But there’s another item in his wardrobe that is more revealing of the man, and more revealing of contemporary politics in general. It has gone remarkably unremarked-upon that Starmer is, as far as we can tell, the first British prime minister to wear a Stone Island polo shirt — formerly a calling card for football hooligans — off duty. It’s not unauthentic. He’s a middle-aged Arsenal fan. Of course he owns a bit of Stoney.

This is a leading aesthetic indicator of what we could call blokeism: a progressive, 21st-century incarnation of the middle-aged white working-class men who came of age under Tony Blair. They are not quite like centrist dads, whose equivocal politics are primarily shaped by comfortable middle-class upbringings. These progressive blokes owe their outlook to Britain’s blissful run of years in the late Nineties and early 2000s, when economic growth and cultural confidence gave Blair’s liberal refashioning of the country a weighty cosign, even to those with more hardscrabble origins.

They are earnest; mostly Left-leaning but not radical; patriotic but not nationalistic; worried about the future of the country, but not as much as they ought to be. They might be buying Gareth Southgate’s book, Dear England: Lessons in Leadership — the former England manager, a conservative tactician who mused on modern patriotism in a 2021 open letter, is blokeism incarnate.

Sources of authority recognize blokeism’s power and use its language to instruct the public: the British Transport Police’s “See it. Say it. Sorted” slogan; the Mayor of London’s “say maaate to a mate” anti-misogyny campaign. Blokeism’s working-class nature anchors its authority with a power rootless, middle-class centrist dads can only envy.

Blokeism holds sway at the top of the Labour party and in Left-leaning culture and media. As well as Starmer and Southgate we could pick out Andy Burnham; Gary Lineker, podcast empresario and Gaza advocate; Gary Neville, an on-off Labour outrider who recently said he tore down a Union flag put up at one of his construction projects for its nationalist implications; and John Fisher, the influencer better known as Big John, who found fame consuming hefty Chinese takeaways and saying “bosh” but has been drafted in as an icon of progressivism for his media appearances defending migrants.

Remember Burnham’s navy worker’s jacket, which went viral in 2020 when he wore it in a speech criticizing the then Tory government’s Covid rules? Mix with his black North Face cagoule, and his black Clarks Wallabees, and you have a strain of dadcore with distinct class implications — no burgundy chinos here. The month before the 2024 election, Labour released a promo video of Neville lobbing softball interview questions at Starmer with a bucolic Lake District backdrop. Both were in black straight-legged jeans and technical black jackets. They talked about going on humble family holidays in the British countryside as kids; about the importance of government delivery. The purist of blokeism.

All these men were born within 14 years of each other, the youngest being Neville, 50, and the oldest Lineker, 64. They all have working-class backgrounds, or at least working-class affects. Lineker’s dad was a greengrocer; Burnham’s was a telephone engineer; Starmer’s was, as you certainly know by now, a toolmaker. Fisher used to run a small cheese business. Neville is a semi-exception: his dad, the emphatically named Neville Neville, was a cricketer and football administrator. Besides Big John’s outer-London home of Romford, none of them are from the capital, though Starmer and Lineker now have nice houses there.

In May 1997, when New Labour came to power, these men were between the ages of 22 and 37. What phase is that in a man’s life? Maturing. Marriages, mortgages, kids. If a political gear-change syncs with a personal gear-change, of course it’s going to seep deep into your understanding of the world. The Blairite liberal revolution came early enough in their lives that they were open to it, but late enough that they had a full sense of what it was replacing. John Major’s sleazy Tories to Blair’s shiny teeth and shiny government — the improvement was obvious. It’s no wonder they cling to “grown-up politics”, as the comfort-blanket phrase has it. This is the politics that came in when they were themselves growing up.

And so we have this reflexive rhetorical allergy to “division”, as if division wasn’t a fundamental part of politics itself. “Anyone else feel politically homeless?” Lineker tweeted in 2017, after the lose-lose election between Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn. “Everything seems far right or way left. Something sensibly centrist might appeal?” “You’ve got extremists on the left, and extremists on the right, and neither of them are any good for society,” Fisher told GQ in September. “We are reasonable people,” Starmer said of Britain in a New Statesman interview this June. When asked about the recent flag-raising campaign on his book tour, Southgate affirmed that “there’s more that bonds us all than separates us”.

What looks like complacency from a lower generational rung makes more sense when you consider that the Blair settlement is associated, in these men’s minds, with long, sustained prosperity. By the time of the 2008 crash, since which UK real wages have stagnated, our blokes were between the ages of 33 and 48 — more than old enough to have established a career and bought at least one house. Hence their tenuously founded optimism about Britain’s prospects. “I don’t agree when Farage and others say we’re a broken country, I don’t subscribe to that, and I actually think it’s unpatriotic. True patriots don’t say their country is broken,” Starmer has said. “There is no place like Britain,” thinks Big John. “When we’re down on the floor, we can joke about it, do you know what I mean?”

Blokeism has always been pretty relaxed about moneymaking. Lineker first advertised Walkers crisps in 1995; was the BBC’s highest-paid employee for seven straight years; and co-founded Goalhanger, the media company behind the podcast phenomena The Rest is History and The Rest is Politics. Neville has a Manchester-centered property empire that includes co-ownership of two hotels and Salford City football club; his company, Relentless Developments, is in the middle of a private-equity-backed £400 million redevelopment in central Manchester.

It’d be easy, then to cast the Garys’ social progressivism as hypocrisy. Easy but wrong. The young online Right’s mockery of middle-aged men reverent of “diversity” ignores how prominent xenophobia was in everyday life until quite recently. Lineker says he was subjected to “racist abuse” at school and by fellow footballers, for having “darkish skin” despite being white; monkey chants and banana skins were still being directed at black players in the early years of his sporting career. In 2004, monkey chants were also being directed at Neville’s black England teammates during a friendly against Spain in Madrid.

