Earlier this month, as polls opened, I met a 90-year-old babushka as she inched her way to the nearest booth with the aid of two walking sticks. Having endured the horrors of the 20th century, she was determined to use her vote to block the resurgence of “evil”. Young people flocking to the extremes of Left and Right made her “sick and sad,” she explained, “because they don’t understand how much progress we have made.” When the results were declared the next evening, the Communists were effectively wiped out, failing to breach the 5% threshold to secure seats in the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of the Czech Parliament. The far-Right SPD (Freedom and Direct Democracy), having entered the election with 20 seats, returned with 15.

The nominal winner of the race — which produced no decisive victor — is ANO, a party bereft of coherent ideology. Its founder, Andrej Babiš, is an “anythingarian”: a highly adaptable Slovak-born billionaire who served as prime minister from 2017 to 2021 and calls himself a “Czech-first” nationalist. His rivals cast Babiš as a threat to Czech security, a soft-on-Russia comrade of Viktor Orbán’s who would terminate Prague’s vital military assistance to Ukraine. His victory is being portrayed as a boost to “populism”.

The fundamental mistake of this view is its underlying supposition that Babiš’s politics are animated by conviction. In reality, Babiš fashions his beliefs in accordance with the prevailing mood. He is an insider who advertises himself as an outsider, a Croesus who has proclaimed himself the tribune of the abandoned masses. He is a consummate salesman, transactional to his marrow. During Donald Trump’s first term as president, Babiš put on a red baseball cap  modeled on MAGA, inscribed with the slogan Strong Czechia. He relished being called the “Czech Trump” and bragged about his multiple meetings with Trump.

But once Trump lost to Joe Biden, Babiš swiftly discarded the MAGA imagery. Unlike, say, Karol Nawrocki, Poland’s president, or indeed Orbán himself, Babiš is not a fixture in the MAGA galaxy. During the campaign he explicitly dissented from Trump’s demand to NATO members to raise their defense spending to 5% of GDP. He also kept his distance from Orbán.

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In opposition, Babiš had intuited that, for all the adulation directed at the Czech Republic for arming Kyiv and sheltering Ukrainians fleeing Russia’s war, ordinary people were suffering under a program of austerity instituted to pay down the national debt. He saw an opening and seized it. Questioning why Prague was lavishing largesse on a foreign country while inflicting privations on its own citizens earned him the contempt of Europeans. But it also appealed to a sizable segment of the Czech electorate, the only constituency that mattered to Babiš as he plotted his return to power.

He was not, however, a one note candidate. He tantalized the electorate with an array of promises — handouts to the elderly and the young; lower taxes and energy tariffs; tax cuts and higher wages — that many Czechs found hard to resist. Even his party’s acronym, which means “yes”, radiates this all-encompassing brand of pragmatism.

Yet if ANO received the largest share of the vote, it failed to win an absolute majority. What is remarkable about this election is not only the return of Babiš; it is also the collapse of the center — that political area of compromise and alignment that makes a democracy governable. The Czech Republic is self-woundingly riven: no party, faction or alliance can claim to speak for a clear majority of the people. Years of austerity, uneven distribution of prosperity between Prague and the regions, and disillusionment with the political class, have worsened the divisions between urban and rural voters, the young and the old, the winners and the losers of the post-1989 generation.

In 2021, the specter of Babiš’s re-election, unifying liberal and conservative forces in opposition to him, gave rise to Spolu, an ideologically kaleidoscopic coalition that succeeded in keeping him out of office. After four years in government, Spolu looked bleached of purpose. Its leader, Petr Fiala, a bespectacled, button-down conservative, won plaudits in Brussels for his unwavering solidarity with Ukraine, but struggled to stabilize the unsteady economy at home, where he presided over soaring inflation, flat wages, and a housing crisis. A traditionalist who believes that marriage can only “be the union of a man and a woman”, he fell out last year with the Pirate Party — the most socially liberal member of the ruling coalition — when he sacked its leader, precipitating the Pirates’ exit.

