The Clare Boothe Luce Center’s annual leadership conference for young women promises to nurture “strong, conservative leaders” and help “young women flourish… while strengthening their families, communities, and country”. With more than 120 there, this was its biggest gathering yet.

Clad in what I thought was my smartest outfit — white shirt, black trousers, ballet flats — I realized my miscalculation the moment the elevator doors opened. Before me stood Mia, 21, from North Carolina, in a long white dress and stilettos, her curls immaculate. It was a sea of voluminous blowdries and meticulous makeup. Nearly every girl was dressed as if she was about to meet a senator, or marry one, while I looked like the Senate librarian.

Over breakfast, I met some of them, as they daintily picked at their syrupy pancakes with scarlet nails: Maddy, a sparky 20-year-old in baby blue, was working as a Comms intern for her “hero”, her state’s first female senator; Cecelia, the youngest and sternest, was interning for the conservative and religious First Things magazine. Paige, another congressional intern, grinned at me: “Today is so fun!”

They were fresh-faced and ambitious. Most were under 21, and were in DC forging the beginnings of their political career, only a few among the swarm of interns that descends upon the city each summer. They came from colleges all over the country, often from campuses that were allergic to their political persuasions, and they hoped that the people they met here would one day be their colleagues in congress or on the senate floor.

Kimberly Begg, the center’s president, is a Catholic attorney, who has five children, and has worked for various conservative causes throughout her life. She took this job last year, feeling a desire to teach the values she’s living to the next generation. “I want them to know what it means to be a good woman,” she said. “Not just how to excel at work, but how to live. ”

Her summer interns are taking note. One of them, Anastasia, told me she’d learned “how to look good on camera and spread the message”. When I asked her about this message, she responded brightly: “That you can be a mom and be ambitious.” I would hear this repeatedly: you shouldn’t disvalue mothering alongside your greater career goals; ; you can most definitely have it all. The practicalities of this were never addressed — can you stay home while running for senate? Instead, we were told that womanhood isn’t possible without babies.

The first speaker was the 30-year-old Mary Margaret Olohan, a redheaded White House correspondent for The Daily Wire. She’d grown up in an Irish Catholic family, “proudly” one of 11 children, and had been homeschooled. She began her career as a publicist during the 2018 Kavanaugh hearings, where several women accused the now Supreme Court justice of sexual misconduct during his confirmation hearing. “I don’t know if you were politically cognizant then,” she told her fresh-faced audience, “but that’s when I was radicalized.” Olohan quit her job to become a journalist, a “truth-seeking one”, convinced that the “Pro-Abortion” media were trying to stop Kavanaugh’s appointment, and now she covers abortion as a beat.

Today, she’s a regular visitor to the Oval Office: “There’s things you have to do to get noticed, I wear bright colors, have a peppy smile, I make sure I look good, really good.” Recently, she’s been reporting on the doxxing of ICE agents. Yet she told us that she’ll always make space for Mass during her work day, even if it means missing a scoop.

Like every other speaker that day, Olohan offered career advice with the caveat that there are “more important things to remember. You should never prioritize your career over finding your spouse… You should try and put yourself in the position that you can be at home. Like me, if God willing, I have a family, I can be at home writing.”

As girls queued for selfies, Maddy, who writes for her student newspaper, told me she was excited that such a young woman could be breaking such big stories. “She was just so cool. I mean, how old is she? And she’s everywhere.”

But not everyone felt so inspired. Courtney, a dazzling blonde from Utah who is currently interning in Congress, sighed. “We’re all girls here, so I may as well just tell you, I’m 17 weeks pregnant. And it’s really hard. I’m the only girl in my office, and I’m just totally exhausted. No one gets it.” She looked around the room. “This is what I hoped DC would be like.” She clearly admired Olohan: “I really want to do that too. To fight abortion, trans stuff, to fight for America. I want to make a difference. But I’m so tired now, and I haven’t even had the kid yet.” And yet for all her talk about balancing work and homemaking, Olohan had offered little practical advice: “I mean, she’s not even married yet. How can she tell me what I’m supposed to do?” Courtney asked me.

The other girls, whose youthful naivete no amount of makeup could conceal, had no answer. “I mean, in an ideal world, you’d have your family around. Someone to look after the baby, right?” Maddy ventured, as the rest of us nodded enthusiastically. “I don’t know how to trust someone else with my kid,” Courtney replied. “And don’t even get me started on daycares.”

There was a fracture at the table now: tiny, but visible. None of the other girls was married. None had boyfriends. Maddy said she’d gladly date someone “if he’s not intimidated by a strong woman”. She was here to network, but Courtney was here to find out how to live.

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Courtney had become pregnant by “accident”, and married her boyfriend earlier this year, “because what else can you do?” All the girls I spoke to were vehemently pro-life, except Maddy, who thought there “should be some exception for rape”. Paige and Courtney weren’t so sure; they grimaced at Maddy’s mention of rape. “Two wrongs just don’t make a right,” Paige told me.

Besides, Courtney was grateful for her unexpected pregnancy. “Now we have to become real grown-ups, we have to step it up,” she said. Her husband is 23 and still has two years of college left. He is spending the summer delivering Amazon packages. “He’s a good man, for that. He wants me to stay home.” She showed us wedding photos taken at the Utah State courthouse.

What really struck me, though, was that in a room of worshipping conservatives, who were excited by what the new administration had been doing, there was no mention of Donald Trump until after lunch. The values of being a “conservative woman” — being polite in your power, being nurturing with your strength — didn’t seem to align with Trumpian chaos. He was the unmentionable representative of a more turbulent revolution.

When I asked about Trump, Paige perked up: “He’s not perfect. But he loves America.” “I just wish he’d get off Twitter!” Courtney sighed. The girls liked Melania Trump and admired her reticence. “People are so mean to her, it’s so disrespectful,” Courtney said. “Feminists especially.” But their real heroine was Karoline Leavitt, Trump’s feisty 27-year-old press secretary. “They say [Trump] doesn’t like strong women, I mean just look at the women surrounding him. Look at her, she’s amazing,” Courtney said. Leavitt, who had a baby on the campaign trail, went back to work just four days after giving birth. To these girls, she’s the ultimate embodiment of conservative womanhood. She grinned through it all with her hair freshly blow-dried.

“Everyone knows conservative women are the happiest in America,” McFarland told the cheering crowd. Like many others that day, McFarland offered happiness like a revolutionary compact: work harder and look better, don’t waste energy on girls who “suck the energy from you”. Don’t out-man the men but outshine them.

We heard from Harmeet Dhillon, Trump’s lawyer, and Paula Scanlan, who spoke with steely hurt about her time on a swim team with Lia Thomas, the transgender athlete. “Women are naturally kind and caring,” Scanlan said. “It’s really challenging to break through that.” Courtney nodded beside me.

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In line for the bathroom afterwards, a group of girls discussed Scanlan’s courage. “She can’t be more than 20,” one said, admiringly. An 18-year-old from California sighed, “That’s the problem with being young. Guys just can’t match our maturity. I have to date, like, a 25-year-old.” The line dragged. Despite the day’s lengthy applause for single-sex spaces, the girls broke into the men’s bathroom. “This is so funny,” a 20-year-old from Maryland told me. One girl dry-shampooed while another fixed her lashes. Another took a mirror selfie to send to her mum.

As I was leaving the conference, I exchanged numbers with Maddy. “It’s funny,” she said when I complimented her outfit, “it was actually my mom’s wedding dress.” “She gave it to me.”

Was that it? Did this maternal gesture in some way sum up the entire movement? In this room, femininity wasn’t something to rebel against or escape from, but something to inherit and slightly refashion, like your mom’s old wedding suit. The girls identified as “first-wave feminists”, because they weren’t looking for equality, but a way to make peace with everything they’d been told to seek. Here, the pursuit of love didn’t conflict with ambition, nor was faith at odds with intelligence.

Yet, as Courtney seemed to realize, there were holes in the story of conservative womanhood these girls were being sold. “Tradwife or Girlboss, maybe you don’t have to choose,” read one of the conference’s ads; and in many ways, the movement on offer here felt like a soft-lit inversion of the girlboss era, with self-empowerment refashioned as political purpose. Where the girlboss promised liberation through self-branding, the conservative woman here was encouraged to become her fullest self by serving others, her God, her country, her family. Yet both models offered the same tired bargain: perform perfectly, and you’ll be rewarded.

Courtney was waiting for that reward. She left hopeful that she would “figure it all out”, become a mother in a few months and then become something else too. And the day’s agenda only offered a more orderly container for those things, one with clear expectations and attractive packaging. But Courtney’s tired eyes and unasked questions still hover over the whole thing: a reminder that no amount of lipstick or prayer can gloss over what this brand of femininity can’t sustain.

We were told all day that boys have it harder now, and the women nodded along, because nodding is easier than asking what hard really means. They’d been “going dancing”, having “movie nights”, cooking each other “cute little dinners”. But they were also getting on in the world. And at some point, the fervor they built up trying to change America would have to be sacrificed for their truer calling: motherhood. Then, it would be the boys left standing in the Oval Office, the Senate floor, or even in their own homes, making decisions.

That siren call of conservative womanhood is not shouted but whispered. A murmur that tells you your instincts are sacred, your sacrifice noble, your submission a kind of strength. It makes giving things up feel like choosing them. Even while Courtney abandoned her political dreams (at least for now) she felt her greater purpose would arrive with her baby. I could easily feel the allure of such a promise. But that’s what I left shaken by: how quietly a life could be rerouted, not by force, but by suggestion. This way they could have it all, supposedly, but the rooms of real power were still off limits, reserved for the boys who never had to choose.

Unfortunately for them, this is at odds with the electorate: a new poll of British voters by UnHerd, conducted by Focaldata, reveals a notable realism towards foreign policy that is not reflected in either of the main party platforms. This is just one of the big issues facing the nation that isn’t being properly interrogated in the general election campaign, and it is the focus of the first instalment in a polling series that will seek to understand the views of UnHerd Britain.

Eighty years on from D-Day, our headline finding is a clear scepticism towards foreign adventures and an unambiguous focus on British national interest, a view which markedly differs from the prevailing liberal interventionism of past decades. A majority of voters (52%) believe that “British foreign policy should be focused on what is in Britain’s interests, even if that is not in other countries’ interests”, compared with only 30% who believe that “British foreign policy should try to make the world a better place, even if it has costs for Britain”.

UK voters: foreign policy should be based on national self-interest

Which of the following comes closer to your view?

This more “realist” option is preferred by overwhelming majorities of Reform and Conservative voters, but is also the preference of people planning to vote Labour, at 45% to 36%. Only Liberal Democrat and Green voters tend the other way, preferring a more idealist foreign policy.

When it comes to overseas conflicts in general, only 7% of voters think that Britain should be more engaged than it currently is, while 44% think it should be less engaged, and 36% think we should keep roughly the current levels of involvement. Again, in a powerful sign of how ideas of British imperialism are no longer in favour on the Right, 64% of Reform voters want less engagement and this is also the preferred position of Conservative voters (44% compared with 42% who say “about the same”). In fact, there is support across all parties, with the exception of Labour, for a reduction in Britain’s engagement in overseas conflicts; Labour voters narrowly opt for the current level of engagement (41% to 39%).

Do you think Britain should be more or less engaged in overseas conflicts?

Polling text

These findings highlight the conundrum that awaits a future Labour government: while its voters are broadly the most supportive of idealistic British involvement in overseas conflicts, the party also contains a strain of passionately anti-war Leftists. The “progressive realism” coined by shadow foreign secretary David Lammy to describe Labour’s approach is best understood as an attempt to square this circle.

The thorniest issue for Keir Starmer will be Israel. Labour voters have a far more critical view of the current war in Gaza than their leader. Asked who they blame for the war, Labour voters choose “the Israeli Government” ahead of Hamas, while British voters in general blame Hamas ahead of Israel. Endorsement of the ICC’s prosecution proceedings against Benjamin Netanyahu is at 53% among Labour voters; only 14% oppose it. Starmer has voiced support for the arrest warrant, and one assumes he would comply with it if issued.

Right-leaning voters, when asked about the conflict, would prefer to disengage entirely rather than taking a tougher stance on either Israel or the Palestinians — this is the preferred option among both Conservative and Reform voters. But Labour voters fall narrowly alongside more progressive voter groups such as the Greens and Liberal Democrats in believing that “the UK should take a tougher stance on Israel”. Once again, disengaging from the war is the most popular option among British voters in general.

British voters: UK should disengage from Israel-Hamas war

British voters

This move towards "realism" extends also to the escalating standoff between the United States and China. Asked what British policy should be towards the standoff, 41% would align with the US; notably however, it is not a majority. Most voters think the country should either be aligned with neither (37%), or China (5%) or aren’t sure (15%).

Do you think the UK should align itself more with the US, China, or neither?

British voters

There is an exception, however, to British voters’ more isolationist mood: Ukraine. Most think that the UK’s level of involvement is about right, or could be further increased. Only a minority of voters would prefer a reduced role or none at all. Voters would reject, if offered, a peace treaty in which Russia would gain possession of eastern provinces of Ukraine and Crimea, and there is even substantial support for the UK allowing Ukraine to shoot missiles into Russian territory (40% compared with 22% against) and allowing British troops into Ukraine to help train Ukrainian forces (39% support compared with 34% against). However, any suggestion of British troops engaging in active combat against Russia is dismissed entirely, by absolute majorities of all political party voters.

Attitudes to Ukraine

British voters

Questions of distant wars, however, only become the defining political issue when citizens are asked to fight in them — and on this question, the results of the UnHerd Britain poll make concerning reading for any government. We asked parents whether they would be prepared to send their children into battle for a range of causes, and the numbers of those who would are vanishingly small. Only 15% would consent to their children taking up arms to defend Poland from a Russian invasion, 14% to defend France from invasion, 9% to defend Ukraine from further Russian attacks, and 7% to defend either Taiwan or Israel. Overwhelming majorities, between 71% and 82%, would object to their children being called up to defend any of these causes.

Would you want your children to fight in the British Army in each of the following circumstances?

Polling Text

Even in the event of a direct invasion on British soil, only 21% of parents say they would want their children to fight to defend the country, 67% of parents say they would not want them involved and a further 10% are not sure.

These results confirm a sobering reality that has not been reflected in the election campaigns yet: there is a strong antipathy to military engagements of any kind, and if a new war should arrive, it is not at all clear that Britain could muster an army even to defend itself.

As the election campaign progresses, UnHerd Britain will be investigating other questions of public opinion missing from the campaign. See full results of today's poll HERE.

But even if the Tories possessed a record of passing legislation in, rather than directly against their own interests, the party has a vanishingly small prospect of winning the next election. The Conservatives turned a blitzkrieg electoral victory into a grinding war of attrition through their own incompetence, so that the enemy, whose capture of vast swathes of the country now looks fated, has already won the war by default. There are no electoral wunderwaffen on the horizon, as the leadership moves phantom armies across the map: but we must all endure a final grim winter of this ill-fated campaign before Labour’s red flag is planted on our ruinous parliament building.

Wartime analogies are not inapt: it is an odd characteristic of the national temperament that the best British novels of Second World War, and the immediate postwar period looking back to it, concern unsatisfying jobs in Whitehall, and frustrated engagement with the dysfunctional engine of the British state. Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy, the wartime sections of Powell’s Dance To the Music of Time sequence, the despondently cuckolded civil servants of both Greene’s End of the Affair and Nigel Balchin’s Darkness Falls From the Air, even the disenchanted civil servant of Nineteen-Eighty-Four: all convey a certain repulsion at British governance borne of sudden experience of how the sausage is actually made. For those outside the Westminster bubble, but away from the front, Europe’s great and bloody convulsion was experienced primarily as something akin to Houellebecq’s accurate prediction of the world after Covid: “the same, just a bit worse.”

There is something of our moment, also, in the writer Patrick Hamilton’s 1947 novel The Slaves of Solitude, set in the grim midwar winter of 1943. For its spinster protagonist Miss Roach, the war is encountered “in its character of petty pilferer” first of all, making long accustomed goods increasingly unobtainable “while at the same time… gradually removing means of transport from the streets, accommodation from the hotels, and sitting or even standing room from the trains.” For Miss Roach, “it was, actually, the gradualness and unobtrusiveness of this process which served to make it so hateful. The war, which had begun by making dramatic and drastic demands, which had held up the public in style like a highwayman, had now developed into a petty pilferer, incessantly pilfering. You never knew where you were with it, and you could not look round without finding something else gone or going.”