For football players, and for football fans like Starmer and Burnham and many other blokes, the Premier League’s modern pre-eminence is a lesson in the virtues of cosmopolitanism. Look what happens if we let in talented people from around the world! What works for Arsenal and Everton must surely work for the rest of the economy! The uptick of migration in the Blair years, and the adoption of diversity as a hegemonic establishment value, was twinned with, again, economic prosperity. If life is good when X thing is happening, surely X thing is itself good?

Blokeism emphasizes that, contrary to what the new Right think, social liberalism is not just an elite practice. From 1983 to 2022, the British Social Attitudes survey found that the proportion of people who thought same-sex relationships were “always wrong” fell from 50% to 9%. In the World Values Survey conducted in two dozen countries from 2017 to 2022, Britain presented itself as impeccably tolerant, with citizens the least (or among the least) bothered about having neighbors who are gay, immigrants, or of a different race or religion.

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As for the hyper-online derision for a purely civil conception of nationhood in the form of “British values” — 2024 BSA data shows that, of all ethnic, religious and civic markers, “to respect British political institutions and laws” is the most widely supported test of being “truly British”, with 86% agreeing. These numbers are more than capacious enough to swallow up a good chunk of middle-aged, white working-class men, and perhaps explain why the Blairite liberal settlement has lasted so long after Britain’s post-2008 slump. Cultural predilections that have successfully filtered down through society are hard to attack and hard to shift.

Britain has changed a lot over the lifetimes of our blokes. Maybe to the point where they can’t believe things can change much more. But we are where we are, with insurgent populist parties, Reform and the Greens, now often outpolling the traditional, sensible duopoly of Conservative and Labour. Blokeism is not oblivious to this — it is, by virtue of its demographic basis, more tapped into Britain’s discontent than blissfully ignorant middle-class centrism. “I’m a bit disillusioned by politics as a whole”, Fisher told The Sunday Times, and said he understood why people felt they had to “take it on themselves” and raise the St George and Union flags on lampposts across the country. He even tweeted that he planned to vote for Reform himself, “as a protest against the big 2”, until Zia Yusuf accused him of being an establishment “counter signal” to Thomas Skinner.

Skinner is another “bosh”-loving influencer, but one who’s distinctly Right-leaning – and, at 34, of a notably younger age than Fisher. Skinner was six when Blair entered government. That’s the only political settlement he knows, and as such, he has no particular love or sentimentality for it. Younger blokes do not subscribe to blokeism. That’s one of the things their older peers are worried about. Burnham, for his part, has spoken of an “existential” threat to the current order from Reform, and how politics has to “change quite radically” to face it. But in general, the rest are too old, and too entrenched in their worldviews, to understand this. Blokeism’s power came from it being a generational phenomenon, the very same thing which will make it helpless in the political world to come.

We were promised “a 1945 moment”. This isn’t it. The welfare fiasco tells a broader story, of the failures of nearly half a century of political economy that decimated industrial Britain, and the inability of all politicians to go beyond managed decline and build a new economic model. Starmer is just the latest bit-part player.

The year 1945 is Year Zero in the Labour imaginary: the foundation of the modern, social-democratic nation-state, before which life was nasty, brutish and short. Its mythic status has only grown as the pillars of the post-war settlement have eroded. The nationalised utilities are now owned by foreign governments and hedge funds. The NHS buckles under the pressures of demographics, PFI bills, and squeezed capital spending. The state-owned industrial behemoths have been replaced by strip-lit private office blocks. And the trade unions’ tacit alliance with the government — cosy meetings and “beer and sandwiches” at No. 10 — has been replaced by a default pose of mutual hostility.

But what remains of Clement Attlee’s dream? The British state, withered, maintains a vast, bureaucratic infrastructure for redistributive cash transfers; a complex sorting-house for the conversion of tax revenues into welfare benefits. Indeed, the two phenomena are interlinked. Full employment is no longer a primary aim of public policy. Instead, the manufacturing industries and broad armies of manual labor have declined in inverse proportion to the number of people reliant on incapacity payments. It’s no coincidence that the places most dependent on DWP largesse are synonymous with economic decline: Port Talbot, Inverclyde and Hartlepool all make the top 10.

The promise of Blairism was to make peace with the Thatcherite model, a Faustian pact with the City and with growth driven by household debt and consumer credit. But welfare would be strengthened. New Labour’s Third Way would function by allowing the neoliberal revolution to continue unabated — privatisations, deregulation, globalisation, marketisation — while Gordon Brown’s fiscal transfers would expand the pool of winners from the social contract.

Pit closures towards the end of the last century were immediately followed by localized spikes in unemployment in the former coalfield. Those lingering for too long in the dole queues were quietly shifted to incapacity benefits, disguising the true picture of joblessness. And this journey from unemployment to disability is now a long-established pathway. It was the unspoken deal for the downwardly mobile citizens of deindustrialised Britain: mass redundancies would be clumsily compensated for with a more-or-less permanent welfare offer, from salt of the earth and the dignity of labor, to Benefits Street. We’ve medicalised and pathologised the effects of structural and economic shifts, of deindustrialisation, and the rise of a service economy geared exclusively towards the skillsets of urbanised graduates.

