicide. Relations between the press and government continued to deteriorate in the runup to the war thanks to Campbell’s bullying and hectoring. As a result, Campbell was dropped as Downing Street director of communications in August 2003.

Campbell may not have “sexed up” the dossier, but it is important not to lose sight of the forest for the trees. The fact remains that Campbell not only joined in beating the drums of war, but did so with an amplitude that put many of his party mates to shame. Like the cocksure Cromwell, he had something of the fundamentalist about him. And like Cromwell, his actions exacted a toll on the world beyond. The Iraq war resulted in some 600,000 deaths according to Lancet. Blair himself paid a price: along with his weird pact with Gordon Brown, it was his plummeting popularity on account of the war that led to his resignation. Still, as late as 2010, Campbell could declare that the war was one that Britain ought to be “proud of”.

The bearded Brummie Nick Timothy, by contrast, was a lesser Rasputin, despite his appropriate mien. As unelected advisors go, his reign wasn’t in any way damaging to the national fabric. His sin was more of a peccadillo. But he seems to have shared the hubris of a Campbell or Cromwell, and like them, was ultimately responsible for the reckless gambit that led to his downfall. Along with his joint chief of staff Fiona Hill, Timothy had the bright idea of cajoling his ruler into calling a snap election in 2017, thus giving Corbynism a new lease of life and his English compatriots a lesson in Northern Irish politics when May inevitably lost her majority and needed to be shored up by the DUP. After an inevitable Tory revolt, Timothy and Hill were duly put out to pasture.

More from this author

The moral weakness of Britain's ruling class

By Pratinav Anil

Thomas Cromwell’s greatest modern heir, undoubtedly, is Boris Johnson’s Svengali, Dominic Cummings. Their backgrounds, though, couldn’t have been more different. Cummings is no working-class lad from Putney. He may be an anti-establishment figure, but his credentials signal its deepest depths: Oxford via public school; father-in-law the baronet owner of Chillingham Castle; an Islington townhouse for a pied-à-terre. Also unlike Cromwell, who kept his cards close to his chest, Cummings likes to lay it on the line, as those subjected to his epithets know all too well: David Davis (“vain as Narcissus”), Nick Clegg (“revolting character”), Ed Llewellyn (“classic third-rate, suck-up-kick-down sycophant”) among others. Like Cromwell, however, Cummings was capable of being perfectly unforgiving when the occasion demanded it. Take his defence of herd immunity: the aim of the government, he declared early on in the pandemic, was to “protect the economy and if that means some pensioners die, too bad”. It’s a sentiment Cromwell might have approved of.

As Johnson’s unelected fixer, Cummings unleashed a “reign of terror”, according to Whitehall mandarins. He went over the head of Sajid Javid to fire one of the chancellor’s advisors, ordering “an armed police officer to escort her out of Downing Street”. Javid later resigned over Downing Street’s penchant for muscling in on Treasury appointments. Throughout his career, Cummings has cultivated the reputation of an iconoclast, by turns intrepid and independent. His Oxford tutor recalled that he was a bit of a Robespierre: “someone determined to bring down things that don’t work.” When he left his job as advisor to education secretary Michael Gove in 2014, Cummings explained his decision with a 237-page manifesto in which he argued that education ultimately didn’t really matter, since in the end it was genetics that determined ability.

The following year, he found himself in charge of Vote Leave, a perch from which he urged Leavers to “pick up a baseball bat and smash David Cameron and George Osborne over the head”. Cummings ran a slick show. “Take back control” was a clever empty signifier, throwing up a tent wide enough to encompass Left sovereigntists, Right xenophobes, and patriotic bien pensants. Less convincing was the downright dishonest claim that some 80 million Turks would descend on the Thames and Tyne. Cummings and his cronies would have surely known that Ankara’s accession was never a real prospect. The misrepresentation brings to mind the manner in which Boleyn was thrown under the bus by Cromwell, who maligned her for, inter alia, conducting incestuous relations with her brother.

Cummings’ next gig, his last real one, was his 16-month tenure as Johnson’s chief advisor. Early on, he set about courting “weirdos from William Gibson novels”, whose presence in the civil service would, he hoped, diminish the outsized influence of “Oxbridge English graduates”, the kind, apparently, “who chat about Lacan at dinner parties with TV producers”. At all events, unlike Cromwell, Cummings never really had a chance to shape the government in his image. His general disdain for “the rules” no doubt prompted him to break them by driving up to Durham despite reeling from Covid with his family, and then making a further sojourn to Barnard Castle despite a “weird” sensation in his eyes. His sorry-not-sorry mea culpa cut no ice. Not even Benedict Cumberbatch playing him in a biopic, nor for that matter BrewDog’s Barnard Castle Eye Test IPA, could save him from the Tory MPs clamouring for his ouster. Very simply, Cummings had made too many enemies.

These days, Campbell is a sterile podcaster, Cummings a logorrhoeic Substacker — forlorn advisors abandoned by their masters now adored only by a vanishing minority of diehards (Campbell) and blowhards (Cummings). They can thank their lucky stars that they don’t live in the age of Cromwell, when the ruling class tended to be rather literal-minded about the expression “heads will roll”. For all that, Cromwell’s age is closer to us than we might think. Shadowy figures of the likes of Morgan McSweeney, purger of the Left, and Waheed Alli, Santa to the front bench, continue to haunt Westminster, running the Labour show from behind the scenes. The throne may be gone, but the powers behind the throne remain.

With a straight face, the multi-millionaire architect of Tory austerity under Cameron tells us that new podcast will “expose how the powerful become powerless when faced with economic forces they can’t control”. Meanwhile, Balls has been filmed drumming in a band called Centrist Dad, performing a Sex Pistols number alongside ITV’s Robert Peston. Who ever said that middle-aged technocrats don’t have a sense of humour?

Certainly, in terms of exhibiting the traditional technocratic vice of advertising expertise as a way of consolidating personal power, the pair seem off to a flying start. Their podcast has already been glowingly endorsed by influential cronies. David Cameron has tweeted that the podcasters “really know their stuff”.  Michael Gove has remarked — perhaps with the sort of sincerity he has become renowned for — that these are “two of the sharpest minds I know”.

Stewart, meanwhile, already has a very popular podcast with Alastair Campbell called “The Rest is Politics”. Like the Osborne and Balls roadshow, this too is framed as bringing sensible, well-informed discussion to the masses from rather different political perspectives, modelling reasonable disagreement along the way. In reality, though, it’s a chummy love-in between two liberals with similarly middle-of-the-road instincts. In a recent episode, the pair spent a lot of time talking about which of them looked better in a kilt at Stewart’s birthday party, and how nice it was to see Theresa May and “Willie Dalrymple” on the dancefloor there too. Vidal versus Buckley this is not.