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Miss Roach is condemned to live in the shabby-genteel oppressiveness of a provincial boarding house, the Rosamund Tea Rooms, “this dead-and-alive house, of this dead-and-alive street, of this dead-and-alive little town.” As the biographer Michael Holroyd observes, Hamilton’s “macabre imagination” and bitter lived experience converts the boarding house  “into something between an asylum and a torture chamber”. Beset by petty rules, the arbitrary dictatorship of the elderly and its debilitating “orgy of ennui”, the Rosamund Tea Rooms could be a stand in for modern Britain, and the downwardly mobile Miss Roach a British millennial: “She was only thirty-nine, but she might have been taken for forty-five. She had given up ‘hope’ years ago. She had never actually had any ‘hope’. Like so many of her kind — the hopeless — she was too amiable and tried too hard in company and conversation, and so sometimes gave an air, untrue to her character, of being genteel.”

It is surprising in our era of housing crisis, that the boarding house has not yet returned. Perhaps it will, or perhaps the HMO, its successor for today’s era of pinched and straitened middle-class circumstances, has taken up its purgatorial role. The HMO has not yet made its literary mark, but if material conditions as well as ideological currents influence our culture, perhaps it already shapes our times. Like our plummeting birthrates, could the inquisitorial suspicion, the nosy backbiting that defines millennial culture (around which an entire culture war has developed) derive as much from the enforced proximity gifted by inadequate housing as from indoctrination by progressive teachers? But it would not be in Conservative interests to highlight another of their own failures if so. Yet our current oppressive cultural atmosphere, characterised by dissident rightists as the culture of the “longhouse,” could just as well be termed, in Britain, the politics of the boarding house. We are all trapped together, by circumstances beyond our control and among people from whom we are increasingly estranged, in a stifling ennui seemingly impossible to shift.

Our state, after all, looks increasingly like Hamilton’s penny-pinching landlady, Mrs. Payne, “who had put a stop to electricity on the landings simply by taking all the bulbs out – thus succouring her hard-pressed country, the spirit of the black-out generally, and her own pecuniary resources.” Our political discourse, increasingly repellant in almost every aspect, is stuck at the level of the elderly tyrants, the pub bores and tiresome pontificators who dominate the shared living quarters in Hamilton’s fiction like “the president in Hell”: like poor Miss Roach, we are doomed to listen to their vapid self-regarding pronouncements every single day. With the simple pleasures of life vanishing, and puritanical new restrictions enforced, our public realm increasingly reflects Hamilton’s “endless snubbing and nagging of war, its lecturing and admonitions.” But then Hamilton’s literary intentions, for all that he aimed to capture the lived experience of his class, were always directed towards a portrait of the British state and character, parodied in his little-read 1939 satire Moribundia as a “stagnant society, one that is lacking vitality and possibly nearing its end,” ruled by the static ideology of “Unchange,” with “a deathly fear and hatred of innovation, of an overturning of their system, behind all their nauseatingly idealistic postures and utterances.”

There is something depressingly current in Hamilton’s depiction of his era, when world historical events, the rise and fall of empires, were experienced first and foremost as sharply declining living standards, a gnawing atmosphere of privation and neglect, and of being increasingly nagged by petty, seemingly arbitrary rules. We areourselves doomed to live in history: the 2008 financial crash, Covid, the war in Ukraine were each epoch-defining global events that beset us in short order, each of which demanded a grand response by the British state which either never came, or instead came in the most self-defeating and immiserating way.

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By choosing austerity over investment, the Cameron government weakened the British state ahead of the crises to come; when Covid came, Johnson promised the sacrifices demanded for the greater good necessitated a wartime response, which in the end came only in petty restrictions, growing debt and some expensive meal vouchers; the economic effects of the war in Ukraine, similarly, have sharply driven down living standards, without any meaningful government strategy or investment to alleviate them, let alone transmute crisis into opportunity. And there is more to come: both the international situation and Britain’s social and economic prospects are worsening. We are asked to endure ever more, without a path or plan to victory. New privations are announced like grand national projects, while grand national projects are cancelled, as unaffordable or simply beyond the nation’s capacity. The only laws the government can pass are for censorship; its only remaining talking points are to condemn the future rationing proposals, fictional or otherwise, of their successors. Promised a humming war economy, we got rationing and restrictions, with neither guns nor butter at the end.

How will this end? What was new about this year’s Conservative conference is the perception that none of it matters, at all. It was merely a ruling party unconvincingly going through the motions of governance, in a country going through the motions of democracy: all a provincial purgatory of sorts, the turbid backwash of world-historical events outside our control.

The Labour Party will enter government with a mandate for total change, and the future stability of the British political system will depend on its capacity to deliver it. On housing, Labour’s bold announced housebuilding commitments begin to address the scale of the problem, offering hope of major reform. Yet Starmer’s timid jettisoning of the grander prospects for reform risks settling for mere tinkering around the edges of dysfunction, and new petty rules with new state functionaries to enforce them. No longer the engine of grand national projects, much the same disenchantment could be applied to Parliament itself, whose restoration costs will apparently total £22bn: is it worth saving? Perhaps it would be better to let it crumble into the Thames, the breeding ground of crows, as a romantic monument to a lost civilisation. For any other purpose, without a bold commitment to reform, its time is running out. As polling for Onward shows, “six in ten Gen Z’ers support the idea of running the UK with a ‘strong leader who doesn’t have to bother with parliament/elections’, compared to only 29 per cent of over-55s. Focus groups suggest this is borne out of apathy: ‘what has democracy done for us?’, they ask with a shrug.” It is difficult to see that the events in store for us, or the state’s response to them, will re-enchant British voters with their decrepit political system.

No wonder that for the young, the talk is no longer of reform but escape. For the fictional Miss Roach, release from her purgatory came through an unexpected inheritance, allowing her to return to Blitz-ravaged London, where for all the risk, “You had to square up to the war. The horror and despondence of the Rosamund Tea Rooms resided in just the fact that it was not squaring up to it [but was] in its petty boarding-house lassitude almost insensible of it.” The miserable conditions of ration Britain were likewise dispelled by the postwar economic boom, but without a concerted effort, without reformist ambition and grandeur, there will be no such unexpected prosperity in our future.

Today’s historic shift of global wealth and power will require a titanic effort to maintain our current lacklustre level of prosperity, let alone achieve the far greater wealth Britain should aspire to. As the rival parties’ regional pantomimes show, there is still no squaring up to reality in our grim national boarding house.

Two explanations are offered for this trend. The first has its roots in 2010. Since then, this theory holds, we have seen the end of Education Maintenance Allowance, the doubling of student fees, the growing inaccessibility of the housing market to those without inherited wealth, and, of course, Brexit. The under-50s neither voted for this Tory policy platform nor stand to benefit from it. They are unlikely to reward a party that appears to want to prolong their insecurity; their refusal to drift Right with age, then, is a result of their material conditions.

The second explanation is longer term and comes down to shifting values. Its roots are much deeper, dating back to the battle for Hampstead during the general Election of 1966, when the north London constituency returned a Labour MP for the first time. “In an earlier era, it would have been unthinkable that Labour could win so middle-class a seat,” writes the geo-demographic expert Richard Webber in The Predictive Postcode. In the 50 years since, “there has been a huge growth in the size, confidence, and influence of this particular geo-demographic group. A radical minority, once fabled for its eccentric habits — shopping at Habitat, reading Private Eye, wearing sandals, eating muesli, and supporting human rights — … has now come to dominate large swathes of inner London.”

The academic study of values looks at the underlying motivations and unmet psychological needs which drive individuals across societies. A range of different models exist, but all identify a similar long-term pattern: as economies grow and education levels rise, the values of the population edge towards some variation of “post-materialism”. This term was coined by Ronald Inglehart, founder of the World Values Survey, to describe the tendency to prioritise principles such as self-expression and personal autonomy over financial considerations. The 1966 Hampstead result was an early indicator of post-materialist values taking root in the UK, and since then, they have become far more widespread.

What does this shift mean in practice? Those with post-materialist values often place ethics and inner fulfilment ahead of more obvious economic interests at the ballot box. Their values are expressed through concerns about equality, freedom of speech and the environment; through a dedication to larger-than-self causes and to internationalist or universalist ideas about national borders; and through a tendency to agree with statements along the lines of “ideas are more important than money”.

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The idea here is not simply that everyone who reaches a certain level of resource security will immediately move towards post-materialism. People’s values are rooted in both psychology and life experiences, and they change only slowly, over time. A pensioner raised in an era of poverty and rationing may see politics in terms of protecting and conserving resources, despite now having the material security of home ownership. Conversely, a graduate who has spent their formative years in social circles which emphasise ethics and freedom of expression will usually retain these values, even as they struggle to pay the rent.

Even so, post-materialists now comprise a large part of the electorate — rising, according an IPPR paper from the early 2010s, from 19% of the population in 1973 to 38% in 2012. This has created a headache for all mainstream politicians, but especially for those on the Right. Of course, post-materialists are not all social justice activists, nor are they all explicitly Left-wing; they may not even be that exercised about party politics. But progressive parties do represent a far more natural home for them, and so Right-of-centre movements have to work harder to win their votes.

David Cameron’s Conservative Party appeared to acknowledge this. And while few post-materialists will have had much love for the coalition government, there was a concerted effort in to keep them on board. Mainly this came down to tone, but it was also clear in specific policies, such as support for gay marriage.

The Leave vote in 2016 changed this. The Tories realised they could use the large and highly visible presence of post-materialists as populist leverage. They could aim their guns at liberal elites or “woke” youngsters and build a new voter coalition, containing everyone who felt abandoned or confused by the post-materialist shift. Strategists such as Dominic Cummings reasoned that post-materialists were an electoral minority, and an inefficiently distributed one at that, prone to congregating in cities. There was little to be lost by antagonising them. Indeed, getting a reaction was part of the point.

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This plan had no immediately obvious downsides from a Conservative perspective. And it was easy for them to exploit it thanks to the antics of some on the progressive Left, who were often happy to take the bait. Their success was such that the average post-materialist will have spent the past decade feeling that their values were in decline rather than in ascent.

But this Faustian strategy could not last. To begin with, post-materialist values are becoming increasingly common, and so attacking them will bring diminishing returns in the long term. The harder the attacks, the more ground the Conservatives will ultimately have to row back on. If they have nothing positive to say to post-materialists, then they are building in their own obsolescence.

Moreover, there will have been a significant group of more cautious post-materialists who, up until a few years ago, were willing to vote for a liberal or One Nation iteration of Toryism. The loss of these voters since 2016 appears to have been treated by the Conservatives as collateral damage. But this means they have had to lean even more heavily on Leave voters and other groups who, while culturally at odds with post-materialists on issues such as crime, will have been just as horrified by raucous lockdown breaches followed by a Budget which caused the economy to collapse.

The plot against the post-materialists, then, now seems to be reaching its endgame, and many are doubling down. Tory MP Brendan Clarke-Smith’s recent call on voters to buy own-brand beans is a perfect illustration: it speaks to the most basic concerns about resource protection and scarcity, and ignores the big picture altogether.

Ultimately, the rise of post-materialism is a gradual, organic process, taking place in most developed countries as societies become more materially comfortable. This is not to say it doesn’t come with challenges. Helen Lewis’s excellent radio series, The New Gurus, illustrated that a society where everyone is in search of meaning rather than money carries perils of its own — and may not always be an especially nice place to live. But this doesn’t mean the rise of post-materialism is an elite plot or an institutional “capture”, as figures on the populist Right such as Matthew Goodwin have interpreted it. Nor is it a mass surrender to “Marxism” or “paganism”, contrary to what some of the speakers at the recent National Conservatism Conference reportedly believe.

Can the Right tempt young and middle-aged voters back into the fold? Policies which improve childcare provisions, fix the housing market, or create economic stability could, hypothetically, make a difference. There are few people so concerned about inner fulfilment as to not care about paying the mortgage. But if you look at the age gap data, what is striking is that the voting divide really kicked in after 2015, when the Tories began to signal at every opportunity that they were not just opposed to liberal and post-material ideas, but, in many cases, that they actively hated them.

From Suella Braverman talking about an “invasion” of migrants to Lee Anderson backing the death penalty, the Tories have used language and taken positions which have damaged their brand far more than the sum of their individual policies ever could. Starting to back policies which advance the interests of younger voters would of course be a start. But if the Tories continue to go to war with the values which many younger voters hold, then this “lost generation” will be the first of many.

Regardless of recent private polling showing Labour’s “floor” to be at the uncomfortably high mark for the Tories of around 330 seats — a working majority for Starmer — some Conservatives hold out hope. But if history is to be our guide, there are more than a few reasons to believe that Keir Starmer really might be on course to join Attlee, Wilson and Blair in No 10.

Labour’s three watershed election victories came in 1945, 1964 and 1997. Each time, the Party won after long periods of Conservative rule or Conservative-dominated government: 14, 13 and 18 years respectively. Sometimes the country just demands change — and the Tories will have been in power for 14 years by the time the next election is called.

But in each of these victories for Labour, it wasn’t just that voters decided a change was needed — it was that the party was best placed for a world that had already changed. By 1945, after all, much of the economy had effectively been nationalised to fight the war, and all the main parties had endorsed the Beveridge Report calling for a dramatic expansion of the welfare state. Whether Labour won power or not, Britain was not going back to the discredited pre-war settlement. But in 1945, Labour was simply more closely aligned with this new Britain than the Tories, with or without Churchill. In foreign policy terms, too, Attlee offered almost complete continuity.

Something similar happened in 1964 and 1997. By 1964, the Tories had already begun the great corporatist experiment to run the economy that Labour would claim as their own. In 1961, Macmillan had initiated a form of centrist managerialism, with voluntary wage controls to combat inflation and national councils established to bring industry and trade unions together. Labour, under Wilson, did not reject the system, but offered a more dynamic and professionalised management of it.

Wilson looked the part for the job, too. Young, smart and committed to the task, he stood in contrast to his opposite number, Alec Douglas Home, who had been parachuted in from the Lords. This early incarnation of Wilson is strikingly similar to Blair, in 1997, when he swept to power demanding a more modern, professional approach to managing the state, maintaining the economic settlement which had been in place since Black Wednesday in 1992, but with more focus on public services.

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Labour is winning the Brexit revolution

By Tom McTague

In each of these elections, Labour was not so much offering radical change, as a policy programme that went with the grain of politics. And something similar is happening today. The pandemic, Net Zero and an ageing population have combined with the rise of China to create a world in which the state has become far more central to the success of an economy than before — a situation which fits far more comfortably into Labour’s economic philosophy than the Tories.

Since 2016, the Conservative Party has taken back regulatory control of the British economy by leaving the EU; it has increased taxes to their highest levels on record to pay for its interventions during the pandemic; and it has dramatically expanded the size of the state by offering to pay for childcare from the age of one (as well as end-of-life care). On top of this, the Government’s central policy idea, to level up the country, imagines a level of government intervention and redistribution on a scale previously deemed impossible, while the commitment to reach Net Zero by 2050 demands an even more transformative role for the state. All of this is happening, meanwhile, while the rest of the Western world begins the process of “de-risking” its supply chains from China, creating new manufacturing capacity outside of Beijing’s control largely by erecting new protective barriers. Not a single part of this economic landscape sits easily for a Conservative government led by a Thatcherite prime minister ostensibly committed to free trade, low taxes and a small state.

No party has ever won an election after presiding over a financial crisis — and the Conservatives actually caused this one. Wilson lost power after failing to stop the devaluation of sterling in 1967, Edward Heath after the oil crisis of 1973, James Callaghan after going to the IMF in 1976, John Major after Black Wednesday in 1992 and Gordon Brown after the great financial crash of 2008.

And yet, there is a socking great caveat to this rosy picture for Labour. Brexit.

Brexit is the one legacy of recent Conservative rule which Labour is not remotely comfortable with, least of all Starmer himself — the former shadow Brexit secretary who advocated a second referendum. Labour opposed the Brexit revolution and, quietly, continues to think it stupid, although cannot say so publicly. There is no precedent for this in the Party’s post-war history. Attlee believed that much of the economy could be run “in peace as in war” as he said in 1945; Wilson thought Macmillan’s corporatism was right but amateurish; Blair that Thatcher’s reforms had produced a better economy but needed better redistribution and professional management of public services. None was uncomfortable with the new settlement, and none would have reversed it — not that they could.