It’s small wonder, then, that a disability benefits raid would provoke a very modern Labour rebellion among the PLP. Blairism only worked when buoyed by strong global growth, and Starmer doesn’t have that. Having abandoned any project for the creation of a new model, or for reforming capitalism (let alone transcending it), welfarism and cash transfers remain one of social democracy’s only remaining raison d’etre. For the contemporary Labour MP, think less class fighter, more social worker. Most of them, for all their professional-managerial, corporate and third sector backgrounds, think of themselves as the stalwart defenders, if not of your normie, average worker, then certainly as an advocate for the very poor, the near-destitute, and, crucially, the benefit-dependent. To remove income from such people reeks of the dark days of Osbornite ascendancy, of the language of “shirkers and strivers”

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But there’s a problem. The past half decade has seen an explosion in incapacity claims driven, in large part, by mental ill health. The average age of claimants is trending downward, as the young increasingly report anxiety, depression, ADHD and other mental disorders. The extent to which this represents a health phenomenon or a cultural shift is a matter of interpretation. The British stiff upper lip came with its own destructive tendencies. But in the new, Americanized world, any and all pushback on an individuals’ subjectivity, “their truth”, is frowned upon. The result is a very modern “epidemic”, driven, in essence, by diagnostic self-ID involving a set of self-reported symptoms, and a growing cohort of jobless young adults, coming with a large price tag. While underlying population health has barely shifted, the pre-pandemic peak of £16 billion annual government spending on incapacity benefit is projected to balloon to £100 billion by the end of the decade. Something has to give.

And yet the Government chose the bluntest of instruments to try to reduce the welfare bill by a mere £5 billion. Instead of reassessing the more spurious claims, or initiating a jobs and training guarantee, benefits would be cut for a broad range of recipients, including physically disabled people, in wheelchairs, incapable of work. This wasn’t welfare reform, it was a Treasury and OBR grab. It wasn’t a Bill for creating secure, well-paid work through investment-led growth, but for punitive measures targeted against people who cannot wash and bath themselves unaided, and all to satisfy the tea-leaf fiscal and growth predictions of a faceless public body.

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But the row signals something bigger than welfare inequities. It is the beginning of the end of the nonentity of Starmerism. As a result of No. 10’s blank intellectual hinterland, we see an administration at the mercy of events, without a clear project, without a domestic vision, and unable to meet the ubiquitous challenges facing contemporary Britain. Nothing works and nothing is possible. Starmer promised “Change”, but the public is giving up on the possibility of deliverance, on the ability of the state to actually do things. The country is becoming ungovernable. In these conditions, instead of signalling a desire for change, the next election will only result in a cry of hopeless rage. Starmer has nothing in his locker that will alter the dynamic. He knows it, hence his retreat to the international stage, where the bone-dry language of diplomacy suits his neutral tones. There, at the summits, this apolitical Prime Minister can appear above the fray of mere politics.

The only consistent hallmark of his project is the bifurcation between its analysis of our malaise, and the solutions it proposes. Failed welfare reform efforts are only the latest example: a hollowed-out industrial base, stagnant real wages and a culture of chronic economic inactivity is met by a set of puny cuts to personal independence payments. Now these tweaks to the minutiae are undeliverable. National renewal is unthinkable. Backbenchers have eyes on their slender majorities — they’ve seen Starmer flip-flopping, disavowing his own past 12 months in The Observer, and they know he has no plan. They are now emboldened, smelling blood, perhaps Morgan McSweeney’s, or perhaps Rachel Reeves’s.

Tony Benn used to talk about weathervane politicians, but our current Prime Minister is more akin to a plastic bag blowing in the wind. The void at the top allows factional actors to transpose any number of worldviews onto the blank canvas of Downing Street’s vision. There’s Blue Labour Starmer, progressive Starmer, and technocratic Starmer, who bristles at the mention of any superfluous “isms”. We once had Corbynite Starmer.

After the welfare vote, we have zombie Starmer, in office but not in power. Reforming welfare treats the symptom, not the cause. It’s palliative care, relatively straightforward compared with the real task of building a new economic paradigm that provides secure, well-paid employment across the country. That would be a real 1945 moment — but it would require a solid ideological grounding, bound up in intensely political struggles, contested notions of the common good, and a new political economy. Starmerism can’t even do tinkering. Its time is up.

Farage later conceded that restoring the furnaces may not be possible, though perhaps new ones could be built. Either way, the episode neatly captured the surreal state of contemporary British politics. After all, there are still four years to go until the next election, and Labour has over 400 MPs, while Reform has just five. As Farage’s promises regarding the steel industry demonstrate, his party’s economic platform consists almost entirely of unworkable gimmicks. And yet, he is quite right to say of Keir Starmer’s government that “Reform are now leading much of their agenda”.

If there was an underlying purpose in Rachel Reeves’ spending review this week, it was to confront the rise of Farage and his party. Since the local elections six weeks ago, Starmer has tried to stake out tougher positions on immigration and integration, while attacking Reform’s economic absurdities. The prime minister has given speeches devoted solely to countering Farage, and has told MPs that they have “a moral responsibility to make sure Farage never wins”. Reeves’ spending review served as the financial complement to Starmer’s political crusade.

For Reeves, who addressed Farage a number of times in her own speech, the decision to reverse course on the winter fuel allowance was obviously driven by Reform’s local election success. She also coughed up $15 billion for transport investments, targeted at regions where Reform is a threat, and provided Labour with some rhetorical ammunition on immigration with extra cash for Border Security Command and a pledge to end the use of asylum seeker hotels by 2029. Higher defense spending will be funded with a 40% cut to foreign aid.

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One can argue that the Government is foolish to build up the Reform threat so much when the next election is still so distant, but it would be wrong to think that this is some sort of knee-jerk reaction. Contra accusations that Starmer lacks a clear direction, there have long been signs that, behind his tepid personality, he has embraced a historic mission of sorts. His purpose is to defend the remnants of Britain’s Blairite settlement from the ongoing revolt against elites, and in favor of national sovereignty. Starmer has filled his government with New Labour figures, and is himself wedded to the technocratic liberalism of the New Labour era which nurtured his political career. He wants to conform to supranational legal structures, empower Britain’s institutions to enforce doctrines of equality and rights, and generally maintain the rule of progressive lawyers and officials. In order to protect these ideals, he has to see off the forces hostile to them.