Though their schtick suggests otherwise, a typical discussion between Stewart and Campbell tends to be quite superficial — citing a few facts gleaned from the broadsheets, a sprinkling of views from this “really, really interesting guy” or that “amazing professor”, but hardly venturing to explain to any sceptics listening what exactly makes their views so interesting and amazing. (In an episode last month, a listener asked which literary character each presenter would most like to be. Stewart chose Prince Andrei from War and Peace; Campbell chose Faust. When pressed by Stewart to justify his choice, Campbell answered: “I think that would be really interesting, yeah.”)

But for me, the most irritating thing about “The Rest Is Politics” is that it has pretensions to de-escalate and depolarise, and yet still patronises the life out of a huge number of voters: namely the supposedly weak-minded fools who voted for Johnson or Trump. “Populist” leaders are habitually presented as an obvious enemy, and the most charitable explanation Stewart and Campbell can muster for anyone voting for them inevitably involves susceptibility to manipulation, either by a corrupt media or by the politicians directly. Perhaps they assume that it is more palatable for grown adults to be called gullible than iniquitous, but I’m not so sure.

Stewart’s new book, meanwhile, is basically a plea for more intelligence in politics. He first entered parliament with a lively, inquisitive mind, a strong sense of duty, and a frankly astonishing CV that included tutoring Prince William, acting as governor of an Iraqi province under occupation, and running a NGO in Afghanistan. Yet once an MP, every aspect of the Tory party system seemed to conspire to subdue his native wit and initiative.

He soon discovered that the only acceptable activities for a newbie were toadying up to leaders and slavishly following orders. If you asked a searching question about an incoming piece of legislation, you were mocked. If you knew more than the average person about a particular policy area, this would be treated as a positive reason to keep you away from it. Phones pinged constantly with the latest messaging to be memorised, and the whips were ruthless in crushing free thought and free movement. Working for Liz Truss at Defra, she advised Stewart to “never be interesting”, though he didn’t listen.

Little by little, Stewart started to feel that parliament “reduced” him. Soon after giving a maiden speech comparing himself to Scott of the Antarctic, he found himself hiding in the toilets rather than voting as directed by the whips. A funny speech of his went viral — in which he talks Latin about hedgehogs — but few of his carefully prepared, serious interventions made a dent. Once he started to get slightly bigger political jobs, the list of people who wouldn’t listen to his good ideas grew longer by the year. Civil servants, ministers and prime ministers, ambassadors, foreign dignitaries, and world leaders all remained stubbornly oblivious. Eventually he got a job as prisons minister, and was for the first time allowed the autonomy and resources to make a tangible positive difference.

More from this author

The four thinkers who took on the mob

By Kathleen Stock

His story certainly illustrates a pressing issue. Running a country these days involves oversight of hundreds of highly complex systems and sub-systems — economic, technological, judicial, diplomatic — directed at whatever goals currently judged socially desirable by voters or their representatives. Yet as Stewart said in an interview this week: The truth is… politicians don’t really know what’s going on. And yet we pretend to the public that we do.”

One suggestion in the book is that those destined for ministerial portfolios should be recruited from relevant specialist backgrounds, and then given enough time to see their initiatives through to the end. He bemoans the fact that “fluent Chinese speakers, decorated colonels, physicians, lawyers and many successful businessmen” were left on the backbenches by Cameron and May. New ministers are “amateur outsiders on very short tours, whose successors could introduce completely different agendas”.

Stewart clearly dreams of a system in which brilliant MPs of the right vision and experience are left to get on with innovation at the operational level, unhampered by the gloomy obstructions of The Blob and the reshuffling whims of their leaders. He is less clear about why the experts he wants in the system have to be MPs; why could they not, say, be members of a reformed, more collegiate, and less obstructive civil service? The implied answer seems to be: because that way, Stewart wouldn’t get to run things.

Still, few could disagree with his general sentiment. The cost of the Tories’ phobia of details are vividly sketched. At their most surreal, Stewart’s recollected exchanges with those in charge of the country read like the darkest of Evelyn Waugh satires. As Secretary of State for Defra, Liz Truss tells him: “I don’t believe in rural affairs, Rory. I think there is no relevant difference between rural and urban populations.” As Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson asks him to “sort out Libya”, describing it as a “bite-sized problem”. When Stewart demurs that the UK has no embassy there and so no real diplomatic influence, Johnson tells him to be more optimistic: he just has to motivate people.

The obvious dangers of technocracy include corruption and voter disenfranchisement. Stewart seems to think the antidote is a more participatory politics, involving things such as citizens’ assemblies to “build consensus”. If there had been a citizens’ assembly on Brexit, he thinks, “you would have ended up with a customs union”. This is a common enough technocratic fantasy, floated many times before by those such as Obama and Clinton: that if people with adequate intelligence are given access to the right sort of detailed information and time to think about it, their conclusions about practical decision-making will converge.

More from this author

What does Caitlin Moran know about men?

By Kathleen Stock

But to me, this just further betrays the extent to which, for all his talk of avoiding polarisation, Stewart is still mired in the classic patrician attitude of the educated liberal who equates “clever” with “good” with “what me and my friends think”. His fantasy just isn’t true. Even when people agree about all the relevant facts in some domain, their radically different values will affect how they each respectively order and prioritise those facts, and what outcomes they then favour. And this does not necessarily make one side or other stupid.

Arguably, to genuinely lessen political polarisation, what the public needs is to witness robust, reasoned disagreement between people who differ radically on both facts and values, and yet who don’t resort to lazily dismissing each other’s characters or intellects in the process. But this is not what they get from “The Rest Is Politics”, and I suspect it won’t be what we get from “Political Currency” either. In the latter case, I predict many casual references to really really interesting guys, quite a lot of unconvincing football banter, and a bit of ribbing about Keble versus Magdalen. It seems we have no shortage of former politicians who think they are clever and interesting. We may even have some actually clever ones, like Stewart. But what we really could do with is a few wiser ones.

***

In the latest episode of These Times, Tom McTague sits down with Rory Stewart. Listen here.

It would be unfair to suggest that the same was true of his journalism, but his stint as political editor of the Daily Mirror, starting in the late Eighties, was not distinguished. He was tribally loyal to Labour, and these were dark days for the party, which had lost three elections in a row and was shortly to lose a fourth, in 1992. His response was to fill the paper’s news pages with relentlessly partisan abuse. As a hack, his best-known contribution to political debate was starting a rumour that John Major tucked his shirt into his underpants. (“I am only 90% sure of the accuracy of the claim,” he acknowledged.)

Perhaps some of the bitter triviality reflected his own thwarted hopes. In the run-up to the 1992 election, he was widely touted as the front-runner to become Neil Kinnock’s press officer should Labour win. But when Labour didn’t win, Campbell had to wait instead for the election of Tony Blair as leader in 1994 before getting the summons to become his press secretary. The job title didn’t reflect the role, Blair hastened to add; “it’s much more than that,” he said.

So it was to be. Campbell was generally referred to as a spin doctor, a relatively new term that had crossed the Atlantic in 1988 and entered the Oxford English Dictionary the following year. The job of the spin doctor, according to Peter Mandelson, the first British figure to be so described, was “to create the truth”. There were limits, though. “They can cajole and protest and manipulate and bully if they want,” Campbell explained. “They can explain their master’s thinking. But the master’s thinking and actions are what count.”