The one time Labour won an election after inheriting constitutional reform it did not support was in 1974, after Edward Heath took Britain into the Common Market. Yet, even here, Wilson was no longer the Eurosceptic he once was. Indeed, he had applied to join the Common Market himself, in 1967, and been rejected. The big difference between then and now, however, lies in how Labour handled this problem. Unlike today, the party was badly divided — split between the traditional Eurosceptic left and the pro-European right. Today, there is near unanimity in the parliamentary party that Brexit was wrong and continues to be harmful. In 1974, Wilson offered voters a referendum to ratify Britain’s accession to the EEC. Today, Starmer has ruled out a rejoin referendum.

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The political power of Deano

By Tom McTague

On Brexit, if anything, Starmer is following a traditional Conservative Party playbook, not a Labour one. The essential dilemma of conservatism, since 1834, has been how to respond to major constitutional change that Toryism has opposed. At what point does this sort of reform become something the Conservative Party should seek to conserve rather than overturn?

In his famous Tamworth Manifesto, effectively creating the modern Conservative Party, Robert Peel declared (wrongly as it turned out) that the Great Reform Act should be seen as the “final and irrevocable settlement of a great constitutional question — a settlement which no friend to the peace and welfare of this country would attempt to disturb, either by direct or by insidious means”. This is essentially Starmer’s position on Brexit today. He didn’t like it, but has accepted it. In so doing, he hopes to benefit, as Peel did in 1834, from being seen as a moderate national leader able to bridge old divides, while also being the person best suited to ending what Peel called the “perpetual vortex of agitation” of a great reform when its  radical supporters aren’t reined in. This is Labour’s essential pitch today: we accept Brexit but will not let its supporters agitate for endless new changes. Enough!  Historically, it is a popular stance.

Will it work this time? It worked for Peel and, eventually, for Disraeli after he reluctantly accepted free trade. It also worked for Churchill and Eden and Macmillan when they accepted Labour’s welfare state. Each reform was popular. Today, the big difference is that Brexit no longer is.

Lord Hailsham famously wrote that Toryism was about fox hunting and religion (by which he meant the Anglican religion of the Book of Common Prayer). More generally, Conservatives were united by a moral belief that people had the right to dispose of their property and a practical sense that capitalism was likely to provide people with the most property to dispose of. Most of all, Conservatives believed in inequality. They thought that some people deserved to be richer, more powerful and more respected than others.

Well, fox hunting and the prayer book have both gone and no Conservative government is going to bring them back. The positions of capitalism and property are more complicated. Boris Johnson must have been the first Conservative prime minister who would not have been mortified to see it reported that he had said “fuck business”. This is partly because the Conservative Party has changed. Its leaders are relatively young, and if they pursued any career outside politics, it is likely to have been journalism.

It is also because capitalism has changed. Once it could be taken for granted that captains of industry were Right-wing in ways that bore no direct relation to their business interests. In 1977, when the CBI was asked to canvas opinions from its members about what a Conservative government should do, suggestions included restoring national service, controlling immigration and deterring couples from “living in sin”. Such opinions would be unimaginable now.

Toryism and capitalism were once joined together in institutional terms. The heads of large companies who funded the party took it for granted that their opinions would be sought and that they would count for more than rank-and-file party members. Today, however, the whole nature of business has changed. The very notion of a British company seems quaint. Note the studied vagueness of BP about what the “B” stands for and remember Margaret Thatcher’s fury when British Airways replaced the Union Jack on the tailfins of its planes with an abstract design.

Most of all, though, the Tories have lost contact with the central core of their beliefs, from which everything else springs: inequality. Just before the election of the Thatcher government in 1979, the historian Maurice Cowling edited a collection of conservative essays in which he dismissed the idea, which had become widespread during the Cold War, that Conservatism was about the defence of freedom. Conservatives, he insisted, only believed in freedom as a means to create inequality or defend existing inequalities.

I doubt if the smooth young men in Conservative Central Office would have put it in such blunt terms, but they (especially those who had recently been taught by Cowling) would have understood what he was driving at. Conservatives are less likely to defend inequality now. This is partly because nothing makes rich people more uncomfortable than the discovery that some people are even richer than themselves. Globalisation has created, and made visible, a class of super-rich people who make a Chancery QC feel like a pauper. Rishi Sunak must surely be the first Conservative politician whose career has been damaged by the fact that he is, in the eyes of many party members, too wealthy.

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The myth of Tory Birmingham

By Richard Vinen

Real Tories believed in inequality for reasons that went beyond economics. They lived in a world of hierarchy and authority. It was a world in which tough-minded magistrates gave stiff sentences to poachers. It was underwritten, for much of the 20th century, by military experience. No institution in England reflects the class system more faithfully than the army and no social distinction is more ruthlessly policed than that between “officers” and “other ranks”. The two World Wars and the retention of conscription until the early Sixties meant there was a time when most British men had military experience. This did not make them all Conservatives — servicemen gave the Labour Party a large majority in 1945. What it did mean was that those people who were already Conservative had their belief in hierarchy reinforced.

Conservative leaders — captain Macmillan, lieutenant colonel Heath — derived much of their prestige from military rank, as did the local notables who organised the party at local level. Yet only a tiny fraction of the population has military experience now. In spite, or because, of this, Conservative fantasies focus ever more on a certain image of the military — but it is an image that is, in its odd way, democratic rather than hierarchical. For instance, one of the strongest themes in Conservative thinking now involves not the imposition of authority but the defence of relatively low-ranking soldiers who have infringed criminal law or military regulations — hence the campaign against soldiers being prosecuted for their actions in Northern Ireland or Afghanistan.

The decline in military experience goes with a more general change. Grassroots supporters of the Conservative Party have always been relatively old but the party used to have complicated relations with this group. An internal document from the early years of the Thatcher government suggested that the party’s support among the retired was a source of problems: “The Government’s economic policy is a long-term policy and the elderly do not think long term.” Of course, real Tories used to think long-term because they saw themselves as part of institutions that would continue beyond their death or simply because they spent a great deal of energy devising trust funds to benefit their grandchildren.

But this kind of long-term thinking is rarer now. Almost the defining feature of Conservative policy — with regards to everything from public debt to fossil fuel — is a slash-and-burn attitude that focuses on material gains to be made in the short term. I sometimes think that the only real Tories are the dreadlocked activists of Extinction Rebellion: people who understand that politics is about debts that might be owed to generations yet unborn and who display a commendable indifference to the short-term vagaries of electoral politics.

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In any case, old age is not what it used to be. Life expectancy and early retirement have both increased — so a disconcertingly large proportion of Conservatives have not worked for many years. A person born in 1926 could claim, with some justification, that they had had a harder life than their own children and might, therefore, have been exposed to harsh realities. This is conspicuously not true of someone born, in, say 1948. These are people who were born into peace and the welfare state. They bear a disconcerting resemblance to their contemporaries who joined student protests in 1968. A part of the press serves the same function for Tory activists that hallucinogenic drugs served for the soixante-huitards: the Mail and the Express are now so removed from reality that their readers might as well be getting their information from the website of David Icke. In fact, the most notable feature of Conservative supporters is often their reluctance to grow up — which may explain why they have, in the past few years, been prone to identify with young or, in the case of Johnson, ostentatiously juvenile, leaders.

A belief in inequality co-existed awkwardly with the extension of democracy. The third Marquess of Salisbury once wrote that it would be absurd if the votes of “two day-labourers” counted for more than that of the Baron de Rothschild. What made the Tories successful in the age of universal suffrage was deference. A political scientist working in the Sixties found that many working-class Tories believed that an Etonian would make a better prime minister than a grammar schoolboy.

The problem for Conservatives now is that democracy has become far too egalitarian. Social media has encouraged the idea that everyone who can hit a keyboard has a right to have their opinion respected. Class divisions count for less as everyone affects a plebeian air — Boris Johnson seems to have been popular with working-class voters not because he is an Etonian but because they think he is “like them”. Worst of all, democracy has infected the Conservative Party itself. It seemed like a revolution when, in 1965, Tory MPs were first given the chance to elect their leader (rather than having him — it always was a him — imposed by a “magic circle” of party elders). Now, power has passed from MPs to party members, and this summer the party members imposed a leader that the majority of MPs did not want.

In easier times, Liz Truss might have been the leader to restore Conservatism. Her own origins are on the Left and her beliefs are probably those of a classical liberal, but, perhaps for that reason, she sometimes seems to understand the traditions and style of Toryism better than people who were born into Conservatism. Most of all, Truss believes in the one thing that has most embarrassed Tories in recent years: inequality. Cutting taxes for the rich would have been as Conservative as cutting benefits for the poor.

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Liz Truss won't unchain Britannia

By John Oxley

As it is, things do not look good for the Conservative Party’s electoral prospects but those of us who feel nostalgic for real Conservatism should not despair. Winning elections is over-rated. Toryism was, for much of its early history, a movement of opposition. True conservatism has, of necessity, a pessimistic, almost Sisyphean, quality: its practitioners know that they cannot really hold back change and that they will always be fighting a doomed rear-guard action.

Pessimism can produce two different forms of Conservatism. One emphasises the need to keep things going with as little damage as possible and therefore to hold on to power at all costs; the other appreciates the symbolic value of the hopeless fight. The conflict between the two approaches was incarnated in the bitter rivalry between the managerial Edward Heath and Enoch Powell, who could not see a three-line whip without voting against it or a ministerial office without resigning from it. Margaret Thatcher managed, at least when she was most successful, to combine pragmatic action with principled rhetoric — so that she sometimes seemed like the leader of an opposition to her own government.

If the most dramatic opinion polls of the last few days are correct, the Tories might not just cease to be party of government; they might not even be the Official Opposition. This would be no bad thing. Fifty or sixty Tory MPs would be just the right number. They could make their voices heard without any serious chance of controlling the commanding heights of policy. If they concentrated their efforts, they might even succeed in bringing back fox hunting.

As soon as it was made public, on September 23, Kwarteng’s “mini-budget” prompted a massive sell-off of “gilts” — UK government bonds — and also saw the pound fall to an all-time low against the dollar. Then, all hell broke loose: some analysts even went as far as saying that Britain was heading for a full-blown “currency crisis” and was starting to look like an “emerging market country”.

The reaction from international quarters was just as hysterical. The IMF launched a biting attack on the UK government, while Larry Summers, former US Treasury secretary, called the policy “utterly irresponsible”. Speaking for many, Jason Furman, former economic adviser to Barack Obama, wrote: “I can’t remember a more uniformly negative reaction to any policy announcement by both economists and financial markets than the UK’s policy.”

Was all the fuss justified? Is the UK really in danger of becoming the next Argentina or Zimbabwe? And was Kwarteng’s U-turn yesterday really necessary?

The mini-budget in question consists of a series of deficit-financed economic measures aimed at cushioning the effects of the energy crisis and boosting growth — namely a freeze on energy bills and various tax cuts, for a total cost of around £160 billion. Most of the criticism aimed at Kwarteng reflected the opinion of orthodox economists: that cutting taxes is the wrong policy when unemployment is low and there is little spare capacity in the economy for additional non-inflationary growth.

Yet for all the uproar, by far the biggest commitment in the mini-budget was found elsewhere: the energy price freeze, which is expected to cost around £60 billion. According to the Bruegel think tank, the UK is already the country that has allocated the most funding to shield households and businesses from the energy crisis — 7% of GDP. While more can and should be done, that’s more than double the EU average (only Germany has announced a measure of similar scope).

Now, one can debate whether capping the price of energy — which essentially amounts to a publicly funded subsidy for the profits of energy giants — is the best way to address the crisis, but if the alternative is hanging household and businesses out to dry, which is what most EU countries are likely to end up doing, the British approach is clearly far better.

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As for the revenue-side measure of the mini-budget, the biggest measures aren’t actual “tax cuts” but non-rises in National Insurance and corporation tax (for a total of £40 billion). Compared to these figures, the actual tax cuts, such as the scrapping of the higher rate of income tax, were rather trivial — just above £10 billion. All of which means that while the tax cuts were bad from a distributional perspective, since they would have mostly benefited the wealthy, from a macroeconomic perspective their impact would have been negligible, and the decision to reverse them will be just as negligible.

Even without the tax cuts, the energy price freeze will still entail a larger deficit. Rather than the tax cuts being at fault, then, it was probably the increase in the deficit itself that freaked everyone out. There seems to be a genuine concern among orthodox economists and financial institutions that the mini-budget will threaten Britain’s “fiscal sustainability” and possibly even cause the country to default.

But the notion that an increased deficit puts the British state at the risk of insolvency is ludicrous. Like all currency-issuing nations, the UK effectively spends by creating money out of thin air. This means that it can never “run out of money” or become insolvent. The fact that fiscal deficits are usually associated with the issuance of bonds, and that these are usually bought by the private financial sector, gives the impression that the latter are able to exercise control over government spending, by refusing to buy the bonds or demanding higher interest rates. However, this is not the case — because the central bank can always step in to buy the bonds itself, setting the yield at whatever level it wants.

Ever since the financial crisis, and especially throughout the pandemic, this has become standard practice. Indeed, virtually all the new bonds issued to support the economy throughout the pandemic were bought by the Bank of England itself. This is paradigmatic of the way in which modern states self-finance; and of the fact that “bond vigilantes” hold no power whatsoever over currency-issuing governments.

So overall, a widening deficit doesn’t represent a problem for the UK. In fact, it’s a good thing, insofar as it will help cushion the British economy from the effects of the energy and cost-of-living crisis. There’s also no reason to believe that larger deficits, even if “monetised” by the central bank, will further stoke inflation. Quite the opposite: if the government borrows money to cut domestic energy, that will likely reduce inflation. Injecting such large sums of money into the economy should also be expected to have a positive effect on growth.

The problem is that all this completely defies the economic orthodoxy, which is probably why mainstream economists are attacking the Government’s plan so vehemently. As Adam Tooze writes: “What the critics of the UK are performing is the role of gatekeepers, a function, which is at the heart of elite economic policy discourse.” This wouldn’t be so much of a problem if it weren’t for the fact that the flawed orthodox view is also shared by people who, unlike economists, have a direct impact on the economy — financial traders. And this can lead them to make some very bad decisions.

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The recent gilt sell-off is a perfect case in point. While some traders might have actually been motivated to unload their gilt holdings through fears of an imminent default, much of the sell-off was actually an attempt to profit from the panic through a practice known as short selling — which consists in selling a financial asset in the expectation that its price will fall, thus generating a profit to the seller.

This is ultimately what economics textbooks say should have happened: a higher deficit will automatically lead to higher yields (and therefore lower prices), and scaring the government through a sell-off will convince policymakers to raise interest rates even more. Unfortunately for the traders, this is not how things work in the real world. In the latter, betting against central banks is always a losing game. They know that very well in Japan, where it’s known as the “widow maker” trade.

Which is why traders were completely caught off-guard when, on September 28, the Bank of England announced that it would be buying up a potentially limitless number of government bonds in order to ease market tensions. This immediately caused yields to fall and stabilise at the level they were at before all the mini-budget hoo-ha — thus thwarting the speculators’ plans.

It’s been said that the BoE’s intervention “saved” the Government from the consequences of its reckless decisions. This is also nonsense. The BoE was simply fulfilling its mandate — acting as a lender of last resort. Moreover, in a democracy, it’s perfectly normal for the central bank to accommodate the budgetary decisions of government. The alternative is the situation in the Eurozone — where democratically elected governments are expected to do what unelected technocrats and central bankers tell them to.

There has been much talk of the fact that the BoE was forced to intervene to save pension funds that would otherwise have faced “mass defaults”. This all sounds rather scary, and has been weaponised to attack the mini-budget — by implying that the Government’s actions risked sending the savings of millions up in smoke. In fact, the pension funds’ quasi-meltdown is entirely a consequence of the way pension systems, like everything else, have become hyper-financialised.

Simply put, today pension funds use safe assets such as gilts to raise large amounts of cash through complex financial instruments, which they then use to pursue high-risk investment strategies. The problem is that if the value of the gilts falls too sharply, the pension funds risk going bust — which is what happened last week following the gilt panic. The problem’s not the mini-budget — the problem’s the way in which we’ve allowed pension funds to gamble with people’s savings.