Once the Pirates left, Spolu crawled further to the Right. And, as elections approached, Fiala was deeply unpopular: polls showed nearly four-in-five Czechs distrusted him. Unable to defend his record, his side attacked Babiš as a Russian stooge, a threat to Czech national security, and a reckless populist. It did not work.

In truth, though, the reflex of labeling figures like Babiš as “populists” reveals more about their opponents than about them. In fact, the term “populist” itself has become a convenient rhetorical comfort-blanket for sedentary critics, a means to brandish virtue while avoiding difficult questions about why so many voters are turning away from them. It obscures the actual reasons that prompt voters to turn to parties such as ANO.

The forces long dismissed as “populism” have now migrated from the margins of debate to the machinery of power. To govern, Babiš will need the support of two Right-wing parties: Motorists for Themselves (Motoristé Sobě) and the SPD. Motorists, a newcomer, is a party of reaction. It opposes Europe’s climate policies, favors continued coal use, and despises cycle lanes. It emerged from frustrations with the state and bureaucracy. At the Motorists’ smart post-election reception at Prague’s Martinický Palace, I met Jiří Vlk, a pilot and entrepreneur. He told me that when the country was ravaged by forest fires in 2022, he deployed his fleet of helicopters to rescue people, personally piloting a chopper to save about ten individuals. His reward for this act of gallantry? A fine from the government for not filing the correct forms and obtaining the proper permit before commencing his rescue mission. Founded three years ago, the Motorists won 13 seats in parliament in this election.

The SPD, the other Right-wing party, is anti-migration, anti-EU, and anti-Nato. It wants the Czech Republic to seal itself off from outsiders and devote itself to re-creating an apparently uncontaminated past. Its leader, the Japan-born Tomio Okamura, was severely bullied as a boy. And the SPD, as a Motorists leader put it to me, has become a platform for Okamura to ventilate his inner rage. It performed worse than expected. The trouble for Babiš, who is 21 seats short of a majority, is that he cannot govern without the SPD’s support; at the same time, he does not want to be tainted by association with them. Ultimately, though, what matters most to him is his own survival. Last week, he announced a prospective cabinet featuring the far-Right, which will oversee defense, agriculture and transport.

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Whether Babiš will himself become prime minister is still unclear. He is a defendant in a long-running fraud case over EU farm subsidies, after Prague’s High Court annulled his acquittal by lower court earlier this year; Czech conflict of interest laws may require him to relinquish control of his vast business empire before taking office. Those who know Babiš say he will do everything in his power to both keep his business holdings and become prime minister. But Petr Pavel, a former Nato general who defeated Babiš in the presidential elections of 2023, may yet block him. The prospects of a presidential barrier are diminishing by the day. But if he is prevented from taking office, Babiš will turn to proxies and govern as a puppeteer.

Either way, once ANO assembles a government, its direction will depend upon the extent to which it must depend on two hard-Right partners. If the SPD’s demand for plebiscites on EU and Nato membership, and the Motorists’ agitation against the Green Deal, gain traction, Prague will drift further from Europe. The greater risk, from the perspective of Brussels, is a revived partnership between Babiš, Orbán, and Slovakia’s Robert Fico. Collectively, this triumvirate could form a wrecking coalition. Such a future is far from certain, of course. Czech coalition talks could drag on, and Orbán, the linchpin of this league, will face a credible challenge at next year’s elections in Hungary.

But the very possibility of such an alliance ought to trouble Europe. What is denounced as “populism” is not so much a cogent creed as a verdict on the emptiness of the center. The greater danger for liberal Europe, in other words, is not the strength of these movements: it is the weakness of those who define themselves against them.

Almost four decades after the Velvet Revolution, one of the most dramatic and peaceful transitions from communism to democracy in Europe, Czech politics have settled into the same uneasy pattern seen across much of the continent: volatile, distrustful, and increasingly open to insurgent movements on the Left and Right. Czech democracy has matured and is institutionally robust — the judiciary is independent, and the Czech senate, controlled by Fiala’s coalition, has the powers to block the government’s attempts at overreach — but ordinary citizens measure its success less by its lofty ideals than by the responsiveness of those in power. This is a truth Babiš’s opponents should absorb in opposition.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was Clegg, the junior partner, who said it best: “Until today, we have been rivals: now we are colleagues… This is a new government and a new kind of government. A radical reforming government where it needs to be. And a source of reassurance and stability, too, at a time of great uncertainty in our country.”