More from this author

The rise of Cruel Britannia

By Alwyn W. Turner

That was the role occupied by Bernard Ingham when he was Margaret Thatcher’s press secretary, but many felt that the master-servant image was no longer entirely accurate. “When you heard Bernard Ingham speaking, you heard Margaret Thatcher,” observed ex-Labour aide Joy Johnson. “When you heard Tony Blair, very often you heard Alastair Campbell.” It was a common perception, and Blair did little that might correct it; in his memoirs, he wrote of Campbell: “He was indispensable, irreplaceable, almost an alter ego.”

In any event, Campbell was — with Blair, Gordon Brown, and Mandelson — one of the Four Horsemen of New Labour. Following the election triumph of 1997, he accumulated still greater power. He ran an ever-expanding empire of press officers and political advisers at the expense of the civil service, he attended cabinet meetings in a way that his predecessors had not, and he took on the role of party discipline at Westminster: in a symbolic move, the press team moved into 12 Downing Street, traditionally the preserve of the Whips’ Office. Charges of control freakery were widely aired.

He was, everyone agreed, supremely good at his job. A large part of that job, however, seemed to include dragging politics down to the level of his commentary at the Daily Mirror. “Alastair tabloidery,” Blair called it, the tendency to pursue headlines rather than deliverable policies. “Political coverage in this country is a joke,” Campbell complained in 1999. “Most of the national media treat politics as a soap opera.” He made his contribution to that.

He contributed too to the growing distrust of politicians. Blair had been elected as the alternative to Tory sleaze, but by 1999 The Sun, which had backed Labour in the general election, was calling the prime minister “Tony Bliar”. Much of the criticism was aimed at Campbell’s media operation. Back in 1996, he’d appeared in a libel case and been castigated by the judge for being “less than completely open and frank”; he was “not a witness in whom I could feel 100% confidence”. By the turn of the century, there were many who agreed with that judgement.

More from this author

The music-hall depravity of British politics

By Alwyn W. Turner

It came to a head, of course, in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. An intelligence dossier was released to justify the war, and when the BBC queried the degree of political interference in its preparation, Campbell decided that the best form of defence was attack. The ensuing battle cost the jobs of the BBC’s chairman and director general, and the life of the UN weapons inspector David Kelly, who killed himself after being identified as a source for the story. “If Alastair Campbell hadn’t started his war against the BBC, then Dr Kelly would still be alive today,” said Sky’s political editor, Adam Boulton, while the headline in Campbell’s old paper the Daily Mirror was: “Spun to death — Iraq expert driven to tragic ‘suicide’.”

Campbell resigned in 2003, but returned to run the 2005 election campaign, completing Blair’s remarkable hat trick of victories. After that, though, the magic seemed to have been lost. He helped with the unsuccessful elections of 2010 and 2015 and was an adviser to the equally unsuccessful People’s Vote campaign to get a second referendum on Brexit. Nonetheless, it was Brexit that gave him a new lease of media life: he became editor-at-large of The New European, and launched The Rest Is Politics podcast with fellow Europhile Rory Stewart.

Now comes a new book, But What Can I Do?, about the deplorable state of politics today. His analysis will come as no great revelation. He’s sympathetic to the idea of a written constitution; he thinks social media “has done much to harm thoughtful public debate”; he deplores “the culture war distractions of the radical Right”; he recycles lame gags about “Kamikwasi Trussonomics”.

More from this author

How Thatcher lost her culture war

By Alwyn W. Turner

As a state-of-the-nation address, it comes with inbuilt obsolescence, with all the temporary nature of journalism, full of references to what happened “last autumn” or “last November”. Despite which, it seems stuck in 2018, so that former US president Donald Trump gets five times as many mentions as current British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. It feels like reading yesterday’s papers.

Much of it is a rambling, sometimes ranting, denunciation of “the Trumps, Johnsons, Netanyahus, Putins and Bolsonaros”, the populist leaders who have wrecked the democratic process. That’s a fairly disparate collection of individuals, but Campbell argues that there are common traits. Populists, he writes, are those who denounce “the elite”, and use the polarising language of “us” and “them”. And they’re not just to be found on the Right; there are also “populists of the Left”. There are those who divide the nation into “the forces of progress and the forces of conservatism”, while railing against “the cynics, the elites, the establishment”. Oh, hang on, that was Blair in a 1999 conference speech, which doesn’t get a look-in here.

These new populists are also barefaced liars. When did this casual attitude towards the truth start, one might ask? Certainly not on Campbell’s watch; he’s keen to point out that there were “several official and parliamentary inquiries” into Iraq, “none of which concluded that I lied”. In fact, not even his political enemies were deliberately deceitful in the old days. From Margaret Thatcher to Theresa May, he says of the prime ministers before Johnson, “none were in my view liars”. This wasn’t always his view. “Truth. Remember that,” he challenged in 1992. John Major and Norman Lamont “lie because it comes easy to them and because it is the only way they can survive”.

Suggested reading

The political power of Deano

By Tom McTague

He sometimes sounds like one of those academics who is triggered by the sight of a Union Jack and takes to Twitter to announce that we’re now living in a fascist regime. Mention referendums, for example, and we’re straight onto Vladimir Putin staging a rigged vote in the occupied parts of Ukraine. In 1975, Thatcher quoted Clement Attlee’s description of referendums as “a device of dictators and demagogues”; Campbell notes this approvingly, but forgets to mention that it was New Labour that made referendums part of normal politics in the first place.

Similarly over-wrought is Campbell’s claim that the British Right-wing press “would not look out of place in North Korea”. To be fair, though, it does take him until p. 34 to go for the inevitable comparison, segueing effortlessly from Nigel Farage to “Europe in the Thirties”. But once it’s out in the open, we get an entire chapter on “The Threat of Fascism”. This would all be more convincing if we hadn’t been here before. “Britain is being run by a dictatorship,” was Campbell’s implausible verdict on Major’s government in 1992.

One could go on. He’s shocked — shocked! — at the sight of Johnson’s government “attacking the BBC”. That’ll be the same BBC that he denounced as a “down-market, dumbed down, over staffed, over bureaucratic, ridiculous organisation”, even before the War of the Dodgy Dossier.

Suggested reading

Britain needs a Napoleon

By Tom McTague

But the point is not just that Campbell is wildly forgetful of his own time in politics and journalism. It’s more that, by airbrushing the past, he’s avoiding the issues. He leaves the big questions unasked, let alone answered. Why did Farage’s populist rhetoric about “the elite” resonate with so many? Might it be because of the extraordinary accumulation of wealth by the super-rich during New Labour’s time in office? Was disillusionment prompted by a government that the public thought was on their side proving instead to be “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich”?