A similarly doom-laden tone accompanied warnings about a “currency crisis” in which the pound will supposedly keep sliding further and further down until it becomes so worthless that the UK will be forced to go cap-in-hand to the IMF. But this was never likely to happen. Countries that float their exchange rate, such as the UK, cannot experience a currency crisis in the traditional understanding of the term — unless they have large external liabilities in a foreign currency. As Paul Krugman observed, that was the story for Asia in the Nineties, the Argentine crisis 2001, and is part of the problem in Turkey now. But this doesn’t apply to the UK, whose external liabilities are overwhelmingly sterling-denominated. And this is why, following the Bank of England’s intervention, the value of the pound has already bounced back to the level it was before the panic.

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Why did the pound fall in the first place? This was due to much the same reasons as the gilt sell-off: unfounded fears over the deficit, attempts to pressure the government into backtracking, and, first and foremost, speculators in the City and elsewhere hoping to profit by shorting the pound. As one trader said: “We were absolutely sure the pound was going to crash. Of course we are going to short the pound. This is what we do.”

The problem is that, unlike bond markets, the government’s options are more limited when it comes to quelling future currency speculation. One option would be for the Bank of England to prop up the pound by buying it on foreign-exchange markets, but that requires large amounts of foreign reserves, which the UK doesn’t have.

Another option would be to raise interest rates. After all, part of sterling’s weakness is simply the result of rising interest differentials vis-à-vis the US, which is hiking up interest rates in an irresponsible manner that is causing problems for the rest of the world, as central banks are forced to raise interest rates to stem the outflow of capital. However, raising interest rates won’t reduce inflation that is entirely driven by supply-side factors — namely the energy crisis and supply-chain bottlenecks — but will almost certainly cause huge pain to the economy, especially to the housing market, which is already in trouble. (Even the UN is now calling on central banks to halt interest rate increases.)

So, it’s a good thing that the Bank of England is still refusing to hike interest rates. After all, the pound has been sliding against the dollar for more than a year, indicating that this part of a longer-term adjustment which could actually help Britain move towards a less import-dependent and more self-reliant economy.

In the end, the best option for the UK’s authorities might to be accept there’s little they can do, in the short term, to rein in inflation that is largely supply side-driven, stop attempting to prevent the pound from falling in the name of some misconceived “strong pound” policy (which is what led to the government’s flawed response to the 1976 crisis) — and focus instead on protecting people and businesses through increased government spending.

This may or may not be inflationary. But the alternative — giving in to market pressure to raise interest rates and rein in the deficit — is almost certainly bound to be worse.

This buttery patriotism is one part of Mordaunt’s political make-up. There is also a Cameroonian social liberalism, pro-immigration, and pro-LGBT rights; she is a Brexiteer. Her breezy-sunny style is giggly and Johnsonian. Mordaunt appears to not take herself very seriously. She wants to smooth Tory edges, get the party back to basics, and embody a cuddly new One Nation synthesis.

Her battered country and her fratricidal party are not really in trouble. They just need to rediscover who they are. Like every centrist — for that is what Mordaunt is — she thinks all sensible people share the same values.

Political colleagues say they have no idea what she believes or thinks. Only 11% of the public, and 16% of Conservative voters, can correctly name Penny Mordaunt when shown a photo of her. But Tory members, though they are old, anti-immigration and disconcerted by social change, appear charmed by this young, pro-immigration, social change welcoming candidate. The heart wants what it wants. It helps that she is never less than vague. “We don’t need a new role in the world — just to be ourselves,” she said in her speech. For party members she is a bare wall. They can light her with their flickering projections. A (supposed) mystery might be welcomed by the public too. After the too graphic, pointillist detail Boris Johnson forced on Britain about his own life, being unknown looks like a political advantage.

Compared with her rivals, Mordaunt’s political career has been low-wattage. Her family’s military background, and her sideline as a naval reservist, made her appointment as Secretary of Defence in 2019 a realised dream. It lasted for two months. She backed Jeremy Hunt in that year’s leadership contest. For that Johnson removed her from the post.

Luckily for us, Mordaunt used the downtime that followed to write a book “to learn more about my country”. Intentionally, and unintentionally, Greater: Britain After The Storm is filled with useful disclosures. Though it is written with a co-author, the book feels more distinctly personal than anything else Mordaunt has done in public. Nothing is more revealing than a person’s prose, not even nudity.

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The bare bones: after the financial crash, Brexit, and Covid, Britain needs a “well-executed national plan”. We are a country longing for a “mission”. Though we are apparently “living longer, healthier, happier, wealthier lives than ever before”, the median Brit, like the nation at large, lacks self-esteem. Only Mordaunt’s plan-mission — a project outlined with no more specificity than the frequent use of the word “modernise” — can make Britain better.

Greater divides into two parts. The first is an attempt to capture Britain’s national character through historical analysis, amateur sociology, and hair-thin observations. The second purports to explain what this “national plan” will look like.

If Mordaunt’s plan-mission is to work, it must be grounded in an understanding of what contemporary Britain is truly about. Early doors she informs us that “the British live on an island”, which is indisputable. Afterwards she makes a cacophony with adjectives. Britain is: industrious, international, cautious, creative, caring, trusted, frugal, fair, selfless, and modest. Then more word confetti: Britain is defined by integrity, sacrifice, honesty, modesty, loyalty, humour, compassion, generosity, love, courage, and defiance. All of these nouns could be lobbed at Cambodia and hit something. They are general, banal. Her words are indiscriminate, not accurate. Without precision, observation shrivels and dies. We can admire her attempt to taxonimise an entire country, but not the outcome. Is her writing better than her diving? No.

Every cliché about this country is on parade. Before politics Mordaunt worked in Public Relations. She knows received wisdom, aimed low, communicated breathlessly. Play the hits Penny: tell us about how much the British love queuing and moaning about the weather. (She does, a lot.) Though Britain is an “ancient” civilisation — not compared with Iran, or China, or Egypt, or any world standard, but whatever, she’s rolling —  it is “surprisingly modern” and “outward looking”. Yet we are also “suspicious of change”. “Sometimes”, she writes, “being British is difficult to explain.” It’s a sentence where the author’s unintended admission of failure lurks between each word. When Mordaunt essays the national character over about 100 pages, she falls back on recapping Seventies TV shows, and odd little factoids — “the majority of Britons eat meat pie at least once a month” — the ultimate significance of which remain obscure. How meat pies affect Mordaunt’s plan-mission is never explained.

Though she lambasts Britain’s apparent tendency towards nostalgia several times in the book, she is imprisoned by outdated notions. Her Britain of queues, rain, and “Sunday rituals” was a stock image when George Orwell wrote about it during the Second World War. The actual Britain, a bewildering mixture of hypermodernity and feudalism, where personal identity is thin, beliefs are fluid, and people mobile, is richer and stranger than anything Mordaunt can conceive of. But she would rather think about breakfast. She ticks off a Full English’s ingredients, then writes: “Not surprisingly, after such breakfast bowel-bashing there blossoms a stool of biblical proportions. Exodus by Caesarean section.”

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It matters that Mordaunt cannot articulate a single original notion about the national character. Disraeli intuited that the working classes were patriotic friends, not revolutionary enemies, and reformed Britain accordingly. Churchill understood that pigheaded British stubbornness could save the nation in 1940, when many in the establishment around him were defeatist. Thatcher understood that baby boomers wished to eschew the clammy, paternalistic collectivism of the post-war period for greater individual autonomy. Their visions were underpinned by new understandings of old national qualities.

Mordaunt sounds like a folksy Hovis advert not a Prime Minister. The language and the ideas are pavements that have been walked over many times. Her belief that Scotland won’t leave the Union is grounded in the notion that Scots, like the English, and the Welsh, and the Northern Irish, “moan about the weather”. If this were funny it might excuse the observation’s total lack of seriousness. But if you care about Britain it’s tragically shallow. Typically, other than this empty cliché, Mordaunt does not have a positive case to make for the Union. She does not seem entirely convinced that it should carry on. “If the Union matters”, she claims “it needs to be clear why. If the UK is to survive, its existence can’t be taken for granted.” That’s just another truism in a book stuffed with them. It is impossible to imagine Disraeli, Churchill, or Thatcher — or yes, even Johnson! — thinking this flaccidly.

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The big idea in Greater is “modernisation”. Mordaunt’s plan-mission “must start with modernising democracy”, which means fiddling about (yet again) with the House of Lords. Is kicking a few aristos around really more important than dealing with the country’s appalling productivity rate, stagnant GDP, and demented planning regulations? Mordaunt seems to think so. Modernisation starts with parliament, then ripples out towards the BBC, the military, the monarchy, the sciences, and the universities. What modernisation means is never explained. It is taken for granted that reform is a synonym for good.

But more than anything else, Greater feels random. This is what happens when you try to be all things to all men in the Blair-Cameron way, but you are not rigorous or thoughtful about it. In no particular order, and with no particular reason, Mordaunt quotes from John Stuart Mill, Margaret Mead, Richard Rorty, Billy Connolly, Gloria Gaynor, Afua Hirsch, Clive James, Malcolm Gladwell, Jo Cox, George the Poet, and “Austrian boy wonder” Friedrich Hayek. The lack of unity here, the looseness of these associations, tells us that Mordaunt is not a structured thinker. She has no philosophy, aside from a lazy-Whiggish belief in Things Can Only Get Better. She would like much more immigration than the average Tory member probably realises.

Mordaunt tacks to the centre, but ends up on the managerial Left. What she writes sounds like it was dredged from a particularly poor speech given at Davos five years ago. Do Tory members want to hear that “change is the engine room of equality”, or that “minority achievement is the stuff of which our dreams, history, and culture are made”? To support this Mordaunt invokes the lives of Horatio Nelson, Marcus Rashford, and Barack Obama.

Mordaunt moves on to her plan-mission. “We must rethink our institutions if they are going to regain popular support,” she declares. “It has to be a top-down as well as bottom-up approach.” Ok then. Government must do more, but due to its inefficiency, many of its tasks can be devolved to private charities. Big corporations are thinning out the state, but growth requires lax regulations and lower taxes. Progress will come from protecting dissenting minority opinions, but censorship is fine if it is developed by “elected and accountable representatives”, otherwise “violent noises from the looneyverse” will wreck public discourse. People shouldn’t be cancelled for having different views, but she approves of Trump’s Twitter ban.

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These grating inconsistencies cannot be papered over by her chummy, punch-in-the-arm patriotism. No part of the plan feels like it was inspired by listening to the electorate, or trying to work out what they want. Again: being a centrist means that Mordaunt thinks the British all basically believe the same things. All our differences can be dissolved in the sugar water of loving Britain; all our problems can be fixed with a bit of joined-up thinking about House of Lords reform.

She wants to heal us. At her launch on Wednesday, Mordaunt claimed the public were “fed up with divisive politics”. We need to get back to a saner, kinder politics: miniature Union Jacks, tolerance, fair play, compromise… Britain, she said on Wednesday, with a characteristic pop culture reference, felt like the crowd watching Paul McCartney at Glastonbury last month. We have digressed from the classics. “He was playing new tunes but what we really wanted was the good old stuff.”

For Mordaunt, then, “playing the good old stuff” means regurgitating a tired centrism. At this point “modernisation” is the shadow of a shadow, the echo of an echo. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Current polling suggests Mordaunt will beat any other candidate if she makes the final round. Scrutiny, starting with this evening’s television debates, ought to see her big tent ideas from a previous age collapse in on themselves. What if they don’t? The conditions that made Cameron and Blair possible are not going to come back. Saying that Britain can “rediscover” itself does not make it so. Real life has not been amenable to ideas like Mordaunt’s for over a decade. If the torch is being passed to her, do not expect its light to carry very far.

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Our exclusive poll provides an answer. For UnHerd, I surveyed three key groups in British politics — a sample of Conservative Party members who will determine the outcome of the leadership race, voters in the Red Wall who will ascertain whether the Conservatives can hold together the coalition who swept Boris Johnson into power in 2019, and a representative sample of all voters.

Our survey showed that the leadership race remains wide open. Among Conservative Party members, the slight favourite is Rishi Sunak on 18%, followed by Liz Truss on 15%, Penny Mordaunt on 13%, and Kemi Badenoch on 7%. This picture is to some extent mirrored in the Red Wall and among all voters, though the real winner among all these groups is “none of the above”.

Perhaps because the contest is so short, perhaps because so many people are running, the blunt reality is that nobody yet holds a clear and commanding lead. This race could yet go in one of several directions, which underlines how precarious this moment is for the party.

What, then, do voters want the next leader to focus on? The priority, as you might expect, is the cost-of-living crisis. Britain is heading into its most difficult winter for decades, with energy prices, inflation, low growth, and sluggish productivity all combining to undermine the nation’s finances. Even though very few of the candidates are speaking to these longer-term, structural difficulties — hardly anybody has set out a convincing case for tackling our productivity problem — our data shows that many voters are keenly aware of them. And they are deeply worried.

We also find a clear and present danger for the party —one that is a leftover from the Brexit revolt. While the Conservative Party leadership hopefuls have focused almost exclusively on pressing the case for tax cuts, thought to be popular among the rank-and-file, we find a far more nuanced story.

When asked whether the next leader should increase taxes and spend more on public services, keep taxes and spending on services at the same level as they are now, or reduce taxes and spending on public services, the story is not what you might think. Many Conservative Party MPs and their supporters are far apart.

Only a minority of Conservative Party members — 33% — say we should reduce taxes and spend less on public services while a plurality — 39% — want to keep the status-quo (the rest say we should increase taxes or are unsure). Yet Red Wallers are even less supportive of slashing taxes; only 15% of them want to cut them and spend less on public services while almost half, 34%, want to keep the status quo and a further quarter want to raise taxes so we can spend more on things like health, education, and benefits.

This is consistent with the longer-term trend in Britain — and one that every Conservative must note. As the National Centre for Social Research points out, support for slashing taxes and spending less on public services is actually a very fringe position, supported by around only 5% of the country. Over the past decade, against the backdrop of austerity, public support for increasing taxes to spend more on public services rocketed, peaking at 60% in 2017 and staying above 50% in the most recent data, from 2019.

I am not saying this is the right position, just that many Conservative candidates are firmly disconnected from the position of many voters — which may yet come back to haunt them, especially in those important Red Wall seats. As much research since the 2019 general election has shown, many of these voters have always sat further to the Left on the economy and further to the Right on culture than most Conservative MPs in Westminster.

This points to the major tension now at the heart of the Conservative Party in the age of realignment: a party that is torn between its tax-cutting leadership candidates and True-Blue Tories in the shires, and its new Red Wall voters who are either comfortable with the status-quo or would even like to pay a bit more to get better public services in return.

Given the current slate of candidates it is hard, if not impossible, to see how the party resolves this tension. Many voters, it appears, want a leadership candidate who is not on the ballot sheet; one who is willing to intervene a little more to fix what they see as a rigged economic system, while also maintaining a tough line on Brexit, crime, and reducing immigration. A Blue Labour or Red Tory candidate would go down very well in a poll among these voters.

Another myth that is blown apart by our polling is the idea, fashionable after Brexit, that British politics would soon swing back to focus heavily and exclusively on the economy. But this is not supported by our polling.

Conservative Party members do not only want to talk about the economy but also, in descending order, immigration and asylum, health, tax, Brexit, and free speech/cancel culture. For Red Wallers, too, while the cost of living tops the agenda, it is followed by health, immigration, taxes, and levelling-up, while among all voters their priorities after the cost-of-living crisis are healthcare, immigration, taxes, climate change, and Brexit.

In short, many people want to talk about issues that are glaringly absent in the campaign so far. Do candidates want to retain mass immigration? How will they reform the NHS and social care? How can levelling up become a serious and sustained strategy for driving growth and productivity? All have been conspicuously quiet so far.

The relative prominence of Brexit, immigration and, to a lesser extent, free speech and cancel culture really matters; these concerns all point to the continuing power of the “cultural dimension” in British politics which, increasingly, is cutting across the old tribal loyalties.

So, too, does growing public anxiety about the rising prominence of “woke” ideology. Several candidates — most notably Kemi Badenoch and Suella Braverman — are actively campaigning against it, however, with Badenoch warning against “identity politics” and taking aim at what she argues are supposedly impartial, yet woke civil servants, and Braverman pitching herself as the “anti-woke” candidate.

While the issue of identity politics is often dismissed among the Twitterati as a fringe culture war issue, and some don’t have a clear idea of what exactly “woke” pertains to, it is still important not to dismiss it. After all, we frequently poll voters about things such as the economy, productivity, levelling-up, knowing they tend to have very different views about what these things are.