The Coalition government even had an official colour, a soft green— a mix of the two party colours, as if the Cameron and Clegg ties had copped-off and had a baby. 

There were those who said it wouldn’t last, that a coalition of mismatched parties (a big one of the centre-right, a small one of the centre-left) would soon collapse. And yet it lasted a full five years — Tories and Lib Dems referring to one another as ‘honourable friends’ for the duration of the parliament.

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But where’s the legacy? David Cameron had 10 years as Tory leader. Six years of them as Prime Minister. In George Osborne he had a politically-potent, but loyal, deputy — not to mention an heir apparent. Together they swallowed up the Lib Dems, wrecked New Labour and won the first Conservative majority since 1992.

Clegg may have been doomed from the start, but the future should have belonged to Cameron and the Cameroons. Yes, at some point, they’d have lost power — in a true democracy political ascendancies eventually and inevitably descend. But usually they shape what comes after them.

Thatcherism left its mark on Blairism, which in turn influenced Cameronism. A new broom may set out to sweep away the legacy of what came before it; yet there’s still a connection — a negative example which the incoming regime seeks to define itself against.

But with the Cameron-Clegg years there isn’t even that. Unless you look very hard, the Coalition years are unusually — almost freakishly — disconnected from what happened next. It’s almost as if they didn’t happen at all.

*

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

Occasionally, in the history of a nation, there will be an upheaval of such magnitude as to completely redefine the politics of the present. The future is severed from the past — rendering what happened before irrelevant to what happens next. What’s so extraordinary looking back across the last decade is that three such upheavals stand between 2010 and 2020.

The first was the election of 2015 — which ended the Lib Dems as a serious force in British politics. What was literally a party of government is now a joke party of the loony centre. Vince Cable once remarked that Gordon Brown had gone “from Stalin to Mr Bean”, but little did he know that the Lib Dems would go from Vince Cable to Layla Moran.

The second upheaval was Brexit — which ended David Cameron as a serious force in British politics — and George Osborne too. If you look at their record, there is everything that the two amigos achieved over their political careers. And then there is them losing the 2016 referendum. The latter stands beside the former like the White Cliffs of Dover against a sandcastle.

Now, it is Brexit’s turn to be overshadowed — and by the tiniest of things, a virus. Looking back on that scene 10 years ago, what better setting could there have been than a rose garden? Because it all seems so impossibly, heartbreakingly, quaint.

*

And yet those years aren’t entirely without significance. As well as the fateful promise to hold an in/out referendum, there are other threads that still connect the past to the present: consequences of the Coalition that we still live with today. Here are five of them.

1. The Cameroon style of government

To be fair, this was a continuation of the Blair-Brown style of government — i.e. an over-centralised, headline-obsessed, PR-driven operation, that treats the Cabinet like middle management.

All governments need strong leaders, but good leaders allow the most talented individuals in their organisations to thrive. Bad leaders stunt the growth of those closest to them, and sideline those who refuse to be smothered.

For instance, no one doubts the dominant role that Margaret Thatcher played in her time as Prime Minister, but, contrary to the sexist stereotypes, she did not emasculate the big beasts in her Cabinet. She certainly fought with them (in Michael Heseltine’s case, to the death); but, to this day, Heseltine, Howe, Hurd, Major, Clarke, Lawson and Tebbit are seen as substantial figures in their own right.

It’s telling that the two figures who managed to emerge from the shadow of Cameron and Osborne — Theresa May (for a while) and Boris Johnson — were those who’d managed to maintain their distance from the leadership without being thrown out altogether.

The legacy, here, is that the Cameroon style of government has persisted, albeit under the new management of the May and Johnson regimes. At a time in our history when we need a government led by giants, we have a ministerial team of ever-diminishing stature.