If you’re looking at disengagement from the political process, it’s worth considering the 2001 general election, when turnout was so low that the number of abstentions was greater than the number who voted for Labour.

In Campbell’s analysis, however, the rot only set in with the global financial crisis of 2008, an event so massive that it warrants an abbreviation: the GFC. His coverage is so brief, however, that those initials only get used once. Maybe he doesn’t like to dwell, lest he has to explain why Britain was so exposed to the banking meltdown that started in America. After the event, Gordon Brown complained that a “shadow banking system had proliferated without politicians being aware of it,” and it’s hard not to think that the man who’d been chancellor for a decade perhaps should have been aware of it.

Suggested reading

Test article

By Nicholas Harris

On a personal level, Campbell’s problem — the reason he worries about whether he’s “Dadsplaining” — is that he’s been overtaken by the world he helped to create. He would obviously disagree, but surely Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings are part of his legacy. So too, perhaps, is Brexit itself. Partly because even Campbell’s famed tabloid instincts failed to alert him to the impact of the huge rise in immigration. But even more for squandering the chance of moving closer to the European Union.

Because the biggest issue in Blair’s first term — even if it was ducked — was the single currency, and the imminent arrival of the euro. Should Britain join this venture or not? Blair was in favour. Gordon Brown was not. Nor was Rupert Murdoch, whose views carried some weight. And Campbell? Well, he wasn’t much fussed one way or another. “I was not that bothered about the euro,” he wrote in his diary. “It didn’t move me like a Labour v. Tory battle did.”

Maybe he should have cared a little more. Regardless of whether one thinks it would have been good for the country, being part of the single currency would have been transformative. It would have tied Britain so closely to Europe that it would have made a Leave vote very unlikely, indeed would have made a referendum unlikely.

Without Brexit, though, where would Campbell be now? His belated rallying to the European cause has been the re-making of his reputation, wiping away much of the stain of Iraq. As he was during his time at the Daily Mirror, he’s now fighting rearguard actions for the losing side, and it’s a role that suits him admirably. The player of the pipes might not call the tune, but he does get his voice heard.

“Today marks 20 years since the beginning of an invasion and occupation that has been estimated to have cost more than one million Iraqis lives, along with those of 179 British servicemen and women,” he told a TV camera afterwards. “Today, we remember how the then UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, warned that the war was not in accordance with the UN Charter and was illegal. Last month, we observed a minute’s silence for those killed in another illegal war, started by Russia in Ukraine. If there is a lesson for all of us to learn, it is that the UN Charter is there for a reason.”

Less than a mile away, at the Houses of Parliament, the Leader of the Opposition, Sir Keir Starmer, also observed the minute’s silence. “I have previously stated that the Iraq war was not lawful because there was no UN resolution expressly authorising it,” he said in a statement afterwards. “The decision to commit British forces was taken by a former Labour Prime Minister, Tony Blair. My Labour Party condemns all breaches of international law — both past and present.”

And then I woke up… to the dulcet tones of Tony Blair, sufficiently emboldened by yet another soft-soap BBC interview to pronounce, without a hint of irony, on Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. When gently challenged over his own invasion of Iraq, he loftily declared that “each case must be judged on its own merits”. Blair, of course, has form with Putin, visiting the St Petersburg opera with him in 2000 as Chechnya was being pulverised. He later said that it is “important we support Russia in her action against terrorism”.

Twenty years ago, as an elected member of the Labour Party’s ruling National Executive Committee, I had a ring-side seat at the launch of the Iraq War. From the outset, I didn’t believe Blair’s claims about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. According to Robin Lustig, then a presenter on Radio 4’s The World Tonight, my clash with former US Secretary of State, Lawrence Eagleburger, was the first time anyone had publicly challenged the WMD claim. (So furious was Eagleburger, he started calling me “Buster”.)

From early 2002, it was already clear that America had a political imperative for Iraqi regime change. Tony Blair, far from dissuading President Bush, was actually helping him build an international “coalition of the willing”. On January 28, I sat next to the veteran Labour Left-winger Dennis Skinner at a meeting of Labour’s NEC as he jabbed his finger at Blair and said: “This will be the biggest mistake you will ever make!”

Suggested reading

Black gold fuelled the Iraq War

By Helen Thompson

Unbeknown to Blair, I was working closely with Jan Kavan, a former President of the UN General Assembly and Czech Foreign Minister, and Robin Cook, who would later resign from the Cabinet in protest at Britain’s support for the Iraq war. Together we drafted a series of resolutions to be tabled at meetings of the NEC, in the hope that this might encourage a wider revolt within the Parliamentary Labour Party. On three occasions, with only the support of three other members of the NEC, we challenged Blair directly, submitting resolutions demanding that the Labour Government ascertain from the UN Secretary-General and the President of the General Assembly the legality of any attack. The 30-strong committee voted us down twice and on a third occasion, as the countdown to war intensified, ruled a resolution “out of order”, which meant that it could not be voted on. This time, I walked out of the NEC meeting in protest. In another meeting, we were briefly handed a copy of the “dodgy dossier”, with its confected claim that WMDs could be launched against British military bases in Cyprus within 45 minutes. Then we had to hand it back.

When we took our opposition for a fourth time to the Labour Party Conference, despite party chairman Charles Clarke’s attempts to persuade us to withdraw our amendment, we were subsequently rounded on by tame, hand-picked speakers in the debate. I was accused of being an “appeaser” and “guilty of making orphans of the sons and daughters of servicemen in Cyprus”. Given that I was the son of a serviceman based in Cyprus who had been evacuated because there was a very real threat of a Turkish invasion at the time, it all seemed pretty hysterical. 

Suggested reading

The betrayal of Baghdad

By David Patrikarakos

On February 15, 2003, millions of people in more than 600 cities worldwide took to the streets to protest the impending invasion. In London, with more than a million people filling the streets and Hyde Park, I joined speakers including Reverend Jesse Jackson, Charles Kennedy, and Jeremy Corbyn. I had brought the nonagenarian Michael Foot from his home in Hampstead to give possibly one of his last great flights of oratory. In Europe, crowds were even larger. Anti-war organisers reported that the worldwide demonstrations collectively formed the largest peace protest since the Vietnam War.

What have we learned from the Iraq invasion? Precious little it would seem. Today, Gordon Brown, whom I had attempted to win over before the invasion, and who I knew in his heart didn’t really want to go along with it, is calling for a Nuremberg-style special court to try Putin for war crimes; the same was promised for Saddam Hussein and look how how that turned out. Meanwhile, arms control treaties have been ripped up and the UN Secretary-General is invisible enough for most not even to know his name.

In Britain, it is now very difficult to find anyone who was ever in favour of the invasion and dismemberment of Iraq. Yet Tony Blair has never apologised or been held to account; instead, he has become revoltingly rich, partly by advising the kind of regimes he once railed against. Meanwhile, his chief propagandist, Alastair Campbell, is treated reverentially by the media, holding forth with no hint of self-awareness on such vexed issues as “standards in public life”. However, perhaps Peter Mandelson is thriving the most: he is now back in control of a Labour Party that Starmer claims as his own. This is the legacy of Iraq for New Labour: the lies might seem a distant memory, but the liars are most certainly not.