In the immediate aftermath of last year’s election, a report in the Times suggested that this mission was already taking shape. It noted that, in the northeast of England, you can drive for an hour through seats where Reform came second to Labour. Spurred by campaign manager Morgan McSweeney, who would soon be promoted to Starmer’s chief of staff, the Government’s response would essentially have three strands. Populist rhetoric would make disaffected voters feel represented by Labour; crime, health and immigration — “areas where [voters] see or viscerally feel the price of government inaction” — would be soundly managed; and economic improvement would be made manifest in people’s lives, a strategy Reeves calls the “everyday economy”. This, by-and-large, is the agenda which has come back into focus since the locals. The spending review was a reiteration of the third prong, promising, as Reeves put it on Wednesday, that “renewal” will be “felt in people’s everyday lives, in their jobs, and on their high streets”.

As a theory of how to tackle populism, the formula appears to be a fairly standard center-left one: some “flag shagging” may be necessary to address the tribal needs of voters, but fundamentally, higher living standards and a stronger state will make them good social democrats. Yet to continue giving Starmer the benefit of the doubt, he may have a deeper sense of how material and immaterial factors, matters of welfare and emotion, interact. For he has surely realized that British politics is increasingly becoming oriented around the fundamental question of citizenship. Not citizenship in the narrow sense of who gets to have a passport, but in the broader sense of what it means to be a member of British society; the rights and responsibilities it entails, and the relations, between individual, state and civil society, that it ultimately comprises.

Much of Reform’s popularity stems from the simple assertion, made salient by globalization and particularly immigration, that citizenship requires boundaries to be meaningful. If the state expects citizens to pay its taxes and follow its laws, it cannot make its resources and rights available to anyone in the world. Its first responsibility must be towards the security and welfare of British people, and it must show a preference for the culture and norms of the country as the majority of its citizens understand them. This is not enough to constitute a proper model of citizenship, but if there is a perception that the state is not maintaining the boundaries needed for citizenship even to exist, it can be politically successful. Starmer realizes this, which explains many of the positions he has taken in recent months: criticizing uncontrolled immigration, talking about the need for rules in society, and tightening requirements in areas such as English language proficiency.

But Starmer has also inherited from New Labour a more substantial model of citizenship, one that is much misunderstood. You will often hear, especially on the Right, that Blair primed the country for multiculturalism by reducing British identity to a collection of nondescript “values” like tolerance and fair play. In fact, Blair’s revolution was grounded in a much more sophisticated and comprehensive redrawing of the social contract. It was, indeed, intended to crack open older and more bounded understandings of British society, not just by redefining identity but by marinating public life in a range of progressive narratives and principles, a project assisted by sympathetic NGOs and by cadres of new graduates in the professional classes.

Crucially, though, there was another component in this scheme, essential for winning over the public, and that was public services. Improving public services was central to New Labour’s electoral pitch in 1997, and from that date until 2010 spending rose sharply, increasing by an average of 4.4% each year with a focus on health, education and transport. As for the quality and quantity of public services — more difficult to measure, of course — the Office for National Statistics estimated an increase of about one-third between 1997-2007. But this was not simply about improving material living standards or voter satisfaction; public services were a vehicle through which a new image of Britain could be sold to citizens.

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Immigration is a case in point. In the Blairite vision, people would embrace new arrivals if they were able to walk into shiny hospitals, schools, and community centers and be greeted by smiling teams of multiethnic staff, before receiving high-quality support. This is still the image of Britain emblazoned on every public-facing brochure and webpage, and the notion that immigration serves the purpose of staffing public services remains the most commonly heard case for it.

Similarly, via education, bureaucracy and broadcasting, public services provided opportunities to promote cultural change, whether by encouraging certain attitudes to language or presenting Britain as an amalgam of distinct communities. Meanwhile, the authoritarian side of Blairism — the growth of surveillance, anti-terror programs and new criminal offenses — approached the same task from the opposite angle, advancing the role of the state as a protective if menacing force capable of maintaining order in a changing society.

There are parts of Britain, increasingly likely to vote Liberal Democrat, where this vision has been really quite successful: good schools, hospitals and infrastructure underpin a way of life that is socially liberal and cosmopolitan. Here we see modern Britain “at ease with itself”, as the cliché would have it, a world that peacefully minds its own business. But these areas are generally quite wealthy. Throughout much of the country, by contrast, the financial crisis of 2008 and the subsequent years of austerity eroded the foundations on which the New Jerusalem was supposed to be built. To make matters considerably worse for Starmer and Reeves, more recent Conservative governments botched Brexit and lost control of the country’s borders. What remains of the Blairite model of citizenship, conceived as a system of managed change, are incoherent and disconnected pieces, with none of the security or prosperity needed to anchor them: social justice campaigns that seem to spring up from nowhere; a police force both unreliable and strangely aggressive; incomprehensible concessions to international law.

If there is a discernable purpose in the Starmer project, it is to shepherd these fragments and painstakingly restore them to a more coherent whole. The urgency with which his government has awarded public sector pay deals, while insisting on the need for growth, shows an elemental desire to rebuild the progressive state by getting public services functioning and funded. The problem illustrated by this week’s spending review, however, is that the government simply lacks the resources to do anything more than plug some of the gaps left by the state’s steady decay. The golden geese of New Labour’s financialized economy are not coming back, and since investors demand high interest rates from the government, the Treasury now spends more than £100 billion each year just on debt interest. For comparison, Reeves’ winter fuel payment cut was predicted to save £1.5 billion annually.