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2. The tuition fees fiasco

Tuition fees: the original sin of the rose garden. Though first introduced by Labour, they were tripled by the Coalition. That was despite a very public pledge, made by the Lib Dems during the 2010 election, to vote against any rise in fees. Cleggmania, if you remember that such a thing ever existed, was swept along by a tide of student support. But once in power the Lib Dems not only voted for the increase, but implemented it as part of a Tory-led government!

Politicians break promises. We all know that — and we expect it to happen. But this was on another level. The Lib Dems’ reputation was destroyed and has never recovered.

As for the funding of higher education — student numbers have swollen and as a result so have the pay packets of vice chancellors. The student loan system, however, is a shambles. An IFS report from last year found that approximately half of all loans are written off — the taxpayer picking up the tab. This accounts for 90% of all government spending on higher education — a subsidy for failure that rewards the courses and institutions that make the least contribution to their students’ future prospects.

It’s an absolute mess that loads young people up with debt, while still leaving taxpayers on the hook. And, of course, those responsible — the fat cats of the higher education establishment — get paid regardless. The whole thing is morally bankrupt — and the current crisis is pushing it ever closer to financial bankruptcy too.

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3. Breaking the housing ladder

Having alienated the young with its tuition fees policy, you’d have thought that the Coalition might have won them back by making homeownership affordable again.

Not a bit of it. In 2010, poleaxed by recession, the big housing developers were on the floor. The Government could have dictated terms — putting an end the landbanking scam, for instance. Instead, ministers rescued the sector without reforming it .

The Coalition’s flagship policy was ‘Help to Buy‘ — basically a mortgage subsidy that only serves to pump more finance into a rationed housing market. The impact on prices was entirely predictable. So, 10 years later, Generation Rent is still struggling to get on to the housing ladder. With the oldest millennials now hitting middle age, they face a lifetime of exclusion from the property-owning democracy. Good luck getting them to vote Conservative!

It’s not that nothing has been achieved. There were some useful reforms to the planning system and, more recently, the excellent work of the Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission. But these have been initiatives of the Department of Communities and Local Government (latterly, the Department of Housing, Communities and local Government). The policies that really count were — and still are — dictated from the Treasury and Downing Street. And those power centres are still dedicated to the protection of the landlord class.

What a shameful legacy.

4. Austerity the stupid way

It has to be said that the Coalition government was not dealt the easiest of hands. Like the Obama administration in America, they came into power with the consequences of the Global Financial Crisis to sort out.

With its outsized financial sector, the British economy was in a vulnerable position. Add to that a hung parliament plus the Eurozone crisis gathering momentum just over the Channel, and it is clear that the new government absolutely had to establish its credibility.

As the Left always pretends to forget, a mountain of public debt doesn’t just allow a country to spend more than it earns, it makes it deeply dependent on the confidence of its creditors — i.e. the international money markets. As events would prove, the loss of that confidence would have dire consequences elsewhere in Europe.

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As painful as austerity has been the UK, it could have been worse. Just ask the Irish or the Italians or the Greeks. And yet while he had no choice but to rein in spending, George Osborne made some unforced errors.

For instance, he ruthlessly exploited public support for curbs to social security. It was right to encourage people off welfare and into work, but lasting harm was done by underfunding vital reforms like the introduction of Universal Credit.

Another false economy was the decision to implement Labour’s planned cuts to capital spending (infrastructure, etc). Failing to mend the roof when the sun’s shining (the charge that the Coalition levelled at Labour) is certainly irresponsible, but failing to fix it when it is raining is even worse. In fact, downing tools at a time when the economy has lots of idle capacity is simply perverse.

The recovery was undoubtedly delayed as a result. And the work that could have been done was added the country’s backlog of necessary infrastructure improvements. That’s an especially big burden on those parts of the country that have suffered decades of under-investment.

Goodness knows what the Covid-crisis will do to it, but the current government’s “levelling-up” agenda is just what Britain needs. But we needed it 10 years ago too.

5. The three horrible aitches

As if to make up for their early mistakes, Cameron and Osborne went on to develop a penchant for really big infrastructure investments — promoting the three horrible aitches: HS2, Hinkley Point C and Heathrow expansion. The political advantage of these massive projects was that with their very long lead-in times, big announcements could be made years, even decades before the bills become due.