It is perhaps an anecdotal measure of cultural decline that Alastair Campbell, along with fellow “political heavyweight” Baroness Warsi, is now playing the role of scowling mentor in Channel 4’s new reality show, Make Me Prime Minister. Twelve “ordinary yet opinionated Brits” compete to see if any of them “has what it takes” to “do the top job better”. They are faced with wildly under-specified tasks — week one: “totally reform primary school education”; week two: solve “the obesity epidemic” — with rather uncertain standards as to what might count as success. Presumably, next week it will be “broker a multi-lateral peace treaty in the Middle East”, or “restructure the UK’s long-term government debt”. If that kind of geopolitical cosplay doesn’t send them hurtling for the fire escape, the candidates should perhaps ask themselves if anything would.

The candidates grandstand, argue, blame and bullshit one another — ungrammatically and at length — in a tour de force of charmless self-assertion. They stumble around boardrooms in a fake Downing Street, draw randomly on whiteboards, and loosely translate the vapid, self-affirming dialect of reality-TV cliché into the terms of the mad fantasy the show insists on: “As Prime Minister, I have to stay true to myself”; “I don’t want to be like the Prime Ministers that we’ve had previously”. Warsi and Campbell — one can only hope in return for a large fee — are made to debase themselves by pretending the exercise has some halfway credible purpose. “I hope what this competition will do is find a new generation of political leaders,” says Warsi flatly, like a hostage to camera. “It would be quite extraordinary”, Campbell agrees, “if one or more of the people who go through this process actually do end up as elected politicians.” True enough.

Why insist on this deranged understanding of the show’s purpose? There is, I take it, something more to it than the usual time-filling promotional bluster.

At the heart of the show is an oddly exceptionalist view of politics as a locus of human thought and action. It is the view that politics, unlike any other intellectually-demanding discipline you care to name, admits no refinement of judgement: that there is no such thing as political wisdom or expertise. This bedrock conviction provides a firm basis for various kinds of populist sentiment. If there are no standards of political judgement, any “ordinary Brit” with enough of a can-do attitude should be able to do it. The apparent existence of subtle, structural or technically-demanding political problems turns out to be an illusion, one no doubt sustained by a political class who gain by it. Actually, the view says, there are no persistent or recalcitrant political problems, no perennial challenges of conflict or co-ordination: politics is nothing but a realm of pseudo-problems. What is needed, as one of the contestants puts it, is to “just apply some common sense to what we were told was a very complex situation”.

The show ministers to a strand of common-sense supremacism that plays a recognisable role in more and less sophisticated styles of political cynicism. Make Me Prime Minister is the kind of show you can imagine appealing to someone who reckons Hugh Grant should definitely be made Prime Minister on the basis of the terribly amusing dance he does in Love Actually, or who tweets terrifying lists of the various celebrities who would appear in their “fantasy cabinets”. It is a position that operates in a purposefully unstable rhetorical ground — at once reflexively sanctimonious and deeply unserious. The show’s embrace of this kind of thought makes for a haywire tone. One moment Campbell and Warsi talk disapprovingly about politics “being in a mess” and the urgent search for “new talent and energy”; the next, parish-council tactical-Zoom-defenestrator Jackie Weaver is introduced as one of the contestants. One minute, we’re told “parliament ought to sit up and take notice” of the fine example the contestants are setting; the next, we have to watch as they stumble around, asserting themselves mindlessly like a round-the-clock tribute act to the Dunning-Kruger Effect.

Of course, to the owners of the reductive theory that politics consists in the straightforward application of common sense, the solutions to all our problems can look frustratingly close to hand. All we have to do, as various candidates suggest in their turn, is to put “any differences aside”, agree to “take a more progressive approach”, and try to be “a lot more forgiving and a lot more open”. “I believe in doing the right thing,” insists one candidate, contentiously; another informs us that in politics all “you need [is] integrity and principles”. “I try not to take an argumentative stance when I debate” reveals one, apparently without irony. “I don’t like to be confrontational”, insists another at a decisive moment of conflict. “It’s one of the things I dislike about politics.” (What exactly there is left of politics, let alone left to like about it, once conflict has been disposed of, is not explained.)

Suggested reading

The Tory Party belongs to Alan Clark

By John Maier

You might think it would be quite tricky for someone who believes that all political disagreement dissolves in the universal acid of common sense to explain the manifest character of the world around them. Cynicism about the political process can be a helpful crutch here, though it can easily modulate into something with a more wide-eyed, conspiracist aspect to it. Because there cannot be any real political problems, the theory might go, anyone — in particular, any politician — pretending that there are must be somehow compromised: a liar, ill-intentioned or in someone else’s pocket.

For common-sense supremacists, being alienated from a sclerotic and corrupted political process can therefore only bolster one’s credentials. The “ordinary Brit”, with her brutal logic of common sense, wouldn’t do the “top job” just as well as the career politician; she would do it a damn sight better! She is, after all, free from all that unhelpful political baggage — you know, all that dreadful cumbersome stuff like understanding, loyalty, experience or commitment.

All the contestants on Make Me Prime Minister seem to credit some version of this account of the pure and indefeasible claim of free-floating common sense. In fact, it is perhaps this that accounts for the strangely unstable set of attitudes they seem to hold with regard to extant political life: a mixture of global contempt, wild self-belief, and shameless ignorance. At the limit — as the show’s candidates express with an unguarded clarity — even a standing interest in politics might be a possession of doubtful value. “I don’t know that I am interested in politics,” Jackie Weaver boasts; a second contestant suggests his “greatest attribute” is his lack of party-political solidarity (“I would just weigh up the policies as I see them”); another boasts of his “outsider status”; “what you need to do is think: I’m sick of these politicians, I can do this better”.

Suggested reading

Why normal people love Sally Rooney

By John Maier

The anti-democratic argument that rule-by-experts would be best for society and the soul is, of course, as old as political philosophy itself. At first sight, the implied political vision of Make Me Prime Minister is a terrifying inversion of its Platonic relation — it shows us a vision of society ruled, not by philosopher kings, but by an untrained council of reality TV contestants who also happen to be apolitical imbeciles. But in a way, the opposed visions have more in common than is first apparent. Both are ways not so much of advancing political life, but of disposing of it altogether. They are both expressions of the belief, or perhaps the consoling aspiration, that politics, with all its constitutive disharmony and antagonism, should cease to exist. Of course, as a solution to the perennial problem of reaching political decisions, the resolution comes, inevitably, one decision too late. And it is one of the fleeting pleasures of watching Make Me Prime Minister to see its contestants’ belief in the obliterating power of common sense and worthy intentions disintegrate as they struggle, argue and disagree in the course of making even the most elementary decisions.  