When we told Conservative party members and voters that some leadership candidates were “promising to oppose woke ideology, on the basis that they argue it undermines free speech”, we found widespread support for this position. Our findings suggest that the free speech campaigns do cut through.

Nearly three-quarters of Conservative Party members, 69%, said they strongly or somewhat agreed with “the need to oppose woke ideology”, as did 40% of Red Wallers (versus 16% who disagreed), and 36% of all voters (versus 22% who disagreed). The perceived need to oppose wokeness is especially strong among pensioners (52%). This, to me, points to the beginning, not the end, of a growing debate about what this ideology means for British schools, universities, how we make sense of our history, and, ultimately, who we are.

This was all brought home to me at an event held by the Centre for Policy Studies, in the heart of Westminster, this week, where many of the party’s current and former advisors were agonising over the future of the party and conservatism more generally.

There appeared a broad consensus in the room that while the Conservative Party might still be holding the largest majority since the days of Margaret Thatcher it has nonetheless become clearly disconnected from many of the key groups that made this possible to begin with — whether on tax, the lack of attention to the big challenges facing Britain, or a growing public appetite to debate the ongoing effects of immigration, Net Zero policies, and culture.

This is certainly supported by our polling which suggests, clearly, that unless the next leader can repair and reboot the party’s relationship with the people who put it into power less than three years ago then it may not remain in power for very long at all.

Disney is exhausted too, in the wake of the backlash that followed revelations of a the company’s commitment to having 50% of story leads be sexual or racial minorities: “I know I’m preaching to the choir but as a Disney employee I am just. exhausted”, says director Sam King.

“I’m exhausted” feels to me like a stand-in for actual emotions. Either of the individuals quoted above might be angry, saddened, resentful, disgusted, all of the above or perhaps some other strong feeling. Instead, “exhausted” takes its place.

It puts me in mind of something I see often among parents of young children, when their offspring are acting up. A small child is snatching, defiant or throwing a tantrum; the parent’s response is “Oh, s/he’s tired”.

When you’re the parent in charge of a toddler that’s acting up, telling others around “Oh, she’s tired” in practice serves as much to excuse your own parenting as the child’s behaviour. It may also be true, of course.  But what does it tell a child, if we give them the consistent message that strong negative emotions are not ‘theirs’ but simply byproducts of external factors, such as being ‘tired’, and that they bear no responsibility for anything they do under the influence of these external factors?

I think we may be finding out. For we’re seeing an increasingly prominent role played in our public discourse by the adult version of the “she’s tired” trump card: trauma.

Just as a badly-behaved toddler may really be tired, it is, of course, important to recognise that trauma is real and can mark people’s psyches deeply. But it’s not that long since the only context in which people talked about ‘trauma’ was veterans of war. And yet recently the US journalist and purveyor of politically slanted pile-on reporting, Taylor Lorenz, described the “severe PTSD” she experienced as a result of the hostility she inspires online.

This came hot on the heels of the writer Laurie Penny responding to the not entirely positive reception her recent book received, by describing “rolling panic attacks, bone-tired, confused and constantly cold in a way I’ve only experienced before in the immediacy of deep grief”. Was it Covid-19? She wondered. “Nope, just CPTSD.”

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In this context, I was struck by the heavy use of trauma-related language in the recent announcement by Bridgend MP Jamie Wallis that he intended to come out as transgender. Wallis has, reportedly, been having “a tough time” necessitating the “support” of his party’s Whips — not in their usual role in keeping MPs in line but in their “important wellbeing role”. “I am not OK”, he says.

Wallis refers to several traumatic incidents including being blackmailed, raped and crashing a car into a lamp-post. (Reports at the time indicated the MP was suspected of “driving while unfit”.) And mixed in with these are statements from Wallis of having been “diagnosed with gender dysphoria” and feeling “this way since I was a very young child”.

The main focus in the press has been on the latter announcement, reported straightforwardly as Wallis coming out as transgender. But, on closer inspection, the declaration is more than a little odd, bearing an echo of St Augustine’s famous plea “Please, God, make me good, but not yet”. “I’m trans,” Wallis declares. “Or rather, I want to be.”

That is, not so much announcing a transgender identity, as declaring a desire to do so. Elsewhere, Wallis has indicated that he’s not planning to change appearance or pronouns at present.

Is Wallis really trans, on his way to being trans, or something else? That is, I suggest, not a useful rabbit-hole to go down. There are no biomarkers for a trans identity, meaning there’s no test that will reliably determine whether someone is really trans in an objectively measurable way. (Nor is there any metaphysical consensus, in the radioactive public discourse about trans identities, on what really trans could mean.) Given this, you’re either down with the radical subjectivism the condition implies — or you aren’t.

But while politicians need to be careful about speculating on others’ inner lives, the online peanut gallery is of the view that radical subjectivism is precisely the point — at least where Jamie Wallis MP is concerned.

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Here, in contrast to uniform public applause, we find widespread cynicism about the authenticity of Wallis’s declared identity, the purity of his motives in making the announcement, and the laudability of his character in general.

For in the context of our contemporary culture, despite how radically subjective transgender identity is, it is common to refer to people who claim it, as Keir Starmer did last year, as “among the most marginalised”. As a group, they’re commonly referred to as at special risk of trauma. It is understood to follow from this that such individuals are, therefore, in need of compensatory kindness and latitude wherever possible.

Such kindness and latitude has been forthcoming in spades since Wallis’s announcement – at least from the press and politicians across the House, who were quick to make warm and welcoming noises about it. Boris Johnson declared “We will support you to live freely as yourself”.

And there are reasons to think Wallis might be in need of “support” to “live freely”. For the consequences of his free living over the last two years have seen him repeatedly at the sharp end of hostile scrutiny, on several occasions, in ways that might well be (in the Taylor Lorenz sense) traumatic.

A year ago, for example, Labour MP Tonia Antoniazzi demanded that Wallis apologise for involvement in a “sugar daddy” dating website she called “exploitative and demeaning”. Wallis denied any involvement in this business, but Ms Antoniazzi claimed to have information from a former employee that contradicted this statement.

And once journalists began rummaging in Wallis’s portfolio as an online entrepreneur, other stories began to surface as well. Buzzfeed reported that online firms in which Wallis was involved had been the subject of hundreds of complaints to trading standards. Subject to the tabloid magnifying-glass for more than two years, then, perhaps it’s no wonder that Jamie Wallis is “not ok”.

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I am less cynical than the internet’s Greek chorus, many of whom seem to suggest that Wallis’s announcement is issued in bad faith. I don’t think this is the case; rather, I think it perfectly plausible that he believes every word of it. There’s no reason to imagine hostile tabloid scrutiny, blackmail, a hookup gone horribly wrong and a car crash that resulted in arrest would be anything other than cumulatively very upsetting.

But it’s also legitimate to ask: does being upset by a series of events release you from any condemnation for the events themselves? And it’s striking how often “trauma” and related forms of emotional distress occur in close proximity, in contemporary discourse, to behaviour others might look askance at.

This weekend, the writer Katherine Ormerod explained her decision to go on holiday without her 10-week-old baby — something many in the age of “attachment parenting” would consider a complete no-no — by telling the reader “It had been a traumatic time”. Just yesterday, Tory MP David Warburton was admitted to hospital with “shock and stress” after a parliamentary investigation was opened into his behaviour.

And in his statement, Wallis says “When I crashed my car on the 28th November I fled the scene. I did so because I was terrified. I have PTSD and I honestly have no idea what I was doing except I was overcome by an overwhelming sense of fear.”

We may feel empathy for those who experience their inner life as being at odds with what the rest of the world sees — at least in the context of a trans identity. But how far should that empathy extend, if the gap between inner life and what the rest of the world sees comprises actions that would be widely seen as worthy of condemnation? And certainly, for many, “driving while unfit” then fleeing the scene of the resulting crash would qualify as “worthy of condemnation”.

I would be the last to advocate a wholly harsh and pitiless public life. It is good and right to include a measure of empathy in how we assess public figures. But if we accept a politics that is all empathy, we may end up creating one that is pitiless in another way.

For what such a world gains in compassion, it risks losing in justice. In 2018, Taylor Lorenz turbo-charged her move out of digital into journalism by “outing” two anonymous social media stars, the Oshry sisters, as daughters of a notorious far-Right commentator, which resulted in their TV talk show being cancelled. In other words, it is safe to say she has no objections to online pile-ons as such, just to having them directed at herself.

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A world in which Taylor Lorenz is an unambiguous figure of sympathy is a radically subjective one, in which only the self-declared metric of personal trauma determines how we weigh the severity of wrongdoing. A world in which there is no responsibility for actions, except the “accountability” of competing online pile-ons, mitigated (for some) by compassion for the trauma you experience having been piled-upon.

And, of course, compassion for such trauma isn’t evenly distributed. Rather, it relies on being able to persuade the internet’s collective excusing-parent to say of you “Oh, she was tired”; or to agree “oh, he was traumatised”. And this turns heavily on whether you can elicit such excuses — which in turn depends on convincing people that you possess characteristics that mark you out as worthy of special compassion.

It is, in other words, a world where there is no justice. And one that is wide open to exploitation by those not so much traumatised as possessing a ready supply of crocodile tears. In other words: truly “exhausting”.

In the 12 years of rule that have followed three landslide electoral victories, Viktor Orbán, now Europe’s longest-serving leader, has successfully reshaped Hungary in his own image: too successfully, in the eyes of both the weak and fractured opposition and of the EU mainstream.

Hungary is not the dictatorship Orbán’s more strident critics allege, but it departs from the stated norms of European liberal democracy in a number of ways. Under his leadership, the ruling Fidesz party has placed its thumb on the electoral scales, ensuring that while elections are free, the government enters them at an advantage. Opposition candidates are given significantly less airtime on state broadcasting networks than government figures, with the result that Fidesz narratives dominate the airwaves; the opposition claims that electoral boundaries have been redrawn to favour the government, a charge that Fidesz disputes; and a sophisticated politics of patronage has created a new conservative elite which owes its survival to Orbán’s continued rule. 

It is precisely these same innovations, which make Orbán’s Hungary anathema to Western liberals, that make the country so attractive to so many Western conservatives — particularly Anglo-Saxon ones. Where conservatives in Britain and America can win elections but find their governance impeded by a liberal powerbase in the media, NGOs and the judiciary (termed by conservative Hungarian intellectuals as an anti-democratic “juristocracy”), in Orbán’s Hungary the liberal intelligentsia’s political powerbase has been dismantled and replaced with a confident new conservative elite. A wealth of glossy conservative magazines, universities, think tanks and NGOs are the lavishly-funded product of Orbán’s Gramscian conservativism.

Rather than the vulgar 20th-century authoritarianism with which his more excitable critics charge him, Orbán’s dominance of Hungary’s politics is a subtler, more postmodern exercise. A product of George Soros’s attempt to nurture an elite governing class in Central Europe, the disaffected liberal reformer has adopted and inverted the same methods that produce liberal hegemony towards distinctly post-liberal ends. No wonder so many Western conservatives, who cannot translate electoral success to meaningful political power, find Orbán’s Hungary an object of both envy and inspiration. At Gólya, a far-Left cooperative and cultural space in a disused Budapest warehouse bedecked with PKK flags, I met the Marxist journalist and leftwing activist Csaba Tóth, who wryly described Orbán’s Hungary as “Rojava for western conservatives”, an idealised polity onto which they can project their political hopes and dreams.

“​​The point about Fidesz,” Tóth told me, “is that they’re against this liberal Deep State, NGO elite, whatever you want to call it. But they are mesmerised by it, and they are trying to replicate it along their own political lines. So they will have their own NGOs, their own think tanks, their own societies and international influence, modelled after this Atlanticist elite.” This creates a system, Tóth claims, where “I don’t think there is a level playing field now in elections. There’s kind of a controlled press in which there’s very little administrative measures against the opposition press, but on the other hand, pro-government media is very heavily rewarded, even from state funds… [This means] there is an economic and political power centre that is overwhelming and couldn’t really make another power centre come about.”

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Before her election as Hungary’s first female president last month, the then Fidesz Vice-President Katalin Novák suggested to me that Western European politics is itself undemocratic, as government policy is driven by a “very, very powerful NGO network, which drives this kind of ongoing aggression against those countries who would like to step out of line in migration and all these big liberal trends dominating European policy today”. In Hungary, due to the government’s use of direct referendums to enshrine policy (such as the question on LGBT education in schools, which is also on the ballot on Sunday’s election), Novák claims politics is more democratic in practice than the European mainstream: “I don’t think that in Western Europe politicians would dare to hold a referendum about migration.”

Struggling to make headway against this consolidated conservative system, six of Hungary’s opposition parties have united in a fractious and unwieldy coalition to unseat Orbán, under the titular leadership of Péter Márki-Zay, a gaffe-prone, small-town mayor and Catholic conservative. Dominated by social and economic liberals but encompassing parties as disparate as the social-democratic Socialist party on the one hand, and the until-recently fascist Jobbik party, which has put aside its black uniforms for a centre-right rebranding, on the other, the opposition are united in an awkward marriage of convenience by one goal only: to depose Orbán. And to do so, their campaign has settled on an unexpected lightning rod issue: the war in Ukraine.

There are few things that can focus a voter’s attention more than a bloody war in a neighbouring country, and Orbán’s long-standing policy of amicable relations with Putin’s Russia makes the issue more pointed here than anywhere else in Europe. At an opposition hustings event this week in Budapest’s Széll Kálmán square — until 2011 Moscow Square — where a crowd of perhaps 200 people had gathered to hear the opposition leaders’ speeches, I asked the neatly-suited, smoothly Atlanticist Márki-Zay how the Ukraine war was feeding into his election campaign.

“Many people just woke up that Orbán’s best friend is a war criminal who’s killing kids, who’s shooting at nuclear power plants,” Márki-Zay told me. “So of course, now Putin is responsible for the war in Ukraine and Orbán is responsible for supporting Putin. Orbán has been a traitor of Europe, has been a traitor of Nato and of course, a traitor of Hungary for 12 years.”

Hungary’s opposition has focused on attacking Orbán for his non-interventionist stance in the Ukraine war. While the Fidesz government has agreed to EU sanctions against Russia and sends humanitarian aid to Ukraine, as well as accepting hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian refugees, it refuses to deliver Ukraine weapons or to allow Hungary to be used as a transit point for weapons deliveries from other Nato countries. In return, Fidesz has accused the opposition of being reckless interventionists, eager to embroil Hungarians in a war whose outcome is uncertain, and to torpedo Hungarian living standards by shutting the country off from its energy supplier Russia.

“Unfortunately Orbán controls 90% of the media environment in Hungary,” Márki-Zay asserted, “so he is now attacking the opposition [saying] that we would send untrained kids to die in Ukraine in this war.” So would a Márki-Zay government intervene in Ukraine, I asked? “I will always support Nato’s position because we have to be a loyal member of Nato. We can only rely on defending Hungary with Nato troops in Hungary, which Orbán first denied and then allowed. And then he was also attacking us with allowing arms shipments to Ukraine and [then] Orbán decreed that they can cross Hungary,” he replied. “[He is] a pathetic liar, of course, Orbán, who’s always saying one thing today and changing his mind tomorrow. He was a communist, a liberal, a conservative — and now he’s building a fascist Putinist faction in the European Parliament.”

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Also at the event was Anna Júlia Donáth, a young MEP and leader of the liberal Momentum party, which failed to reach the 5% threshold for representation in Hungary’s last parliamentary election. A scion of a liberal political dynasty, former project manager for an NGO dealing with migrant rights, and member of an EU parliament committee concerned with LGBT issues, Donáth is a Fidesz opponent straight from central casting. I asked her how the Ukraine question was playing in the election campaign.

“It’s about the war of narratives,” she replied, “Orbán builds up a new narrative, which, of course, for us is like a 180-degree change from what he said 24 hours before. But in his communication machine, it works. Yes, indeed, right now, he is a peacemaker. Three weeks ago, he was the most pro-Putin person in Europe.”

Struggling to get the opposition’s message across in the election campaign, Donáth was not sanguine about her coalition’s chances. “Sometimes we really feel like we are fighting against a machine which is impossible to win against,” she told me. “Because they have everything, they don’t just use their own budget. They’re using the state budget for campaigning; this is ridiculous. You can’t win against them.” 