However, this also provides plenty of time for costs to be revised — which they have been, in the usual upwards fashion.

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The horrible aitches are obvious white elephants that should have been shot by the Coalition. Instead, they gained such momentum, that the more sceptical May and Johnson administrations felt unable to stop them. Coronavirus may put to a halt to Heathrow (indeed to whole swathes of the aviation industry) — but it looks like we’ll be paying billions-and-billions for HS2 and HPC for decades to come.

This will be the longest lasting and costliest legacy of the Coalition years.

*

I’ll admit I’ve been accentuating the negative. There were some positives: the Govian reforms to education; the devolution of power to English cities; a pretty good climate change policy. But I’ve focused on the mistakes because they were avoidable.

It’s not like we can afford to make them again.

So it is for me and my politics. I haven’t had one political awakening; I’ve had dozens. I’m still not sure that the way I see the world today is the right one. Frankly, the level of conviction most political writers seem to have these days strikes me as indulgent narcissism.

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My first political memory is staying up late in 1992 with my father, nestled on the sofa in the upstairs living room of our house in Birmingham. As the results ticked in, and his hopes for a Labour victory expired, I felt his sense of despair as if it were my own. I believed it was my own for a long time: I had a sort of lizard-brain level conviction that I was Not a Tory.

Around this time I remember walking home from school with my good friend Catherine, who had no such in-built disdain for the Conservative party, and wanted to know why I was so passionately against them. In an instant, I conjured up a rationalisation for my stance: the mess the government had made of child support laws had pitted my parents against each other during their divorce. They had stayed friends, I maintained, until the Child Support Agency ruined things.

Catherine nodded wisely, and said that made sense. But I felt awkward, because I knew it wasn’t true. Yes: I had a vague inkling that my parents had found the CSA hard to deal with. But I knew the truth was that I hated the Conservatives because I loved my father. The feelings came before the reasons, not the other way around.

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I continued to consider myself Not a Tory for years, with other vague political identities layered on top, like George Bush is a Bad Guy and Northern Ireland is Important (I had a boyfriend whose dad had served there, and who had friends caught up in the Omagh bombing). But honestly, I paid almost no attention to politics.

In 2002 I had an interview for a graduate trainee scheme at Reuters where they asked me to name “a news story from the last few months”. I stared blankly until the interviewer generously reminded me of a few: a Foot and Mouth epidemic, a postponed General Election, the Soham murders, the death of the Queen Mother. I didn’t get the job.

In the end, I came to politics through policy. I was a journalist at a magazine called Property Week, where I was assigned the job of reporting on tax and planning policy (as well as industrial warehouses). I loved it. I saw how incentives and rules create system-level change, or system-level failure. I never got the hang of reporting on deals — the life blood of the magazine — but discussing and explaining policy? I had found a metier.

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By Peter Franklin

So I went to work for the Liberal Democrats, as a policy adviser on housing and local government — that’s when I fell in love. Because joining a political movement is exactly like falling in love. The feelings come before the reasons.

I went to party conference, in Harrogate, and I stayed up until 3 in the morning, then kept myself awake during the day by chain-drinking caramel macchiatos. I felt like I was part of something. I belonged. I gazed longingly at the most senior political advisers, like Charles Kennedy’s handsome press officer, and his handsome speechwriter, and I dreamed of being like them.

My addiction to The West Wing bears a lot of responsibility for this, of course: this was my Aaron Sorkin phase, where I believed earnestly that all problems could be resolved if we were all just a bit more articulate, clever and brave.

Then came the coalition, in which I worked as Nick Clegg’s senior policy adviser. I’d long since been able to observe intellectually that the Conservative Party was not the exclusive force for evil I’d been brought up to believe it. But I think I only emotionally absorbed this when I was working day after day alongside talented, wise, compassionate and thoughtful people who chose to wear a blue rosette at election time. There are still Conservatives I’d cross the road to avoid. But there are far more I’m privileged to call friends.