Surely this show has backfired on its creators? If I didn’t know better, I would say the whole thing was the result of a hasty backroom deal between television executives and the government designed to make members of the current administration look sane, witty, intelligent, urbane, self-effacing and capable by comparison. It is no small irony that the show falls flat in this way, much like the contestants’ attempts to “prove themselves” do: collapsing without generating intelligent reflection or insight, the hollowness of their shared and complacent vision of politics exposed. There are, needless to say, insightful and unsettling criticisms to be made of the political institutions in this country; but the claim that we would all be better off if very simple-minded people were running them is not one of them.

Our son was 18 at the time and had lived his entire life under a Tory government. My mood in the weeks ahead of Election ’97 was positively gleeful. As The Thick of It‘s Peter Mannion said a decade later as Labour’s own dynasty entered its fag-end phase: “Our tanks on their lawn at last, fuck a doodle-doo!”

Did the Blair years change satire? Not really. Maybe. Sort of, accidentally. The first Blair government happened to coincide with the growth of heartless piss-taking on the internet — that was new. And a young, earnest, sexually-active prime minister was bound to provide a welcome target for satirists bored senseless by John Major and his dreary retinue at Castle Greyscale.

We saw the elevation of “spin” to Dark Arts status, even though it has been a standard political ploy since Henry VIII’s first divorce. The appointment of Thomas Cromwell Alastair Campbell as press secretary defined New Labour’s presentation style, and his method and strategies paved the way for a new satirical landscape. Here was a journalist brought in at the very top, issuing orders to civil servants, enforcing the ministerial line on public statements, keeping the spads on message. Essentially Blair’s official spokesman, but with a senior civil servant’s salary and the influence of a deputy prime minister, say, or an editorial in the Sun.

In those balmy first months of summer 1997, however, the focus was very much on Tony: his barrister’s smile, his soft-Left dress code, his political philosophy of “whatever works, yeah?”. Private Eye portrayed him as a trendy vicar, irritated by church affiliates and parishioners alike. Steve Bell did him as a glinty-eyed Thatcher clone. Rory Bremner nailed the voice and mannerisms but, like many, struggled to find an ideology to satirise. As he told the BBC in 2007: “As soon as you got a handle on some area it would just vaporise and disappear and they’d be off somewhere else…”

Nebulous politics were hip, fading seamlessly into the wider cultural vacuity of Cool Britannia. Post-modern Union Jacks winked at us from everywhere — an Oasis guitar here, a Spice Girls frock there. Everyone was mad for Britpop and football and ecstasy and an end to boom-and-bust. Happy days. In PR terms, pride in New Labour’s New Britain was whatever worked, yeah? Whatever made us look good and feel fabulous. Dolce et gabbana est pro patria mori, as somebody should have said at the time.

More from this author

A brief history of profanity

By Ian Martin

The great satirical chronicler of the rise and fall of New Labour was Armando Iannucci. Earlier in the decade, with Chris Morris and a brilliant team of writers and performers, he had entirely reset British satire, first on radio with On The Hour, then on TV with its mad descendant The Day Today. The format spoofed news stories through the prism of a news format which was itself satirised, Morris anchoring as a demented Paxman. When Blair was basking in warm hosannahs as the New Labour Messiah, Iannucci was there at the start of the Great Experiment with his new show, Saturday Night Armistice. He was there too at the end with The Thick of It as the hot air balloon deflated and Blair parachuted out, allowing Gordon Brown to navigate the last few hundred feet as the economy, with Labour in it, crashed.

Iannucci was taking the piss out of Blair even before the evangelical shine dimmed, at a time when New Labour was all about a new hope and Sure Start and billions pumped into education and health; when Blair’s public approval ratings were up there with Diana, Princess of Wales and Fatboy Slim. Armistice featured a soft toy called Mr Tony Blair whose inanities could only be heard by Iannucci. It seemed jarring to me at the time, Blair as a platitudinous gonk, but it was, as it turned out, merely prophetic. I spoke to Iannucci recently about satirising Blair in those early years. “We started portraying him as the Sun King,” he said. “That whole sense of him feeding off how good he thinks he is as a person, his saintliness, his good works. It wasn’t like we were trying to bring him down, just to pierce that sense of mass hysteria…”

In due course, the satire became less about the Mandelsons and Prescotts of New Labour. “All the ones that the impressionists would automatically do, they were all gently eased out,” said Iannucci. “Anyone with a hint of idiosyncrasy had to go. Blair wanted managerial clones of himself, safe and uniform. Thatcher and Major had tended to appoint ministers who had a bit of clout, some expertise, in their subjects. Under Blair, it was much more the case that ministers were required to do what Number 10 wanted. Message control — that was what the whole Blair thing was about…”

More from this author

Why the miners will never win

By Ian Martin

He mentions Excalibur, the party’s “rapid rebuttal unit” which compiled computerised data on Labour’s opponents, allowing it to mount agile and aggressive counterattacks during the ’97 election campaign. By 1999, aggressive counter-attacks were seen as a bit tame. The party appointed a Head of Attack to lead its election campaign using Excalibur 2. “They didn’t want to make the mistake of not preparing,” Iannucci said, “and then went crazily the other way…”

As the Millennium dawned, so did something else. Satirists realised that the key strength and weakness of the government was the Blair-Campbell axis. Until now, the most famous media bulldog had been Thatcher’s scrotum-chewing press secretary, Bernard Ingham. In those days the job meant protecting your boss. Now it meant being his locum. By the time the Iraq war happened, Blair’s moral compass was already spinning in its grave. The Public Finance Initiative was revealing itself to be a massive siphon, sucking money from taxpayers to developers from here to eternity, ASBOs were already a badge of honour for young criminals, and Parliamentary oversight was becoming an afterthought rather than a statutory condition.

And every week, as the misery in Iraq increased, I thought — loads of us thought — of Bush and Blair and their prayer breakfasts, with their mad conviction that they were on a mission from God. How we’d have loved to hear the other side of those prayers.

This audacity of self-belief: how it trumped political process, how pure it was. Iraq exposed a contempt for accountability, a legacy we enjoy to its fullest with the current shower of crooks and clowns. As Iannucci told me: “Because they were crushing the personality out of the Cabinet, the subject was therefore going to be the process. It had to be. It’s why we went into the process itself with Thick. We were thinking about what happens to people when they have untrammelled power. You know, ‘I invaded Iraq because I thought it was the right thing to do’. That’s not enough — you need proof! This is what happens if anyone at any point on the political spectrum believes they have a mission, that only they can fix this…”

As an exercise in satirical archaeology I recently watched Iannucci’s Election Night Armistice. It went out live on the night in 1997 and honestly, it’s all there even before Blair slipped into his monogrammed pyjamas at Number 10. I’d missed most of it at the time because, like every other pissed Old Labour voter, I was mostly glued to the unfolding source material. But on Armistice, here was the sensationalist media taken to a logical conclusion: someone in a giant penis costume — the Sleaze Cock — was on the streets badgering senior Tories. Sally Phillips was the Whore in a Helicopter ready to invent a tabloid affair with the first MP elected.