“Two thirds of the country,” she claimed, “are only receiving propaganda media, so they only get a reality built up by the government. And in that reality, they are the best and we are monsters. I can’t blame people for that. They don’t even want to ask questions anymore, because… the system has polarised society on such a level that we cannot even start talking to each other right now.” 

The pre-election polls which a month ago were uncomfortably tight for the government now show Orbán pulling away by a comfortable margin. When I was last in Hungary during the first days of the Ukraine war, government officials were privately downbeat about their prospect of victory, cautioning against over-confident assumptions of success. Four weeks of campaigning later, they are feeling far more positive. 

In an interview at the Scruton cafe at Budapest’s Matthias Corvinus Collegium — part of the flourishing ecosystem of elite conservative institutions created by Fidesz — Viktor Orbán’s strategic advisor Balász Orbán told me that the coming election was Hungary’s “most important ever since the transition period [from communism]” because “it’s about deciding between peace and war. It’s about deciding between peaceful cooperation or coexistence and ideological warfare… I think that the result will be obvious on Sunday, and then this whole turbulent period of time will go away.”

Do most Hungarians support the government’s anti-interventionist stance on Ukraine, I asked? “Yes, yes, yes,” he replied emphatically. “What I feel when I’m traveling all around the country, is that about the Ukrainian conflict, even those who are undecided voters, or who had some willingness to vote for the opposition, even those voting groups are saying that we support the government and government change is not a real option anymore.” Indeed, he added, “if you want to really understand why [the opposition] aren’t successful for like 10, 12 years, and why they’re going to lose the election, that’s the reason: because they think that everything is part of the political issue where they have to somehow get close and in line with the international mainstream liberal approach, but it goes against the majority of the Hungarians’ opinions, even those who are not in favour of Fidesz.”

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But even if staying out of the war appeals to Hungarian voters, Orbán’s position on Ukraine is isolating the government from its closest allies in the EU, with Poland’s president Andrzej Duda stating that it is “hard for me to understand the approach” of Orbán towards Ukraine, and warning that “this policy will be costly for Hungary, very costly”. Similarly, Czechia’s defence minister Jana Černochová posted on Twitter that “I am very sorry that cheap Russian oil is now more important to Hungarian politicians than Ukrainian blood.” Even a planned meeting this week of V4 foreign ministers in Budapest was cancelled at the last minute by Orbán’s erstwhile Central European allies in protest at the Hungarian government’s stance. 

For Hungary’s beleaguered opposition, the war in Ukraine must have seemed like a dramatic, emotive bolt from the blue that could turn the electoral tide in their favour. Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy has even singled out Hungary for criticism in a video address to EU leaders, though this intervention has been criticised in turn by Hungarian foreign minister Péter Szijjártó as an unwelcome attempt at “influencing the election results in Hungary.” Walking around Budapest, a liberal city in a conservative country, I saw election posters for Fidesz candidates defaced with the words “PUTIN KILLER”, and on the Buda side of the river, a display of emotionally powerful photographs of the carnage and destruction in Ukraine set up at a busy traffic intersection. 

But for the electorate as a whole, the war seems to have instead prompted a rallying effect around Orbán’s message of stability and security in a newly-dangerous region, with voters apparently heeding his message that a more actively pro-Ukrainian stance would be “getting involved in a war that is not our war, in which we have nothing to gain and everything to lose”. Barring a major upset, Sunday’s polls look set to deliver a historic fourth consecutive term of office for Orbán and the consolidation of Hungary’s fascinating — if controversial — experiment in enshrining conservative cultural and political hegemony. The Orbán model may not, as liberals fear and some conservatives dream, be applicable outside of Hungary’s own unique historic and political context, but it seems for now firmly secure in the heart of Europe.

Covid-19 doesn’t discriminate, or at least does so on the basis of age and health conditions rather than politics. Why, then, have views on how we should manage it — and particularly how we should treat vaccination — become so heartless, judgemental and politically tribal?

We have a milder case of it in Britain than some countries. But there’s a correlation between (broadly Remain-affiliated) liberal urbanites and the new hygiene-authoritarianism. This has been emerging for a while: back in 2020 the research group UK In A Changing Europe noted that while “it’s not the case that all Leavers are lockdown sceptics” nonetheless “it’s pretty much the case that all lockdown sceptics are Leavers”. More recently, 99 Tories voted against Covid passes before Christmas, compared to 22 in Labour.

In the US, analogous (and angrier) patterns emerge. Free-wheeling, mask-optional Republican Florida is pitted against Democrat California, which mandates indoor mask-wearing, including for all children over the age of two, and announced in October that vaccination would become mandatory for in-person school attendance. Vaccination is already mandatory for employment in the police force and healthcare on public-health grounds.

More interesting than arguing for either one side or the other, though, is what the arguments reveal about our ongoing political realignment. In particular, it sounds the death-knell for a relatively mild-mannered twentieth-century version of progressivism characterised by a desire to ensure the world is fair, and to avoid harming others.

What’s emerging to replace it is more bellicose, more ruthless — and increasingly religious. So-called “secular liberalism” has, in other words, stopped pretending to be secular. It’s been received opinion since the end of World War II that authoritarian religiosity was exclusive to the Right. Theodor Adorno’s 1950 The Authoritarian Personality cited batteries of research to argue that fascism, and the Holocaust, could be explained by the prevalence of an ‘Authoritarian Personality Type’. This ‘personality type’, he argued, was characterised by blind allegiance to conventional beliefs about right and wrong, respect for submission to acknowledged authority, and a tendency to project one’s own feelings of inadequacy, rage and fear onto a scapegoated group.

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In turn, Adorno’s conviction that these behaviours are characteristic of the Right crops up again in a far more recent, but also influential book: Jonathan Haidt’s 2012 The Righteous Mind. Here, Haidt argued that the reason ‘liberals’ and ‘conservatives’ routinely misunderstand one another is that there exist five ‘moral foundations’ on which we all base our political views: care/harm, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion and sanctity/degradation. Haidt argues that liberals are only interested in care/harm and fairness/cheating, while the Right is attuned to all five foundations.

Does this apply in the Covid debate? Certainly at the surface, calls for coercive measures tend to start off with arguments about protecting people. For example, Scottish public health adviser Jason Leitch told BBC Good Morning Scotland that the aim of Covid passes was “to allow people to attend events and environments safely”.

At the core of this argument is the not unreasonable point that when it comes to physical wellbeing, we can’t be wholly individualistic. The moment you get ill or injure yourself as a consequence of having taken some risk (for example after breaking your leg skiing), you need care and are thus, by definition, no longer taking sole responsibility for your wellbeing.

Does this mean vaxx authoritarians have a point? Hiltzik points out that mandates have long existed on other health grounds where risk-taking imposes costs on wider society, such as seatbelt-wearing, smoking, or drink-driving. Insisting on the individual right to choose whether or not to be vaccinated therefore “places a perverse conception of individual “freedom” in opposition to the communal interest”.

We might simply shrug, and say this is just another data point for that 2021 study which showed that contra Adorno, there is abundant evidence for authoritarianism among left-liberals. Certainly, calls from self-identified progressives to “crush the resistance” to vaccines by making the lives of the unvaccinated a “total misery” might challenge the idea that the ‘authoritarian personality’ can only flourish on the Right.

But it’s the character and chosen terrain of the emerging progressive authoritarianism that’s distinctive. For it’s not merely a matter of progressives waking up to the possibility that they, too, may use coercive measures to pursue their chosen ends. It’s also the nature of those ends. Consider, for example, the fact that in 2020 fentanyl killed more Californians than Covid. But unlike Covid, the drug epidemic inspired few coercive measures — only safe injection sites, billboards encouraging users to take drugs with friends or programmes that pay them not to use.

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If avoiding harm justified coercive interventions, surely we’d have seen more of them in Californian drug policy. But their absence in the case of drug abuse, and fervent application in the case of virus control, suggests there’s a different motive at work than the prevention of harm.

In an Evening Standard piece last week, former editor Emily Sheffield argued that our capital city’s unvaccinated residents should “pay with their freedoms, not ours”. And on social media, we saw the same punitive ferocity recently when one American mother reported that when her son tested positive she didn’t just quarantine him but also “took the X-Box”, a measure more consistent with chastisement than infection control. The only reason she didn’t also confiscate the phone, she says, “is so he can text for food and water”.

Recently, we’ve had news that Omicron appears to be more infectious but milder, and research that indicates vaccination does very little to prevent transmission of the virus. So rationally, none of these vengeful attitudes make much sense. What’s going on?

The recent furore over the entry into Australia of (unvaccinated) tennis superstar Novak Djokovic offers a clue. One Melbourne journalist tweeted about how, since he was allowed into the country, fans “won’t want to come” to the tennis matches. Objectively, one single unvaccinated tennis player would make a negligible difference to someone’s risk of catching Covid; the only possible reason someone might skip the Australian Open because of Djokovic’s presence is if the fear was of a subtler, more metaphysical contagion.

In the Bay of Kells, in Ireland’s County Kerry, there’s a small secret graveyard that until recently was overgrown with brambles and largely forgotten. It was a place where grieving parents buried babies who died before they could be baptised — for the unbaptised were spiritually unclean, and therefore not permitted burial on a churchyard’s consecrated ground.

In Eugenics and Other Evils (1922), GK Chesterton observed that “it seems quite natural to our politicians to enforce vaccination; and it would seem to them madness to enforce baptism”. Today the prescience of Chesterton’s remark is clear, as is the convergence in terms of social meaning between vaccination and baptism.

The growing tendency for ‘the vaccinated’ to treat ‘the unvaccinated’ as other or impure recalls the willingness of an earlier age to deny others simple forms of inclusion on the basis of baptism. Never mind what studies say about the efficacy of Covid vaccination in protecting us from severe illness (which evidence strongly suggests it does) or mitigating further infection (perhaps more debatable). Increasingly, vaccination carries a social meaning as well as a medical one. It’s a ritual infusion — albeit via injection, not anointment — of sacred liquid, whose application confers freedom from spiritual taint.

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Perhaps it’s just that the correlation between left-liberalism and secularism in both Britain and America has left progressives especially hungry for something to fill the God-shaped hole, and the yearning for measures that speak to the fundamental moral instinct Haidt calls ‘sanctity/degradation’. This might help account for the ongoing, fruitless, rationally debunked but nonetheless persistent obsession Tom Chivers recently noted, with disinfecting surfaces ‘because of Covid’ despite mounting evidence that the virus is airborne.

An increasingly post-Christian West, then, finds itself grabbing gratefully onto Covid hygiene theatre, in pursuit of a purity more metaphysical than bacterial. And as we’ve now spent two years clapping for carers, sharing dancing nurse videos, and creating window iconography and even altar-cloths to venerate medical professionals, it’s probably a bit late to rein this blossoming spiritualisation of hygiene.

For to imagine we can do so would be to say we still live in a world of reasoned debate. And when ‘experts’ offer ‘evidence’ to counter rumours of Covid propagandising, only to be met with derisive accusations of using fact-checking to propagandise, we might as well abandon ‘reasoned debate’ altogether and, in the words of Edmund Blackadder, stick two pencils up our noses and wear underpants on our heads.

Or, alternatively, start praying. Progressives spent half of the twentieth century telling us that this was pointless: the search for metaphysical purity was low-status, ‘authoritarian’ or simply obsolete, and reason replaced all that. Their children, though, have discovered that purification rituals don’t have to be confined to the individualistic realm of ‘juice cleanses’ or ‘clean eating’, but can be imposed on entire societies.

We can expect them to go on chasing that high. And meanwhile, it seems enough of the rest of us like having something to worship, and a suitable group of sinners to despise. If you don’t already pray, you might as well start; we all once again live in a religious world.

This use of far-Right tropes — in particular, the Chad vs Wojak dichotomy — is telling of the two groups’ mutual mourning over modern ‘degeneracy’ and the ‘decline of the West’. But this alliance also throws a spoke in the wheel for the conventional narrative surrounding Islam and the Right.

After all, in both fringe and mainstream conservative discourses, Islam is loathed as a prime culprit driving societal decline. Whether it takes the form of European white nationalist groups such as Generation Identity blaming Muslim immigration for the ‘great replacement’ or Right-wing newspaper columnists deeming it a ‘threat to our liberal values’, hostility towards Islam seems to be a defining feature on the modern Right. No less ambiguous is Islamists’ own hostility towards the Right as the vanguard of the Western culture that they oppose; for both parties, a convergence with one another would seem paradoxical.

Islamism and the Left, on the other hand, appear to make far more intuitive allies. Most recently, it has been suggested that some Islamists may be actively co-opting ‘wokeness’ and camouflaging their agenda in the language of diversity and inclusion. But well outside the sphere of extremism, the so-called Islamo-Leftist alliance is a well-established source of analysis. A number of mainstream trends reveal the extent of a relationship between Islam and the Left, from the crossover of Muslim and Leftist causes among student activists to the fact that Western Muslims statistically tend to vote for Left-wing parties.

Yet this alliance is not without its own tensions: the modern Left has an uneasy relationship with traditional religion, and struggles to incorporate moral absolutism, spiritual hierarchies, and the submission to a Divine order that is integral to Islam. In other words, while the modern Left seeks to break down ‘grand narratives’, Islam is a grand narrative, and one imbued with a profound metaphysical potency at that.

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This is not to overlook the fact that there have been numerous attempts to systematically converge Islamic and Leftist political philosophy. Most prominently in the 20^th century, movements such as the Islamic socialism of the Iranian Revolution or the Somali Revolutionary Socialist Party sought to achieve their political aims through means which were, or at least strived to be, theologically sincere. It is also notable that this kind of Leftism, which was closer to orthodox Marxism, was more sympathetic to grand narratives than its contemporary forms where postmodern currents prevail (leaving aside the overtly anti-religious sentiments of Marx himself, that is).

Today, attempts by Western Leftists to form alliances with Muslims often overlook religious narratives: unsurprisingly, Islamic theological and intellectual traditions do not take centre stage in secular activism. Though modern Leftists — committed to showing solidarity with minority groups — may represent the identities of Muslims, they struggle to represent the values of Muslims. Incorporating their traditional beliefs would involve revising their own secular (and ironically, modern Western) biases, which, despite efforts to ‘decolonise the mind’, they are often reluctant to do.

In effect, the modern Left’s concern with religion boils down to identity politics; an impetus, perhaps, for practising Muslims to gravitate to the other side of the ideological spectrum. But religion is also relegated to identity politics on the modern Right, where the term ‘culturally Christian’ is commonplace. Self-styled ‘anti-woke’ commentators may invoke Christianity in their paeans for a return to tradition, but this often gives precedence to the cultural and aesthetic residues of the religion over its metaphysical and moral precepts. As far as ideology is concerned, more faith is placed in the axioms of the European Enlightenment — individual liberty, free speech and, ironically, secularism — than those of traditional Christianity, now reduced to little more than a signifier of Western heritage.

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It follows that the Right’s contempt towards Islam does not come so much from a theological defence of Christianity, but a cultural one. Likewise, the Left’s representation of Muslims, owing to its own secular biases, also ends up reducing Islam to a cultural entity. In effect, theological and metaphysical considerations have been rendered obsolete on both the Left and the Right when it comes to religion.

This points, among other things, to a major shift within the Right: traditionally, it was the Right that served to uphold religious principles, including moral absolutism, spiritual hierarchies and, in a way, submission to a Divine order. But fixated as it now is on individual liberty, free speech and secularism, the modern Right overlooks this. And in relocating its origins to the European Enlightenment, it forgets that the conservative tradition was itself born out of a hesitation towards the Enlightenment.

Roger Scruton — one of the last philosophers to defend conservatism as a counterweight to the Enlightenment, rather than a full embrace of it — saw it necessary for politics to have a metaphysical dimension. Following Edmund Burke, Michael Oakeshott and Matthew Arnold, he remained true to the origins of British conservatism as a reaction against the excesses of liberalism and secularism. This conservatism was, he wrote, “a defence of tradition against calls for popular religion and high culture against the materialist doctrine of progress”.

With this in mind, the notion of an alliance between Islam and the Right begins to make sense. Islam poses many of the same challenges to Enlightenment liberalism as the English conservative tradition once did, with both traditions recognising the social and spiritual dangers of modern materialism. Islam, in a sense, fulfils Scruton’s definition of ‘metaphysical conservatism’ as a defence of sacred things against desecration. But today, the modern Right is more concerned with defending free speech against ‘wokeness’, individual liberties against collectivism, and freedom against censorship than sacred things against desecration.