I shared an office with Steve Hilton, the maverick adviser to David Cameron. At one point he introduced me to a policy specialist who was advising on the introduction of elected Police and Crime Commissioners. “You know how I’ve told you that everyone who’s against PCCs is just an establishment bore who has to be ignored,” Steve told this adviser. The adviser nodded. “Well, Polly’s the exception. You can listen to her.” And most of the time, this was the spirit of the coalition. We mostly found ways to listen to each other, instead of starting with the assumption that our opponents were wrong. It made for better government. I believed in it.

But my illusions that you could win hearts and minds with decent government and reasonable compromise were shattered by the 2015 General Election. The morning after, Paddy Ashdown stood in our Lib Dem HQ among the hungover and the heartbroken hangers on, who couldn’t bear to face the reality of going home. Perched on a chair, his voice cracking, he asked: “Why would anyone compromise in the national interest ever again?”

He reminded us that politics is feelings, not facts. We’d placed our faith in facts, and reasonableness. We’d tried being clever, articulate and brave; and discovered that the public preferred intransigence.

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The abusive inhumanity of our politics

By Polly Mackenzie

I miss being partisan. It’s so comfortable to be right all the time, and there’s no view better than the one from the moral high ground, from which your enemies are the ranged forces of evil. It’s the way to make money as a columnist. It’s the way to win votes at the ballot box. But even these victories are less valuable than the feeling of being surrounded by your tribe and the warm fuzzy glow of righteousness. I miss it. I just don’t feel that tribal belonging any more. I’m a political apostate.

In fact, I think we do better when we listen to each other with an open mind. I think politics should be about finding a way forward together, not winning and making the other guys shut up for a few years. I think all our parties, and every individual within them, are wrong on some things and right on some others. And I think the same of myself.

Humility needs a place in our politics. I hope some day it will take the place of the hubris we see from our current crop of leaders.

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

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

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The rise of the hippie conservatives

By Freddie Sayers

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

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

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

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

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

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Why the Greens should stop playing God

By John Gray

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

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

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

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

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

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Why men should be banned

By James Kirkup

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

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

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

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

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

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In 2010, David Cameron first fooled the country

By James Bloodworth

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

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

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

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

Brexit did, of course, hasten this realignment. And spare a thought for the Theresa May/Nick Timothy strategy in the 2017 election which was widely ridiculed at the time, because it narrowly failed, but which can now take a bow as a necessary prelude to the breath-taking Tory advances made into historically hostile territory on Thursday.

Brexit, rather like immigration in the past couple of decades, has become an “emblem” policy. Support for Brexit is not so much about the details of EU regulation, rather it has become part of a wider, defensive reaction to the radicalism of the post-Cold War “double liberalism” of free market and cultural opening, represented in the EU by the two central post-national policies of the Euro and free movement.

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The danger ahead for Boris Johnson

By Mary Harrington

The challenge for the Tory party now, as Mary Harrington lays out in her election night piece, is to represent aspects of this defensive, national reaction without turning its back on the attractive aspects of the economic and social openness of recent decades. There is no reason why this cannot be accommodated under the canopy of the “One Nation Conservative party” that Boris Johnson talked up last night and throughout the campaign.

On immigration, for example, Johnson has already been shaping policy to appeal to both wings of the new Tory coalition. While the overall stress is on control and a return to more moderate levels, there has been selective liberalisation — over post-student work opportunities, for example.

It is not even impossible that Johnson, pressured by the Spectator magazine’s enthusiasm for it, could announce an amnesty for those illegal immigrants who have been here 10 years or more and who are never going to be deported anyway. Such a gesture to the liberal end of the coalition could be balanced with something for small-c conservatives such as the introduction of a citizen identity system (ID cards in the old language) which would, incidentally, make illegal immigration much harder.

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It's a bad time for an illegal immigration amnesty

By David Goodhart

There will also be genuine conflicts of interest between different parts of the new Tory coalition. The small-state, low-tax Toryism of the affluent suburbs has hardly been in the ascendancy in recent years. But it will have to concede further ground to the new Tory voters who want quite high public spending and good public infrastructure. How much ground it will have to concede will be the stuff of battles to come.