More from this series

Cherie Blair's class war

By Joan Smith

And some bits were comedy microcosms of the fearsome governmental narrative control we were to see in the years to come. Spin Olympics, in retrospect, was eerily prescient. Here, flanked by a Thatcher-era PR guy and a Lib Dem treasurer is 30-year-old Derek Draper, former chief adviser to Mandelson, who would go on to have a chequered career in the Labour Party. Unlike the other two — the Tory ebulliently clueless; the Lib Dem sober but useless — Draper is utterly, utterly brilliant. He understands how the game works, here and in real life. In the first round, the contestants have to spin some awful thing a politician has said: for example, David Blunkett: “I hate Muslims.” For comic effect Draper channels furious sanctimony to insist that Blunkett was talking about the way Muslims are stereotyped by the media, and deplores the way that this show itself threatens to denigrate and harm minorities.

Round Two features a random policy generator, which nonsensically burps up: “We/would like to/nationalise/Europe.” Nevertheless, Draper talks it up, arguing that individual EU nations would be improved. A Wheel of Spin is spun: Talk Tough. Without missing a beat he says “… and if they don’t like it they’ll just have to put up with it…” The wheel spins again and again. Do a U-Turn: “… though of course each nation will have control over its own affairs…” Go Negative: he does, firmly disavowing the policy without breaking his tone of sincerity. It’s a tour de force, and an astonishing glimpse of what was to come fictionally with Malcolm Tucker and the hapless ministers under his control.

So the Blair years didn’t change satire. But satire was there all along, hiding in plain sight, waiting to become real. In the dying light of 2009, with Tony now well into his new globalist afterlife, Thick scriptwriters and New Labour wonks were coming up with identically desperate policies, week after week in Broken Britain. Policies that had to sound impressive and cost nothing. The audience looked from satirists to policymakers, and from policymakers to satirists, but already it was impossible to say which was which.

Where exactly is home for Labour? The answer was decisively revealed this week by the leader’s conference speech: home is an Islington townhouse in the year 1996. What a time to be British! Hugh Grant is shagging Liz Hurley. Princess Diana is sparklingly alive. Football means Skinner and Baddiel, not Heysel and Hillsborough. Damon and Noel are the new Mick and John. Somehow, Ian Hislop is actually quite funny.

Bonkers, barmy, grotesque Tories in pin-stripe suits dusted with dandruff are going mental over Europe. But on the telly, inspiring Tony and pragmatic Gordon are preparing, as smoothly professional as stockbrokers, for power. Things can only get… better.

Starmer did not have to mention Blair on Wednesday. The spirit of Tone was lurking underneath every word, dressed in greasy overalls, wrenching every rhetorical bolt into place. Tough on crime? Absolutely. Education? Say it three times baby.

More important than anything Starmer said was Peter Mandelson’s remark to Seumas Milne: “We’re back in control.”

More from this author

Twilight of the centrist dads

By Will Lloyd

Speaking of figures from the past who consistently ruin the breakfasts of Daily Mail readers, Gina Miller is back too. New New Labour was not the only centre party to stagger on to the scene in the last few days.

“The True & Fair Party” is her new political vehicle. Miller said: “This government needs to be held to account. Voters deserve better than the current politics of incompetence and self-interest.”

The party’s policies are yet to be announced, but they will be a homecoming for Miller as well. You have to imagine that they will be Rejoin-ishly pro-EU and described everywhere as “centrist”. Like every middle-aged product of British centrism, whether it is a political party, or a newspaper columnist, True & Fair would be better named: Let Down & Fed Up & Really Quite Tired.

Miller is, at least, about a thousand times more interesting than Sir Keir. In the long 2016 era, when the British middle-class were lost in a prolonged and anxious freak out, she was easily the most charismatic and exciting Remainer personality.

The others were lame. Elsewhere there was only terrible hair (A.C. Grayling), or needling over-familiarity (Alastair Campbell, Andrew Adonis), or sad, sullen machismo (Bob Geldof, James O’Brien, David Aaronovitch), or… Femi.

Miller was their antidote and foil. She intrigued in all senses. She was a cigar-smoking sports racer, and a parachutist. Her background was pure 1980s, pure Thatcherite graft. After her family lost its fortune, she chewed her way back through the class system, from hard-luck indigence to a £7 million Chelsea villa, by way of the City. She was serious and respected. A lawyerly battle axe. Joan of Arc to Remainers; the Terminator to Brexiteers.

She took flak, both of the legitimate and grimly racist sort. Her most intelligent profilers wondered whether her high-wire legal challenges to Brexit were motivated by “an extreme sense of civic duty” or the chance of another adrenaline rush.

The same question hovers over her new party. In a sense though the answer doesn’t matter. Like Starmer’s zombie centrism, True & Fair will fail, because there is no market for this politics anymore. Barely months have passed since the last attempts to rebuild the centre.

Suggested reading

The speech Starmer should have given

By Ian Martin

During the Brexit years, centrist fever dreams rolled above the land like rain clouds. In 2017, a Twitter-famous tax lawyer called Jolyon Maugham wanted to launch a new party called “Spring”. His plans were big, massively big. According to the Guardian: “He would hold a 28-day festival at the football stadium in Maidenhead, [Theresa] May’s constituency. Each day would be dedicated to the national dress and cuisine of a different EU member state. For the finale, Maugham planned to announce that he was standing in Maidenhead as a Spring candidate.” That sounds like satire written after a long, drunken seance with the hooting spirit of Auberon Waugh, but apparently it’s true. In the end Maugham “decided he didn’t have enough time to go ahead with it”. A wise choice!

There were smaller, but no less Partridge-into-a-dictaphone visions that year. Former George Osborne aide James Chapman called for an anti-Brexit party called ‘The Democrats’ in a Twitter meltdown, which only ended after he’d demanded — sad machismo again — that Theresa May personally debate him outside parliament. Even PR Week (not exactly Guido Fawkes) was moved to call this “an extraordinary rant”. A few months later, the then Economist writer Jeremy Cliffe proposed setting up a party called “The Radicals” — pro-tech, pro-Europe, social-liberal — and ultimately, anti-ever amounting to anything.

The biggest centrist bubble blown and pricked was Change UK. Or was it The Independent Group for Change? Or the UK’s Independently Grouped Change? Or the UK Group’s Independent Change? Nobody — not even lead member Anna Soubry, who called the party “Change.org” in the Commons — was very sure. (The only Change UK question anybody really wanted to know the answer to was what moisturiser Chuka Umunna used. Sadly, he never told us.)

Formed by 11 MPs fleeing Labour and the Tories, and born in Nando’s, Change UK died in bathos when every single member lost their seat at the last general election. But for me, Change.Independence.UK only really expired for good when its former MEP candidate Gavin Esler was booted off Celebrity Masterchef this summer after serving a dessert condemned as “incomplete” by John Torrode. The judge’s cruel reception of this pudding, which was also compared to “soup”, exactly mirrored the British public’s reaction to Change UK, namely: “WTF is this supposed to be lads.”