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What does this tell us about the alleged alliance between Islam and the far-Right? Since the mainstream Right has become indifferent towards traditional values, their ideological debris has drifted downstream to be claimed by fringe subcultures. But these fragments, severed from their original contexts, have been misappropriated to suit hateful ideologies that are just as unmoored from religious virtues. Defences of gender roles, the family and community, for example, are often articulated through crude biological reductionism rather than spiritual concerns. Whether it’s the blood and soil paganism of Neo-Nazis or the New Atheism of hardline rationalists, much of today’s far-Right is just as materialistic and hostile towards traditional religion.

The fact that many look for or encounter traditional ideas in these extremist subcultures is telling of the fact that these ideas are severely underrepresented in political discourse. This was once a role fulfilled by the Right. Yet modern conservatism’s embrace of liberalism and secularism, despite originating as a counterweight to these Enlightenment ideolo­gies, excludes those wishing to defend the sacred. Without representation of such concerns, ‘dissidents’ will continue to drift to extremes — even if it means promoting a group as nefarious as the Taliban.

“I was sent out as a child to go and canvas for the Conservatives,” he says. “I was sent out to get money and you would come back with half a crown if you were lucky and a load of abuse.” He removes his pipe, replaces it, and sucks on it again. “I done my little bit, and these are not the people I grew up with. These are not the people I voted for. When I grew up there was an old lady down the road. The thing she used to say, it stuck with me all my life: ‘You can hide from a thief. You can’t do anything with a liar’. And he [Boris Johnson] is. He wouldn’t know the truth if he fell over it.”

North Shropshire is farm land, dotted with medieval wool towns and small villages connected by pot-holed roads on which expensive buses run infrequently and late. The landed class is wealthy and well-established; the working class is white, conservative, un-unionised and earns less than the average wage. The largest minority is Bulgarian.

This constituency never sought to be a referendum on Boris Johnson’s leadership, but fate said otherwise when Owen Paterson, MP for 24 years, resigned for breaking lobbying rules, and the Prime Minster allowed his advisors to break lockdown rules and feast as people died alone. Paterson’s majority in 2019 was an enormous 22,949: 62.7% of the vote on a turnout of 67.9%. It seemed an insurmountable wall of blue, but then Boris Johnson came with chaos in hand.

The electorate here is raging, and combustible; party loyalty no longer matters, as voters behave like consumers. In May, they turned the council of Oswestry – the largest town in the constituency – Green, because, I am told, the Greens worked hard and the Conservatives neglected the constituency, because it is so safe. (There isn’t a Labour or Liberal Democrat councillor in the whole of North Shropshire.) Even so, the Liberal Democrats think they can benefit from protest and repeat their victory in Chesham and Amersham. They are, as they always do, busing in activists from all over the country, and painting the constituency orange. Doormats are buried under their campaign literature. They phonebank ferociously, “trying,” says the Green candidate Duncan Kerr, “to create a tidal wave of perception that it is going their way”. If they behave like Harvey Keitel in Pulp Fiction, driving in and cleaning up, it is working. They are now the bookies’ favourite.

Meanwhile Labour, which came second in six of the last eight General Elections and took twice the number of Liberal Democrat votes in 2019, is wielding a local candidate in the manner of a magical object: like Excalibur. He was born in Oswestry itself. “I’m Ben Wood,” he tells my Dictaphone because he is young, “I’m Labour’s local candidate in the North Shropshire by-election. I’m fighting a local campaign on local issues and the big message we are getting across is that our towns have grown but our public services are shrinking.”

The ambulance station in Oswestry just closed, he says, alongside ambulance stations in Market Drayton and Whitchurch. (People wait eight hours for an ambulance here.) There are fewer police on the streets and the school receives less funding than the national average, he adds; this election, like all rural elections, is about centralisation at heart. “I’ve got skin in the game,” he says. “I want to be a local champion and get people to buy, sell and make more locally.” For emphasis, we stop at a bread stall to buy bread made in Wrexham. “Strong trade here?” Wood asks the bread-seller. “It is a good market,” says the man, “[from] years of building it up. It’s like any market. You can’t flit in and flit out and expect the trade to be there.”

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Wood is campaigning with Daniel Zeichner, the shadow minister for food, farming and fisheries; they walk together, with a local activist taking their photographs for social media. “Labour is reconnecting with the whole country,” Zeichner says. “What we are finding is that we are absolutely back in the game and people are really pleased to see a genuine alternative.”

Are they an alternative here: in a by-election, which is different from a general election?  The Liberal Democrats call themselves the opposition based on the undeniable truth that angry Tories are more likely to vote Liberal Democrat than Labour. The Liberal Democrats are both a brand and a bath of protest; you step in, lie down, and get out when you wish. Then there is their deceptive graph, which shows a “two horse race”: the Liberal Democrats closing in on the Conservatives.

The graph is based on the May Shropshire council elections (North Shropshire wards) in which, thanks to the Greens standing aside in many wards, they took second place for vote share, and lost their only seat in North Shropshire: in Wem.

Labour’s other problem is that their former candidate, Graham Currie, who stood for parliament three times, was prevented from standing this time for over-enthusiastic and unsanctioned Corbynism and posted a furious missive on Facebook: “These Stalinist tactics of the NEC flies in the face of the calls for unity within the Labour Party. I am now an outsider in my own party where I have campaigned and fought for many years alongside my fellow party members for a more equal, socially just and non-discriminatory society. Labour has a corruption in its soul.” Many local activists are staying home in protest, and some Labour voters might too.

So the opposition is divided. But the anger is not. I meet the landlady at the Bailey Head pub, opposite the town museum, which tells me that Barbara Pym and Wilfred Owen were born in Oswestry, and she says the Tories are now considered indecent; barely Tories at all. And if they aren’t Tories, you can abandon them, and remain a better Tory.

“This is a traditional community,” she says. “You have to be honest and decent in a small community because you will get found out. You can’t lie to people and deceive people and expect to get away with it. It’s really quite offensive to people who live like this, where everyone knows each other, we all know what’s going on, and people do look out for each other, to then realise someone you trusted has been so deceitful”. She repeats the party’s line on Paterson, bitterly: “He broke the rules, we will change the rules to suit him.” And then on the parties in Downing Street: “There wasn’t a party, or maybe there was, or we don’t know.” She continues, sounding astonished: “You are dealing with people who have faced losing their business or they had relatives die in hospital who they couldn’t be with and meanwhile Boris’s friends have had a party, and they are lying about it and they are laughing. There are people who have voted Conservative their whole life, now saying, ‘I can’t support that, I haven’t been able to see my kids’. And they have been taking the mickey out of us. There is a real sense of rage”.

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One friend, she says, a man in his 70s, has always voted Tory but is now voting Liberal Democrat, “because he wants to give them a bloody nose”. She pauses and says with absolute conviction: “They can lose 20,000 votes here in a heartbeat.”  Many, she says, will stay home. Others are going to the Right: to Reform and Reclaim.

I cannot find Neil Shastri-Hurst, a barrister, for the Conservatives, but I am used to it: in four by-elections I have not met a single live Conservative candidate. They are shy, semi-mythical beings ever in peril of being chased into cupboards by Newsnight reporters. To appear in public is an opportunity to err. Shastri-Hurst is from Birmingham, which shares few issues with rural North Shropshire; he is a victim of the famous Conservative Party Central Office map, which pronounced that a farmer should stand in Hartlepool of all places. Shastri-Hurst’s enemies say he is from Birmingham in the same tone as you might say he is from France, or Iran. (One man suggested it was “dog-whistling”.) In any case, the Conservatives do not help themselves. During a flying visit to Oswestry, Boris Johnson called him Neil Shastri-Hughes [sic] and later, “Dr Neil”. “I’ve had much worse,” said the candidate, phlegmatically; and there was worse. “Very positive day campaigning in Wem for the North Staffs [sic] by-election,” tweeted Eddie Hughes MP.

There are novelty candidates too, of course: Russell Dean of The Party Party, who was born in Chester, is now a yacht broker living in Monaco and promises to fight sleaze and engage young people in politics. (His nephew is in charge on the ground.)

Then there is Earl Jesse for the Freedom Alliance standing for “political truth, medical freedom and individual prosperity” and bouncing around near Sainsbury’s in a flat cap hugging people with his party leader Jonathan Tilt. The problem with the Freedom Alliance is two-fold. First, they are too small to be a meaningful alliance. Second, though they have some good instincts — why close small shops in lockdown, when supermarkets stay open? — they rapidly sound completely insane. But they do hug you.

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I find Boris Been-Bunged – also known as Faux Bojo — for the Rejoin EU Party in Oswestry by a yellow Mini that says Bollocks to Brexit (“vote tactically, we will be back”). He is a comedian and a Boris Johnson impersonator, who once pole danced with strippers as Faux Bojo in Secrets the nightclub and has burned his scalp from bleaching his hair blonde. His real name is Drew Galdron.  He believes that Westminster “isn’t a democracy, it’s theatre” and he would know. The resemblance is uncanny. He amuses passers-by (he takes on the voice, which is nothing like his own) and he seems, as is usual for a comic, far more at ease as the man he despises than as himself. “People imagine I get a lot of stick,” he says. “Actually, what annoys me far more has been the sheer amount of sycophancy I’ve seen from a lot of people who like him”. Later, he is heckled by a drunk woman, who calls him a cunt, which clearly dismays him. He takes refuge in the Liar Liar coffee shop, but some lads spot him through the window. “It’s Boris!” they scream, giving thumbs up but sideways; a half thumbs up, then. But I sense the love still: for his courage – it is a mad kind of courage. I wonder if they will vote for Faux Bojo because they think he is Boris Johnson, and this has all been a terrible mistake.

Laurence Fox is here too with his candidate Martin Daubney, a former journalist. They spend a lot of time in the Fox Inn, tweeting about living in a one-party state, and how Covid is just like a cold.

I meet Duncan Kerr for the Greens. “This place is similar to many places in England,” he says. “It’s been Tory for so long that they’ve got very complacent. They don’t listen to people. They haven’t got a plan. There is an awful lot of Cake-ism [in the campaign literature]. We will fix the potholes; we will fix the ambulance service; everything is promised”.

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In Whitchurch, another fine medieval town with a pinkish Baroque church, I find hope for the Conservatives: if you can call ennui hope. The landlord at the Bulls Head pub says no one is discussing sleaze “and we have been quite busy. There doesn’t seem to be any take-up for it really. Everybody thinks its crazy; everybody does the same thing. I think people are fed up with it.”

But not all: “I’m appalled,” says one woman, formerly a lifelong Conservative, of the “party business. I felt really let down. He should be good and stay good.” But she twinkles at the thought of him, and in that twinkle is, potentially, his salvation. “Tell him.”

They still talk about him as if he were a naughty child; and they still believe in his redemption, which they think has a universal meaning: the king and the land are one. “I do like Boris,” says another in Costa Coffee. “I don’t know why. I’m not going to let him down now. He’s trying.” The relationship Johnson has formed with the voters is not broken yet. But it hangs by a thread.

It is easy to assume the Conservatives will win with a greatly reduced majority. Superficially at least, the Liberal Democrats have a harder task than in Chesham and Amersham, where the Conservative majority in 2019 was much smaller than it is here (16,223 or 55.4% of the vote) and Labour barely campaigned. There was almost a levity to the protest vote in Buckinghamshire. But here people feel more betrayed; their objection is less trivial, and more heartfelt. In Old Bexley and Sidcup, the by-election held this month after James Brokenshire died, the Tories lost more than 18,000 votes – though they won. Brokenshire was liked and admired. Paterson is not; and the electorate has never been more volatile.

Not everyone agrees. I meet a man whose job is to decide if Christmas lights can be hung on medieval houses in Whitchurch. He stares at them, holding a clipboard, pondering.  “Even if the Prime Minister came here and said he would sacrifice their first-born child they would still vote Conservative,” he says. He turns and looks at the line of medieval houses, thrilling in their irregularity, wondering which, if any, are sturdy enough to bear light.

One would have thought that Oliver Dowden was doing a fairly good job of pursuing the Government’s forever “war on woke”. But obviously not. The reshuffle saw Olive, as the former Statues (sorry, Culture) Secretary (now party co-Chairman) is known to his friends, summarily replaced by the preternaturally plain-speaking Nadine Dorries. She was known by her enemies as the woman who once suggested equal marriage was something which only “metro elite gay activists” aspired to and called Messrs Cameron and Osborne “two posh boys who don’t know the price of milk”.

Whether Ms Dorries, before accepting his commission, quizzed Mr Johnson on precisely how much he paid when he last popped out for a pint of semi-skimmed is, sadly, not recorded, although, if precedent is anything to go by, we will eventually find out. Indeed, many of the most delicious moments in contemporary histories of recent premierships are provided by their accounts of the often cack-handed attempts of their hapless heroes to inject fresh blood and get rid of dead wood.

Normally, it’s the sackings that afford the most entertainment: May’s “elder sister” slaying of George Osborne is an absolute classic of the genre — not least because it came back to bite her big time when the former Chancellor became editor of the Evening Standard, from which perch he took great delight in proving that revenge is indeed a dish best served cold (and, in his case, that meant very, very cold indeed).

This time around, however, it’s the appointments that are more intriguing. In part, that’s because the reshuffle’s two most obvious victims were (a) long-destined for the chop and (b) not particularly interesting or heavyweight politicians.

It would be hard, for instance, to find many people sad to see Gavin Williamson depart Education after what teachers, students and pupils (not to mention their parents) have been put through during the pandemic. And the now-former Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, Robert Jenrick (cruelly dubbed “Robert Generic” by his detractors), was better known for bending lockdown rules, greenlighting a Tory donor’s questionable construction project, bunging big grants to towns with Tory MPs, and going on telly to defend the indefensible than he was for building more houses.

Their replacements, however, are rather more interesting. Nadhim Zahawi will, of course, be criticised for having no direct experience of state schooling, but may well be given the benefit of the doubt, at least initially, as a result of his impressive performance as Vaccines Minister and because he’s that most unusual of top Tories – someone with a BSc (Chemical Engineering, UCL) rather than an Oxford PPE.

Even more interesting, is Michael Gove’s move to MHCLG. This is not a ministry normally given to a big-hitter with a reputation (at least among civil servants) for competence as well as the ability to present a parliamentary and Cabinet case.

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Westminster's empty narcissism

By Peter Franklin

His appointment suggests – encouragingly – that Johnson realises that he can’t merely give up fundamental planning reform as a bad job and hope the problem goes away. And, while it may be true (Gove’s many fans would even say tragic) that his neo-con worldview and concerns about his reliability (perhaps expressed most shockingly and openly a few years ago by Defence Secretary Ben Wallace) mean Gove is unlikely ever to be awarded one of the great offices of state (Chancellor, Home Secretary, Foreign Secretary), his decision to accept the challenge — which apparently includes converting the PM’s “levelling up” rhetoric into reality – is nonetheless significant.

The test, of course, will be whether he can achieve anything without simultaneously losing friends and alienating people (including voters) – a test he clearly flunked when he was Cameron’s controversial Education Secretary.

But if Gove is something of an ideologue, he has nothing, at least on that score, on Liz Truss, the new Foreign Secretary — the first Conservative woman (and only the second woman ever) to occupy that post. And in some ways that (plus the fact that the Tory grassroots’ favourite free-market zealot was seen by those who get off on Global Britain as having done well in the International Trade brief) may be half the point.

At the FCDO, Truss has effectively been parked somewhere where her Britannia Unchained, Singapore-on-Thames shtick isn’t going to interfere too much with Boris Johnson’s rather more pragmatic, interventionist, and supposedly One Nation brand of Toryism. Meanwhile, her replacement at DIT, Brexity former International Development Minister, Anne-Marie Trevelyan, is seen as a reasonably safe pair of hands, although without Truss’s infamous flair for publicity. That said, anyone (can there still be anyone?) dreaming of a trade deal with China on her watch might be well advised invest their hopes elsewhere.

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The West can learn from China

By Marshall Aubercack

Truss replaces Dominic Raab – surely the most high-profile casualty of this reshuffle, which may seem like an odd thing to say about the new Justice Secretary and Lord Chancellor after he was compensated with the formal title of Deputy Prime Minister. But let’s be honest: Franklin Roosevelt’s Veep, “Cactus Jack” Garner famously dismissed the vice presidency as “not worth a bucket of warm piss”; well, whatever is worth less than warm piss, that’s basically what the office of DPM is worth.