But if Labour lacks a vision for citizenship without healthy public services and a generous state, then so does Reform. Farage’s purely opportunistic economic policies, comprised of lavish, largely unfunded tax cuts and giveaways, show a failure to grasp the seriousness of the moment. He may think that the problem of citizenship is just one of reasserting boundaries, but he will soon find that, for much of the public, it is also defined by material benefits which he cannot provide.

Mainly set in the ethnically diverse working-class area of Willesden, Smith’s multigenerational saga traces over 30 years the intertwined lives of three families: the Anglo-Jamaican Jones’, the Bengali Muslim Iqbals, and the secular Jewish Chafens. The novel mainly explores the ambiguities and anxieties of the immigrant experience, but what is particularly striking is the sanguineness throughout — a sense of possibility that seems quixotic in a post-Rochdale, post-BLM and post-Southport Britain. Even if it wasn’t wholly emblematic of contemporary Britain at the time, the book seemed to reflect what Britain could become. Reading White Teeth today feels like discovering an artifact of what the late social theorist Mark Fisher called a “lost future”.

Like any good post-modern novel, White Teeth is anarchic. The search for a pure, uncontaminated identity is flung aside and so is the past — “what is past is prologue”, writes Smith in homage to Shakespeare. As Salman Rushdie and Hanif Kureishi had already tested, the immigrant experience in multicultural Britain with all its contradictions was the right subject for the post-modern novelist. But by White Teeth, cultural hybridity is not only normal but almost mundane. The O’Connell pub where Samad Iqbal and Archie Jones regularly meet is owned by an Arab Muslim immigrant. Children have names such as Danny Rahman and Quang O’Rourke, while the dialogue incorporates Creole and Bengali.

Around halfway through the novel, the narrator declares “this has been the century of strangers, brown, yellow and white”. A far cry from the high days of empire when the vexed questions of pluralism and difference were relegated “over there” in the colonies. Now those questions were coming to the metropole itself via migration, and transforming it. As Stuart Hall put it: “One day the world is going to wake up and discover that whole areas of life in Britain, in spite of Conservatism and Little Englandism, have been transformed… a kind of hybridization is happening to the English, whether they like it or not.”

White Teeth did at least acknowledge the cost of this cultural hybridization for both the native majority and the immigrant communities themselves, the latter of whom fear “dissolution, disappearance”. But the book should be read above all as the literary apotheosis of Blair-era multiculturalism. It was written in that brief age of innocence after the “End of History” and before “the age of horrorism” inaugurated by 9/11. In this narrow window, neoliberal globalization seemed triumphant and irrefragable, propped up in the academe by Homi Bhabha’s notion of “cultural hybridity” and the Blair government’s transformative immigration policies. This was an occasion to be celebrated.

Britain was steadily redefining its identity and national narrative to take into account its changing demographics. It was recast as a “nation of immigrants”, with white Britons transformed from longer the universal subject of the nation to one ethno-racial group among a host of others. “Britishness” evolved from an imperial identity tainted with racism to a civic national badge that, like Americanism, could accommodate hyphenated identities. The HMS Windrush was reimagined as a Mayflower-like ship, founding the “new” multicultural Britain. In the same year as White Teeth came the Parekh report. Commissioned by Runnymede Trust, it called for Britain to officially declare itself as a multicultural nation composed of a “community of communities”. This notion of multiculturalism went beyond a descriptor of pluralism in British society and was turned into an ideological principle and political creed to manage this plurality. For Runnymede, multiculturalism proclaimed to provide a broad framework of a new common belonging where “all citizens are treated with rigorous and uncompromising equality and social justice”, but “cultural diversity is celebrated and cherished”.

What better figurehead for this exuberant age than Zadie Smith whose debut unleashed genuine hysteria upon release? Growing up on a council estate and ascending to Cambridge University, she was the perfect example of the “multicultural writer” fit for modern Britain. Unlike her saggy-faced, hoary predecessors, the then 24-year-old mixed-race Smith was culturally versatile, writing as splendidly on Dostoyevsky and E. M Forster as on hip-hop and Game of Thrones. It’s easy to see why The Telegraph dubbed her “the George Eliot of multiculturalism”.

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And herein lay the appeal. For all of its multicultural reputation, White Teeth comfortably fits within the tradition of the English novel — how reassuringly English it feels at every step. Like generations of refined English authors before her, Zadie Smith had read her Eliot, Dickens, Shakespeare, and Chaucer. Her humour, too, is mordantly English — the proletarian wit of her North London background tempered by Oxbridge bookish irony. Some assumed that White Teeth was subverting the traditional English novel, through themes of race, gender and colonialism which expressed a new multicultural subjectivity, creating a sense that Smith was possibly radical and edgy. But for anyone who dares to set aside her ethnic origins, it’s clear that Smith’s cultural context is as establishment as it gets. She became a fellow at Harvard while still in her 20s.

Smith has long been a privileged transatlantic liberal. So much is clear from the positions she takes whenever she wades into politics. She publicly supported Obama, the political apogee of what she had been writing for years in fiction. She then opposed Brexit, scolding Corbyn for his Euroscepticism. But perhaps the illusion was finally shattered last year when her New Yorker essay went viral. Writing about the pro-Palestine campus protests in America, she called the protesters “cynical” and “unworthy” for not considering that Jewish students may find their actions threatening and for promiscuously labeling their enemies Zionist “as if that word were an unchanged and unchangeable monolith”. Her long-standing admirers accused her of rationalizing genocide and being a “liberal both-sider”, with novelist Michael Magee summing up the mood: “we lost Zadie.” A mixed-race author of novels that meditated on the post-colonial condition turned out to be insufficiently anti-Zionist and pro-Palestine. In other words, they discovered she was just another liberal — but she always had been.