More from this author

The war on Martin Amis

By Will Lloyd

Anyway, by 2019 the public was done with soup. They wanted cake. At least Esler reached the Masterchef quarter finals — Change UK didn’t make it past two elections.

How many centrist parties have to get Hindenburged before this all stops? The strangest thing about Miller, and Starmer-Mandelson is that they can’t locate the centre ground at all. If there is a centre ground today in England, it is enormously unpalatable to those who self-identify as centrists. They would not vote for the “Hang the nonces, fund the NHS party”, but that’s where the centre is now.

The centre wants nationalised railways and birched criminals. It wants its borders closed and its healthcare free at the point of access. It is fear and loathing, and charity and kindliness; a truly mutant hybrid of Paul Dacre and Jeremy Corbyn. Pundits would love the English to be the stout and sensible strivers described in Orwell’s The Lion and The Unicorn; sadly, I fear the reality is that they are more like the suspicious and cruel folk described in Chesterton’s The Secret People.

And they’re getting stranger all the time. England is weirding. David Icke has never been so adored. Football fans descended on Nuneaton to defend a half-forgotten statue of George Eliot from BLM; no, they had not read Middlemarch. Parents style their children as Captain Tom. Sports mascots become ultra-large poppies every November. Jackie Weaver publishes books. There are candlelit vigils or protests on a seemingly daily basis.

The mood is jittery, not only in the petrol queues. The writer Clive Martin calls it “Radical Normal”. Gina Miller and Keir Starmer probably don’t know much about Radical Normal, but it has more to do with the future of British politics than they do.

His choice of language is always the same — “advocating the sensible solution” of a second referendum, and ending his speech in Scotland with a rousing peroration on the virtue of the centre ground:

“Politics must renew its core strength. Its centre. A place of reason. A place of maximum agreement and respectful disagreement. The place where radical change is pursued but of the practical and sensible kind, the kind which works.”

It sounds unarguable. Pure common sense. And I have no doubt that Mr Blair genuinely believes that he still represents this sort of politics — the pragmatist, the healing unifier between extremist poles.

But it’s just not true. If he ever was that person, he is not any more. Step back and take note of what he has accomplished over the past three years and you soon realise he has become something very different.

More from this author

The Brexit endgame begins

By Freddie Sayers

Since the EU Referendum, Tony Blair has behaved as a radical. He has deployed his formidable political powers to convince the centre and Left of British politics to rethink their initial acceptance of the result and suppress their instinct to compromise. More than anything else, this shift explains why political and public opinion is now irreconcilably divided; more than anyone else, it’s thanks to him. Whether or not his campaign to reverse the referendum result is ultimately successful, his all-or-nothing approach pushed the country away from the centre ground and into two irreconcilable poles.

The only unifying route after the vote to leave was a compromise Brexit deal that the centrist elements of both main parties could support; this was the natural place for Tony Blair, the master of ‘triangulation’. Had he pointed his powers towards that outcome, instead of radicalising the centre-Left, a version of Theresa May’s deal might long since have passed. The country might be coming together by now.

Instead, he set about a meticulous campaign to move people away from the “place of maximum agreement and respectful disagreement” he talks so lyrically about. Even if a last minute Brexit deal now emerges, his campaign has ensured that it will never be seen as satisfactory.

Looking back at media clips of Blair’s reaction in the initial days after the referendum in June 2016 is an eerie experience. In those first days, no-one knew how it was going to play out — but country and parliament alike broadly accepted that Britain would leave the European Union.

I spent 12 hours on Brexit night commentating on CNN, and as the result became clear, a succession of politicians surfaced to offer dire predictions or expressions of hope. Not a single one suggested that Brexit would not happen.

Except Mr Blair.

Suggested reading

Can social democracy survive?

By Matthew Goodwin

The day after the referendum result, on BBC, he urged caution: “I don’t think we should take any rash decisions at the moment … we’ve got to reflect, we’ve got to unite and we’ve got to chart a way forward.” That same phrase “chart a way forward” returns in many of those initial interviews, but nowhere does he say that Britain will actually leave the EU. The people have spoken, he said, and we have to “take account of that” — but he never says, explicitly, that the decision must be enacted.

Three days later, on 28 June, in America on MSNBC Morning Joe, he’s more to the point:

“The one thing I would just say is, there’s a lot that is going to play out in the next weeks and months. We are masters of our own destiny… I wouldn’t write us out of Europe yet.”

In the context, his composure and foresight are staggering. Right from those early days, when all around him the world had accepted the result as a fact, he already had a plan.

He waited until later in 2016 to formally launch his campaign to reverse the referendum. He gave an interview to the New European (editor-at-large, Alastair Campbell) announcing that “we’re now the insurgents” and that we have to “mobilise and organise” to make people change their minds.

It may seem commonplace now, but back then, this was seen as a revolutionary move. Even the Guardian was uncertain: “Tony Blair’s call to mobilise against Brexit sparks mixed response”, it reported. This intervention first made the idea of a “counter-insurgency” politically acceptable.

On 1 February 2017, the House of Commons voted to trigger Article 50 by 498 votes to 114, supported by more than 75% of Labour MPs. The BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg wrote an analysis entitled “Past the Point of no-return” in which she concluded, “tonight, for better or worse, few will believe that our journey to the exit door can be halted …the moment for turning back is past.”

Just two weeks later, on 17 February, Tony Blair gave a speech at Bloomberg in which he railed against this spirit of acceptance, saying that people had a right to change their mind and that “our mission is to persuade them to do so”.

The following month, he met EU negotiator Michel Barnier in person and pushed for an extension — just one of countless meetings with political leaders from the EU and the UK across the period. By February 2018, he estimated that the chances of “stopping Brexit” had increased to 50%.

Fast forward another year, to January 2019, and he told European leaders (correctly, once again) that May’s government would not opt for no deal, and that if they held firm and refused to compromise, she would be forced to opt for an extension. Throughout, he overtly denigrated the idea of a ‘third way’ compromise as illogical and insisted that the only options that made sense were no-deal Brexit or no Brexit at all.

Suggested reading

How the Third Way lost its way

By Bill Galston

Every time there was about to be a moment of agreement, he has been there, agitating against it. One by one, Left-leaning and centrist politicians and campaigners moved away from hoping for a soft Brexit and towards the idea that the whole thing could be cancelled. This was Tony Blair’s masterplan, and he executed it with aplomb.

The consequences of this historic pivot against compromise are still being felt: it not only scuppered Theresa May’s Brexit deal (which two years previously most Labour MPs would have been delighted with), it has greatly added to divisions in the country, perhaps for a generation. Whichever side finally triumphs, we can be certain that one half of the population will now feel bitterly defeated.

So next time the high-priest of reasonableness pops up on your television screen, remember this: on Brexit, his legacy has been to destroy the very “sensible centre” that he still fancifully calls his own.