Housing is another potential battleground. The interests of younger people and lower income renters not on the ladder are potentially in conflict with those who are already happily housed and worrying about the impact of a massive building programme both on the value of their home and its effect on the green belt.

Meanwhile, in post-school education, the over mighty universities, long institutions of the middle-class Left, may find themselves less favoured, as investment into the battered Further Education sector is prioritised. Yet universities should also be on the front line of a rejuvenated Tory industrial and regional strategy which tries to spread good jobs and economic success more evenly around the country.

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Will Boris save social democracy?

By David Goodhart

So new priorities need not always conflict with old ones. But one interesting thing to follow will be the changing tone and accent (literally) of the Tory party as the proportion of privately educated Tory MPs falls to an all-time low, possibly as low as one-third. The new generation of Tory MP, such as Eddie Hughes the working-class Birmingham man who won Walsall North for the Tories in 2017, do not have a noblesse oblige interest in decent public services for the masses because they have spent their lives depending on them.

People such as Eddie Hughes and the new generation of less middle-class Tories might also have an interesting impact on the party’s attitude to family, gender and race issues. In recent years, British Conservatives have not really offered any kind of alternative to liberal metropolitan thinking in these areas. This could be about to end. Fairness and opportunity for minorities and women need not take the often sectarian and hyper-liberal form of recent years and can better accommodate the priorities of small-c conservatives, in family policy for example.

The fact that Johnson has promoted ethnic minority Brits to leading positions in his cabinet and No 10 also bodes well for more balance in the area of race and minority rights and a willingness to challenge the assumption that any departure from perfectly proportional ethnic representation must always be down to white discrimination.

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Could the Tories ever win the black vote?

By Mutaz Ahmed

Is it possible that fresh thinking in these areas, thinking that is closer to what the decent average person thinks, rather than the average university administrator, might even filter through to younger people who are overwhelmingly under the sway of the Left? That is unlikely to change in the short term but if the Tories push back intelligently against ‘woke’ culture, they might find a surprisingly receptive audience among young people.

A significant section of educated Britain has been suffering from Brexit derangement syndrome in recent years. It might be seen as a less alarming version of the 1930s flirtation with communism. But, as in the 1930s, the sophistry and fundamentally undemocratic instinct of many of those wanting to overturn the Brexit vote has come up against the decent common sense of the new Tory voters.

As John Gray put it in a recent A Point of View talk on BBC Radio 4:

“Those who have studied to degree level and beyond have often embraced ideas and projects that many less educated folk instinctively recognise are dangerously absurd. Something like this happened in Britain in the 1930s — much of the intelligentsia was ready to junk democracy in Britain for a new order that they felt was coming into being somewhere else.”

The EU is not the Soviet Union but the quasi-religious embrace of the EU worldview does seem to have driven many people, some of them my best friends, slightly crazy!

This election result is a big blow to the confidence and cultural power of educated, left-liberal Britain. A new coalition of people from many different backgrounds, by no means all Tories, now has an opportunity to push back against the extremes and pathologies of that cultural hegemony.

So it is for me and my politics. I haven’t had one political awakening; I’ve had dozens. I’m still not sure that the way I see the world today is the right one. Frankly, the level of conviction most political writers seem to have these days strikes me as indulgent narcissism.

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Don't let Brexit become the next Troubles

By Jenny McCartney

My first political memory is staying up late in 1992 with my father, nestled on the sofa in the upstairs living room of our house in Birmingham. As the results ticked in, and his hopes for a Labour victory expired, I felt his sense of despair as if it were my own. I believed it was my own for a long time: I had a sort of lizard-brain level conviction that I was Not a Tory.

Around this time I remember walking home from school with my good friend Catherine, who had no such in-built disdain for the Conservative party, and wanted to know why I was so passionately against them. In an instant, I conjured up a rationalisation for my stance: the mess the government had made of child support laws had pitted my parents against each other during their divorce. They had stayed friends, I maintained, until the Child Support Agency ruined things.

Catherine nodded wisely, and said that made sense. But I felt awkward, because I knew it wasn’t true. Yes: I had a vague inkling that my parents had found the CSA hard to deal with. But I knew the truth was that I hated the Conservatives because I loved my father. The feelings came before the reasons, not the other way around.