This is why, at the turn of the millennium, White Teeth was comforting for British liberals anxious about this unprecedented epoch in British history. A novel that both hypothesized, and by its own existence seemed to prove, that not only could multiculturalism truly succeed, but that it could succeed without making Britain any less recognizably British. The collision of different peoples and cultures once separated by geography and history but drawn together by imperialism and globalization would, so the story went, bring about something new yet familiar. But 25 years later, such hopes seem misplaced. Multiculturalism is now “dead”, no longer seen as a source of freedom and unity but as a harbinger for ethnic conflict and sectarianism. Like a shrine to Jupiter in the decadent years of Imperial Rome, multiculturalism appears now as a relic of a civic religion that virtually everyone has ceased to believe in.

All have lofty ideas of station and status and all have these ideas disappointed. All are repulsed by a hostile, progressive world. And all are shown in the process to be (to varying degrees) trapped, spiteful, grasping, status-obsessed and self-deluding. It’s a comic instinct that speaks to something masochistic in the British spirit. Some sense that human dignity really is only as thick as a sticking plaster, but that tearing it back to expose our wounds and prejudices is in fact cathartic — cringe-making yet somehow soothing. It is through these embarrassments of men that we strangely choose to represent and interpret our culture.

Much psycho-historical ink has been spilt on the roots of this national quirk. Is it the bad British weather? Perhaps it’s a sublimation of glories lost, of needing to find a personification for superpower contraction. It’s a seductive theory — while other countries (France) tried to physically cling on to empire, we channelled the loss of ours into making people laugh. Whatever the cause, it has generated a streak of vicious, self-lacerating humour, which always works best when targeted at flawed cases of masculine psychology. It’s a tradition that has a culminating triumph in Peep Show, which marks its 20th birthday tomorrow, and despite its age, is increasingly emerging as the defining British sitcom of the early 21st century.

At first glance, Peep Show doesn’t represent any great advance in subject matter. Mark and Jez, played by David Mitchell and Robert Webb, are two mid-ult everymen fated by their creators to have a difficult time in work, play, and everything in between — middle-class men behaving slightly badly. Instead, its innovation is chiefly formal. Peep Show is filmed entirely from the perspective of its characters — quite literally in the cheap and crude first series, the actors wearing bicycle helmets with camera-antennae. The viewer is trapped deep in the cockpit of the characters’ minds, following them everywhere, from bedroom to bathroom.

This is accompanied by a script of wonderful linguistic aggression — but only around half of which is dialogue. The other half is delivered as voiceover, the thoughts and thoughtcrimes of Mark and Jez fed straight into your ear. At times, it is like a neurotic ghost train: the show has been described as “an intrusive thought in physical form”. Watching it is to experience consciousness with clunky but near-novelistic intensity. For some it’s unwatchable. For the rest of us it’s addictive.

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The strange death of Jeremy Clarkson's England

By Nicholas Harris

Peep Show originally ran from 2003 to 2015, inadvertently forming a Balzacian chronicle of that charmless, formless, nameless era of British life after Blair and before Brexit. It is full of the stuff of that age: iPods, chavs and coffee chains; Bez, Bush and oil wars on TV. It runs the full alphabet of chronological references from Ali G to Zoella, capturing all the anesthetising affluence of the Noughties just before the snap of tumult and hyper-politicisation that followed. A low, dishonest time if ever there was one, characterised by little more culturally than a tabloid-carnival of endless frivolity. And all the while, society’s atoms continued to drift ever further apart and a low of hum of bitterness set in.

Mark and Jez are two such atoms who have collided and glued together, though bound not by attraction but necessity, two university friends who have wound up living together in Croydon. Their friendship is formed of mutual love and loathing, each regarding the other as the worst-case scenario, a motivating example of how bad things could get. But they’re both outcasts and they know it. In a line that Robert Webb regards as the show’s thesis statement, Jez imagines a more “normal” existence, thinking he could abandon Mark and “be in the mainstream of the culture instead of lying like a freak in our weird puddle”. Of course, he doesn’t leave, and neither of them get anywhere, trying and failing to scale the ladders of success they’ve misguidedly selected.

For Mark, this looks like a Blairite update of the dad-on-the-Meccano-box family man. He wants a house in Surrey (and ultimately a “cottage in the Ardennes”), children who learn the viola and ancient Greek, a mid-level executive job, a Mensa membership and a Sunday Times subscription. He is too anxious and self-sabotaging to achieve nearly any of these things. And for much of the series, he projects these expectations onto Sophie (Olivia Colman), a colleague he imagines holds the key to this lifestyle, even though, as he admits, they have “very little basic compatibility”.

This creates the show’s greatest and most agonising plotline: Sophie and Mark’s relationship, accidental engagement (a twin product of “embarrassment” and “fear”), and Mark’s attempts to extricate himself (respectably) from the arrangement, up to and including on their wedding day. This leaves him at the altar saying “I do”, even his attempted jilting a failure, with his bride-to-be weeping beside him. He thinks to himself (and to us): “That’s it. I’ve ruined it. I’ve ruined my life. You only get one life, and I’ve ruined mine.” It’s a disastrous tilt at 21st-century bourgeois-dom, later to be further disappointed by menial, manual jobs, further failed (though initially more promising) relationships, and a child born out of wedlock.

Whereas Jez is an altogether more contemporary creature. He’s desperate above all to be celebrity-famous, even, if necessary, just for being famous. Craig Phillips or The Chemical Brothers will do fine (an outtake from the first series even shows Jez’s audition tape for Big Brother). This initially takes the form of trying to make it as a talentless DJ-musician alongside “Super Hans”, his erratic and “crack-addled maniac” bandmate, just one of the pack of eccentrics and one-offs that orbit Jez and Mark’s lives, there to perplex and bedevil them further. When music and the dole give out, he pursues the even more fashionable, undemanding and unpromising career of a “life coach”, delivering catastrophic and unethical advice to his clients, who are marginally more damaged than him.