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Why shouting 'traitor' is a fool's game

By Giles Fraser

I continued to consider myself Not a Tory for years, with other vague political identities layered on top, like George Bush is a Bad Guy and Northern Ireland is Important (I had a boyfriend whose dad had served there, and who had friends caught up in the Omagh bombing). But honestly, I paid almost no attention to politics.

In 2002 I had an interview for a graduate trainee scheme at Reuters where they asked me to name “a news story from the last few months”. I stared blankly until the interviewer generously reminded me of a few: a Foot and Mouth epidemic, a postponed General Election, the Soham murders, the death of the Queen Mother. I didn’t get the job.

In the end, I came to politics through policy. I was a journalist at a magazine called Property Week, where I was assigned the job of reporting on tax and planning policy (as well as industrial warehouses). I loved it. I saw how incentives and rules create system-level change, or system-level failure. I never got the hang of reporting on deals — the life blood of the magazine — but discussing and explaining policy? I had found a metier.

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Our politics of impossible promises

By Polly Mackenzie

So I went to work for the Liberal Democrats, as a policy adviser on housing and local government — that’s when I fell in love. Because joining a political movement is exactly like falling in love. The feelings come before the reasons.

I went to party conference, in Harrogate, and I stayed up until 3 in the morning, then kept myself awake during the day by chain-drinking caramel macchiatos. I felt like I was part of something. I belonged. I gazed longingly at the most senior political advisers, like Charles Kennedy’s handsome press officer, and his handsome speechwriter, and I dreamed of being like them.

My addiction to The West Wing bears a lot of responsibility for this, of course: this was my Aaron Sorkin phase, where I believed earnestly that all problems could be resolved if we were all just a bit more articulate, clever and brave.

Then came the coalition, in which I worked as Nick Clegg’s senior policy adviser. I’d long since been able to observe intellectually that the Conservative Party was not the exclusive force for evil I’d been brought up to believe it. But I think I only emotionally absorbed this when I was working day after day alongside talented, wise, compassionate and thoughtful people who chose to wear a blue rosette at election time. There are still Conservatives I’d cross the road to avoid. But there are far more I’m privileged to call friends.

I shared an office with Steve Hilton, the maverick adviser to David Cameron. At one point he introduced me to a policy specialist who was advising on the introduction of elected Police and Crime Commissioners. “You know how I’ve told you that everyone who’s against PCCs is just an establishment bore who has to be ignored,” Steve told this adviser. The adviser nodded. “Well, Polly’s the exception. You can listen to her.” And most of the time, this was the spirit of the coalition. We mostly found ways to listen to each other, instead of starting with the assumption that our opponents were wrong. It made for better government. I believed in it.

But my illusions that you could win hearts and minds with decent government and reasonable compromise were shattered by the 2015 General Election. The morning after, Paddy Ashdown stood in our Lib Dem HQ among the hungover and the heartbroken hangers on, who couldn’t bear to face the reality of going home. Perched on a chair, his voice cracking, he asked: “Why would anyone compromise in the national interest ever again?”

He reminded us that politics is feelings, not facts. We’d placed our faith in facts, and reasonableness. We’d tried being clever, articulate and brave; and discovered that the public preferred intransigence.

More from this series

As a headstrong activist, I was a dangerous thing

By Paul Embery

I miss being partisan. It’s so comfortable to be right all the time, and there’s no view better than the one from the moral high ground, from which your enemies are the ranged forces of evil. It’s the way to make money as a columnist. It’s the way to win votes at the ballot box. But even these victories are less valuable than the feeling of being surrounded by your tribe and the warm fuzzy glow of righteousness. I miss it. I just don’t feel that tribal belonging any more. I’m a political apostate.

In fact, I think we do better when we listen to each other with an open mind. I think politics should be about finding a way forward together, not winning and making the other guys shut up for a few years. I think all our parties, and every individual within them, are wrong on some things and right on some others. And I think the same of myself.

Humility needs a place in our politics. I hope some day it will take the place of the hubris we see from our current crop of leaders.