If Mark is buttoned-up and emotionally barren, a superhuman super-ego of English repression, Jez is his exact double, the “work-shy freeloader” to Mark’s “tight-fisted cockmuncher”. He’s a bohemian with none of the art and all of the mess. At one point, he’s living in a bathtub; at another, he agrees to pimp out his girlfriend to Mark’s boss (after haggling to the exact price of £530). He’s feckless and thoughtless, driven by a pathological adolescence summed-up by his motto of “sucky-fucky” and his “higher law” of “if it feels good, do it”. To which Mark responds, with full David Mitchell panel-show condescension, “Oh, that’s a great law, isn’t it? What’s that, Gaddafi’s law?” At Peep Show’s best, entire episodes can pass like this, the minutiae of life chewed up in perfectly weighted and acted exchanges between its leads. And the quality of the comedy is what sustains such a bleak format, the viewer caught in the bitter-sweet spot of laugh or cry, wince or snort, smile or groan.

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Richard Osman's common people

By Nicholas Harris

It’s not a classic recipe for a large audience, and while it was on TV, Peep Show only ever enjoyed the dubious honour of “cult” status. Beloved by a few, heralded by critics, and commercially unfortunate. It was threatened with cancellation annually. Remarkable, then, that, in the past half-decade, it has achieved a cultural significance and pop-cultural ubiquity that is rare for any modern sitcom, celebrated at the very top of “best-of” lists. These days there are only two sitcoms one can, in need of auxiliary humour at a forbidding social gathering, quote to some agreeable recognition: The Inbetweeners and Peep Show. The “four naan?” exchange in particular has become so commonplace as to have slipped from reference to irritating catchphrase.

And that’s because the mood of Peep Show has moved from cult to collective. Its cackling cynicism, its unchanging protagonists and its anxious interiority were all original at the time of release, improvements and innovations on the cringe comedy trend. The Office may be the more singular, sculpted achievement, and The Thick of It a greater satire, while Fleabag achieves a level of genuine artistic beauty neither can compete with. But — sprawling, baggy, inconsistent but never far from brilliant — in its totality, Peep Show offers some of the pleasures previously reserved for the English comic novel.

The final frame of Peep Show sees our protagonists slumped at angles to the TV in their flat, both rejected by respective love interests, discussing exactly how they’d murder each other (if the situation arose). For all of its comedy, there’s something existential, something of an English Godot about the scene. And, for better or worse, they sit as our representatives: their schemes for improvement defeated and humiliated. Even if Britain has always found solace in abjection, it’s quite a terminal pair for us to have taken up. Ricky Gervais found the heart to relent on David Brent at the end, granting him that laugh from his colleagues that he always wanted. But, in a world that feels ever more joyless and farcical, manic and dejected, perhaps laughter in the dark is only the natural accompaniment.

It was the final of European Cup, Burton tells me, sitting in his living room with Paul Trippett, who was also there that night. They made Blair watch the match; then they talked. “No disrespect to the MPs round here in the Seventies, but they were cannon fodder,” says Trippett. “They put their hand up at the right time and it was a culture of booze and not getting very much done. And all of a sudden there’s this young lad and he’s a breath of fresh air”. Burton adds: “If you were normally wanting a seat, you tell people what they want to hear. But he didn’t.”

In 1983, Labour Party policy was for nuclear disarmament and the nationalisation of Marks & Spencer. Burton and Trippett had to sell it on the doorstep. When voters stared at them, Burton and Trippett had to say it probably wouldn’t happen. The party leadership was addicted to Socialism in a constitutional monarchy and unserious about winning power except over rival factions in the Labour Party. “We were New Labour before anybody mentioned New Labour,” says Trippett. “If you don’t get power, you can’t do anything.’”

The majorities were astonishing in safe Labour seats like this one, but they were a taunt. “We need,” Blair told them, “to engineer our policies so that they can actually vote for us [in the midlands and the south]. And then once they vote for us and we get a majority in parliament we can then do the things that you guys want to do for your people in the north-east.” It is a contortion that has divided Labour since Blair left in 2007; his success only compounded the bitterness.

“Every time I listened to him speak, I used to cry,” says Burton. In the footage of Blair’s election night count in 1997, Burton is at the edge of the screen, writing numbers in a notebook. Then they got on a plane from Teeside to London with Blair to watch him speak outside the Royal Festival Hall. “And he said,” says Burton, “‘a new dawn is rising’ and the sun started to shine in the dawn”. When Blair left the hall for Downing Street, Burton thought he would walk on the water.

Sedgefield is 160 square miles of County Durham, and vital: the first steam-powered passenger train open to the public, Locomotion No.1, was assembled here. Blair called it a microcosm of the country — community minded but hard-headed and aspirational — and treated it as such. The media called him an Islington man as a slur, but he wasn’t. (Corbyn was.) Rather, he thought the London Labour Party was “pretty crazy”. He grew up nearby in Durham and there was an alchemy between Blair and his activists here. “We were desperate for power,” says Trippett, “We’d had 18 years of unremittent Tory government.” Blair’s offer of capitalism to fund public services — of emphasising wealth creation as well as taxation — his positioning of Britain as a global power and his fixation on law and order was invented in Sedgefield.

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Tony Blair's war on reality

By Mary Harrington

Sedgefield is, as they say, “a real mix”. In the south of the constituency, in the suburbs of Darlington, people are monied and commute into Teesside and Durham. In the east, in the old pit villages, where high streets are bare and buses stop running at six, there is shuttered poverty. Newton Aycliffe, William Beveridge’s idealised new town, was once tidy and preening. Now it is tattered redbrick, though the landscape around it is lush. Sedgefield is small-c conservative, conscious of fairness, and ambitious for itself. It is that archetypal English rural constituency, which is considered a joke in Westminster, but isn’t: save the NHS, hang the paedophiles. When Blair won in 1997, he thanked his constituents, then the police.

Sedgefield town itself is ancient, bustling, and wealthy: a tourist destination for people from surrounding cities to visit at weekends. Restaurants, gift shops and gastropubs surround a tidy green. Corbynites would tut, then settle in: it could be Islington. Black Range Rovers are parked on the streets. Posters advertise a medieval fayre, an easter egg hunt, a flower club, and Jubilee tea parties.

The Dun Cow Inn, where Blair brought George W. Bush for fish and chips in 2003 is warm and faded. They like Blair here. “He modernised the party,” says one man. “Blairism was a reasonable thing,” says another. “He had lovely children,” said a third, pointedly, as if I am poised to say otherwise. One woman thinks that he was “corrupted by power”. When I ask why his legacy is so conflicted, another woman says, “Iraq, and that’s all there is to it”, and turns away. It was his defining example of hubris and nemesis, and it left him looking more like an archetype than a man.

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How Blair broke Britain

By Aaron Bastani

Sedgefield went Conservative in 2019. Phil Wilson, who worked for Blair from 1987 and took his seat in 2007, lost as Jeremy Corbyn was conceding. Paul Trippett worked in Wilson’s office. At the beginning of the campaign, he says, they had two teams out, one in an affluent suburb of Darlington and another in a working-class village. The message came back: “We are going to struggle.” Trippett asked them: “What’s the problem?” If it had only been Brexit, they replied, they could win. “But we couldn’t win the seat with Corbyn as leader. We couldn’t sell him. We didn’t want to sell him.” Trippett had been there before in 1983, with Burton and Blair himself, and they loathed the people around Corbyn. Their policies were time travel, Wilson says, but in the wrong direction. The Tories were campaigning in the 1950s and Labour in the 1970s, offering, “Competing images of the past”.

“In 2017 we were given the benefit of the doubt because they didn’t think we could win,” says Wilson. “In 2019 they didn’t vote for us because they were frightened that we would. I remember in 2017 a woman in the polling station saying, ‘Phil I voted for you. But get rid of him.’ That person wouldn’t have voted for me in 2019. Brexit was a part of it, but the biggest fundamental was Corbyn. He went against the grain of your traditional Labour voter who was patriotic, who saw him as a terrorist sympathiser. Giving the Russians the benefit of the doubt over Salisbury? Just embarrassing”. The seat went blue with a tepid majority of 4,513.

Now, Trippett says, “we have to work every seat like it’s a marginal”. The last pit closed 50 years ago and the monolithic culture the mines birthed has gone. Voters think like consumers, and, like consumers they are volatile and hungry. They no longer say: if I don’t vote Labour my grandmother would turn in her grave. They say: what’s the Labour Party going to do for me? Are the voters too individualistic as consumers, too fractured? Trippett ponders: “I don’t know how a political party can be a broad church these days.” It may take time, he thinks, to get Labour into power. Not the next election perhaps. But with the right candidate they’ll get Sedgefield back. Now Starmer is following Blair — emphasising security and law and order — the polls look friendlier. “You win from the centre,” says Trippett, “it’s always been in the centre. Sometimes it pushes a bit one side and sometimes the other but this block in the middle never changes”.

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Cherie Blair's class war

By Joan Smith

I meet Blair online. For someone who has lived through drama he is almost preposterously calm: atrophied by power, by slander. He is polished, wary. He calls Sedgefield, “crucial. I always grounded myself in my constituency and in the community”. He would arrive on Friday for constituency business, address the Labour club, and go to church in Trimdon village on Sunday. It was from this tiny medieval building opposite John Burton’s house that he addressed the nation after Princess Diana died.

The Tory victory of 2019, was, he says, “Corbyn and Brexit: Corbyn more than Brexit in my view. If you put forward Jeremy Corbyn as the potential prime minister of the country in a constituency like Sedgefield, they think you’ve gone crackers”. Labour voters here, he says, “are very patriotic, they are very tough on law and order, and they expect people to behave themselves respectably”.

Why is New Labour so traduced? “The reason,” he says, “is there are two groups of people in whose interests it has been to trash the New Labour concept and record. One on the left who want to say, ‘because you’re New Labour, you’re basically a sell-out’ and they wanted to take control of the Labour Party. And then you got another group of people who are the right-wing people who hated me and New Labour because we kept winning.”

“Once you leave office, unless you have a constituency prepared to argue for the record your enemies close in on it,” he says. “That’s why eventually,” — is the eventually a caveat? — “I think one route back for Labour will be to understand that it should be proud of the last Labour government, and they won’t get there unless it articulates that”.

Further reading

Centrism always fails

By Will Lloyd

I wonder if it is that simple. Labour is currently polling 13% ahead for the local elections on Thursday. The economy is the most important issue for voters and that is the government’s responsibility. 57% want Starmer as PM, compared to 43% for Johnson. And 47% of voters think he should resign. Starmer is polling well by invoking parts of Blair’s offer, and he is benefiting from Johnson’s chaos, but his problems are different. The economy is not booming as it did under Blair, and there are crises in housing, energy and inflation. Labour is two parties now, and Starmer is far to the Right of his enemies. They don’t want a negotiator to tweak capitalism: they want a socialist Utopia.

In Sedgefield, Labour voters hate Corbyn, despise Johnson and aren’t sure of Starmer yet. There is a weird kind of emptiness here politically: a waiting. It is true that Blair offered a future that came to devour him, but in 2019 both parties chose, as Wilson said, a backward glance. Starmer will make gains on Thursday by following some New Labour paths, but that settlement is a quarter of a century old. However much they long for them in Trimdon, the old politics are gone.