He knows it. Johnson knows it. We all know it. The fact that he was offered it at all is testimony only to the fact that, unlike some of the others who were demoted (Williamson, Jenrik, former Justice Secretary Robert Buckland and the Boris-uber-loyalist, former co-Chairman, Amanda Milling) No 10 couldn’t be entirely sure that Raab would go quietly – or, indeed, remain relatively quiet on the backbenches in the hope of a return to government (or, more likely, a seat in the Lords) in years to come.

Quite what Raab’s fellow lawyers will make of him, however, will be interesting to see. There would seem to be little chance of him going native – he was after all the first Tory during the 2019 leadership contest to promote proroguing parliament as a route out of what was then the Brexit impasse. If anything, they may want to buckle up for a bumpy ride: Raab’s combination of natural aggression and neoliberalism means he may be far more inclined than his predecessor to pick a fight with what he’ll no doubt see as the sector’s “producer groups”.

In the end, however, although we’re bound to be distracted by who’s up and who’s down, perhaps we should pay more attention to three politicians who have stuck around. Priti Patel clearly remains too totemic to shift from the Home Office: even if she can’t stop those migrants coming across the Channel in small boats she can bang on about them like no-one else, helping to ensure no space opens up on the Conservatives’ flank for a post-Farage populist right. David Frost is still what passes for the PM’s brain on Brexit. And Rishi Sunak is not just too popular to move; his reputation as a fiscal hawk (doubtless something he’ll burnish this autumn) also provides some much needed reassurance to the party’s bog-standard backbench Thatcherites that Johnson, for all his strengths as an election-winner, hasn’t led the Tories entirely off the small-state straight and narrow.

Ever since the shock win for the Lib Dems in Chesham and Amersham back in June, many on the centre-Left have been waiting for something equally arresting to confirm that it wasn’t a one off, and that the Tories might be in as much trouble in some of their southern heartlands as Labour are in the north.

But is YouGov’s eye-catching Blue Wall poll really that other shoe dropping? And even if it is, isn’t it more a faint echo than a darn great thud?

That the Conservatives are losing support in some of their seats which heavily backed Remain in 2016, and where over a quarter of residents hold a university degree, actually shouldn’t come as much of a surprise.

After all, the flip side of the electoral analyst James Kanagasooriam’s observation that there were Labour seats where voter demographics (and values) meant they could easily turn Tory was always that the Conservatives should expect to lose a few seats, too. In fact, one could almost argue that it was always going to be a matter of when, not if.

It could even be that Covid is speeding the process up. The Government’s recent responses to both the ping- and pandemic have once again given people the impression that (a) it doesn’t really know what it’s doing, and (b) there’s one rule for it and one for the rest of us. Added to which, the search for space among relatively affluent city dwellers may be leading to the surrounding outer suburbs and small towns welcoming younger, better-educated and more socially liberal voters

Chesham and Amersham may be just the kind of constituency they are moving to. But if that formerly true-blue stronghold is in play, then so are a bunch of home-counties seats, although most of those are rather more vulnerable to the Lib Dems than to Labour.

Which is why it may be a little disappointing to those investing in YouGov’s latest polling to find that, at least in the seats it surveyed, support for the Lib Dems appears to have dropped (from 24% down to 18%) since the general election. If he does want take more Blue Wall seats off the Tories in 2023 or 2024, then Ed Davey is going to need a much bigger orange mallet than the one he wielded for the rather endearing photo-op that celebrated his party’s win in Chesham and Amersham.

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Will Boris lose the Blue Wall?

By Tanya Gold

Labour appears to be doing better, with its support rising four points from 20% to 24%. But if you’re excited about those numbers, then it probably says more about you than it does about them. A score of 20% doesn’t even merit the label “low base”. It wouldn’t even come close to what the party would need to pull off an unlikely victory in a classic three-way marginal. In 2019, there were just 11 English seats which had a vote-share gap between first and third place of less than 20 percentage points, and even among those the lowest winning vote share (Labour’s in Sheffield Hallam) was 34.6%.

To be fair, YouGov reckons that: “If the swings were uniform across all constituencies, Labour would be set to gain a total of nine Blue Wall seats, and the Liberal Democrats three.” However, if you look carefully, four of those Labour wins would be in London (Chipping Barnet, Chingford, Hendon and Kensington) and only one (Wycombe) is in what most analysts would think of as the “real” Blue Wall (the others being Milton Keynes North, Stroud, Truro and Falmouth, and one of the Bristol seats).

And anyway, as YouGov goes on in the next breath, even if Labour were to gain the seats listed, “it would not be anywhere near enough to offset the party’s losses in the so-called Red Wall in 2019”. The fact remains, as Keir Starmer’s new Director of Strategy, Deborah Mattinson (whose book does a great job of helping to explain those losses) has reportedly told Labour MPs: the party still has a long way to go if it is to win over the older, less-educated, and culturally conservative voters it desperately needs to get back in order to stand a chance next time round.

Apparently, she also pointed to polling and to focus group research, in which she specialises, that suggests support for Boris Johnson is waning. It’s also worth remembering that, at the end of last year, before the vaccine roll-out became a reality for most people, the gap between the two parties had narrowed. But even as the nation’s gratitude begins to fade, it remains the case that, nationwide, both the PM and the Conservative Party retain significant leads on the measures that matter — trust on who would best run the economy and who would make the best prime minister.

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Don't stereotype Red Wall Tories, Boris

By David Jeffreys

Sure, there are some worrying numbers for the Tories in the YouGov poll. Some 54% of its Blue Wall respondents disapprove of the Government (the same proportion who say it doesn’t listen to people in their area) – and that’s compared to only 30% who approve. Moreover, 47% think the Government is taking the country in the wrong direction compared to just 32% who reckon it’s taking us in the right direction.

Furthermore, some of the Blue Wall’s decidedly liberal views on cultural questions (for instance, 66% of voters polled by YouGov agree that a wide variety of different ethnic backgrounds and cultures is part of British culture compared to 50% of voters in general and 54% in the Red Wall) might give the Government pause for thought about upping the ante on its ongoing war on woke.

More generally, the fact that 55% think the Conservative Party is out of touch is hardly good news for Boris Johnson — until, that is, you realise that 58% say the same of the Labour Party. And Lib Dems shouldn’t read too much into the fact their score on that metric is 39%: a mere 18% say that they’re in touch.

Ultimately, though, most Conservatives — except perhaps those southern Nimby MPs desperate for ammunition in their battle to prevent their government carrying through meaningful planning reform — won’t (or at least shouldn’t) get too worked up about what the poll purports to tell us about the Blue Wall. This is mid-term: they should expect some serious discontent and dissatisfaction.

In any case, a drop from 52% support in 2019 to 44% support now can be made to sound steep but ultimately, in most of their heartland seats anyway, the worse that’s likely to happen to Tory candidates at the next general election is that they end up having to count the votes rather than simply weigh them.

Second, the state of the Labour Party, riddled with anti-Semitism and personal vindictiveness, with people cancelled for the slightest ideological slip, with its gender wars obsessions, with its hatred of the very idea that one might love one’s country. It was a huge personal relief to leave all that behind. Good riddance.

At first, my switch of allegiance to the hated Tories came as something of a relief. And in the early stages of our relationship, it was easy to keep on making excuses for the things that did not sit quite right with me. I found myself, less than a month after the vote, inwardly cringing at the refusal of Tory MP’s to support the bid to reunite unaccompanied child refugees with families in the UK. It seemed heartless and unnecessarily petty — a kind of unvirtue signalling designed to send a strong message to the faithful that this government wouldn’t be manipulated by any of that sentimentalism so beloved of the Left. Perhaps you just have to take the rough with the smooth, no party is ever going to be perfect. And with this sort of unconvincing blah, I soldiered on, morally embarrassed.

I’ve had other wobbles. But now, with the reduction of the aid budget to 0.5% of GDP, the romance is well and truly over. The idea that we export our Covid-related economic pain to the most vulnerable is just too much for me to swallow, especially as the Conservatives made a clear electoral commitment on this one. Not only was their previously stubborn defence of the 0.7% figure a bunch of garlic that could ward off the “nasty party” tag, it was also a promise to some of the poorest people on the planet. Theresa May was right when she spoke against this £4 billion drop in funding, warning that: “Fewer girls will be educated, more girls and boys will become slaves, more children will go hungry and more of the poorest people in the world will die.”

An instinctive distrust of grand, over-arching theories of morality is one of the principle features of the Conservative mindset. Practice trumps theory. Utopianism is dangerous. Human beings are messy, complicated, conflicted creatures, and strict moral prescriptions are often inhospitable to the lived reality of human life. I get all of that. I agree with it. But one of the inherent weaknesses of this position is that morality can become so bendy and pragmatic as to be practically non-existent. And there is nothing Conservative about the abandonment of guiding moral ideals, however qualified they might have to become when they bump into reality.

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The Church is abandoning its flock

By Giles Fraser

What distinguishes this government from so many Conservative governments of the past is that this one doesn’t seem to do morality at all. One suspects they think that morality is for lefties. Which is just rubbish. Because Conservatism has always had a moral core, albeit a different one from that of the Left. It honours the implicit moral tone of communities, customs and institutions – monarchy, law, military, the family. Traditionally, it has had a close relationship with the Church of England and its establishment.

It has a ready affinity with environmental concerns, with its instinctive preference for the countryside over concrete. And while it does not typically appreciate the way modernity has formatted the moral instinct, it nonetheless holds important things like honourable conduct, something that used to be called character, keeping your word, being fair, even that much derided idea of noblesse oblige, which, when sympathetically understood, is a sense of social responsibility by those who have much, towards those who do not. All of these add up to a powerful conjunction of obligations — something we used to be comfortable describing as implicit in what it was to be British. And they are deeply conservative instincts.

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The EU's most shameful betrayal

By Giles Fraser

But what do we have with this government? No one can say that Boris has ever made any great play of being constrained by morality, certainly not anything like a Judeo-Christian one. Perhaps he thinks that the air has gone out of this particular balloon. But if that’s the case, another one of the bulwarks of moral Conservativism has been dislodged. I wonder if he thinks that the sense of honour implicit in keeping one’s word is equally old fashioned. Green MP Caroline Lucas is right to be concerned that with Boris Johnson there has been a gradual “normalisation of lying to the house”. And this normalisation is highly corrosive of one of key institutions that Conservatives have traditionally respected: Parliament itself.

I don’t care so much about the money spent on soft furnishings, but it’s that creepy conjunction of greed, entitlement and sexual licence that eats away at the integrity of our public life. I am not terribly judgmental about a bit of old-fashioned hypocrisy; the gap between what we want to be and who we are is there in most of us. What I find so deeply dispiriting is its, yes again, normalisation — as if, for instance, there was nothing about Matt Hancock’s bit on the side that should concern proper grown-ups. And such was the normalisation of this corrosive and amoral me-first philosophy that it seems Boris genuinely thought he could get away with there being one Covid isolation rule for him, and another for the rest of us, the little people. Pilot project? More Pontius Pilate, if you ask me.

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The dictator who fooled us

By Ian Birrell

I have discovered and nurtured my inner conservative since 2019. People like Roger Scruton have become central to how I look at the world. But the more conservative I become, the less I like the Government. It is true that the very different values of market-led liberal individualism have been hollowing out more traditional Toryism since at least the Thatcher revolution. But there were hopes of a fightback. The Brexit vote was a refusal to put the values of economic growth over those of democracy and sovereignty. It was a repatriation of distant unaccountable power and the first great break with the Thatcherite economic consensus. And there is still a long way to go to undo the damage it did.

I won’t return to the Left. But I won’t be voting Conservative next time either. They have forgotten the values of being conservative. And without those values, the Conservative Party is little more than a vessel for the personal ambitions of the depressingly self-entitled.

This is the land of plenty at the end of the Metropolitan Line. The charity shop has a wedding hat section. There is a bespoke gentleman’s tailor and a town museum, so you can investigate Amersham’s plenty of yore. The Britain in Bloom awards are stacked vertically on a post by the Old Market. These golden discs, and the pride in the physical perfection of Old Amersham that they convey, are an indication that Boris Johnson’s luck might sag there this year. Is the Prime Minister conservative enough for Amersham Old Town? They doubt his dedication to their bloom. These are visual lands: you see it in the costumes, the cars, the homes, and the rage against HS2, currently being hewn into the hill beyond their paradise. They hate HS2 with the fervour of children because they usually have their way in everything, and in that is the possibility of rebellion.

If Amersham Old Town is in denial about it being 2021 — it is largely medieval with fiercely repointed Georgian frontage — so are most of its voters. I wonder if the residents consider the Chiltern Hills to be an extension of their gardens; they are enraged about HS2 because it will benefit the Midlands and the North and leave them and their excellent transport connections with a glut they did not seek.  Benjamin Disraeli similarly courted the working classes from nearby Hughenden Manor, but perhaps the descendants of his voters have forgotten this happy coalition of manor and slum. HS2 is the only teardrop spilling onto their plate, and this, not pandemic, is the story here. Pandemic was unfortunate, but they are vaccinated now, and the shops are open.

There is jeopardy for the Prime Minister, then: when Dame Cheryl Gillan, Conservative MP for Chesham and Amersham, died in April, a by-election was called, scheduled for Thursday. Gillan’s majority was immense, a blue hill in a land of hills: 16,223 in 2019, or 55.4% of the vote. If you listen to constituents the result was barely conscious. As a pub landlord says from behind his tidy bar: “I vote Conservative. If you ask me why I vote Conservative I couldn’t give you an answer.” He makes it sound like an existential question singular to Tory Buckinghamshire: “Why do I vote Conservative? I think the majority of people don’t really look into that much – of why they vote.” He tells me he was born to a working-class family in Wales — his Welsh-based family have “nothing” — lives in a £1 million house in Chesham Bois, drives a new Range Rover and educated his children at private schools. Then two elderly ladies come in for lunch, and we must stop talking, because he is busy spoiling them with a professionalism that looks like rapture. He has been working since 5am — he works hard — and he is almost the most analytical voter I meet, but this election is about flowers and potholes.

The Tory majority is vast, but the Liberal Democrats sense an opportunity to beat the new Conservative candidate, one Peter Fleet, formerly of the Ford motor company. His centre of operations is a flat above an award-winning iron mongery in Amersham; from here he rides out to promise mitigation of the impact of HS2, a national park in the Chiltern Hills and a crack-down on anti-social behaviour (he is against it).

To combat him, there are 500 Liberal Democrat activists in Chesham and Amersham, placing banks of posters near notorious potholes. It is uncanny, and I wonder if they are consulting psychologists. Hit a pothole and you see a Liberal Democrat poster or, more likely, four Liberal Democrat posts. “The roads,” I am told by an upper-middle-class woman, “are shit”. I fantasise their slogan changed to: “Potholes winning here.”

Opposition parties do well in by-elections, and there is rage with the liberalisation of the planning laws, which I think is the equivalent of Total War in Nimby-land.

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How the Left lost Hartlepool

By Tanya Gold

There is a theory that for each brick he removes from the Red Wall, Boris Johnson loses a third of a brick, or maybe more, from the Blue Wall, as businessmen voters fantasise about which lie they would fire him for, and liberal-leaning voters flee London for the Home Counties, taking their Remain politics and rustic fantasies with them. These fantasies are helpful to Liberal Democrats, if irritating: what is the point of living in a village where everyone looks like Philip Green? Where be the cows?

I hear that after a bad poll the previous week, Johnson made a surprise visit to the constituency. The Liberal Democrats were second in 91 seats in 2019 and took Amersham Town Council in May. They wonder if this by-election is the beginning of a recovery; of a Conservative rebellion against itself. Amersham Old Town is quite the place to stick it to the man, his optics — last week he was gambolling in the Cornish surf  and toasting Peter Fleet with a pint — and his national polling average of 44%.

I meet the Liberal Democrat candidate Sarah Green in a coffee shop in Amersham. Amersham is not Amersham Old Town. It does not have a bespoke gentleman’s tailor, or a personal museum. I watch an attempted burglary of a post office, just opposite the Conservative campaign office. The postmaster chases the villain with a baseball bat. No one is injured.

Green is young, open, emphatic. “People feel ignored,” she says, “people feel taken for granted.” I heard that in Hartlepool, from Labour voters; here, I struggle not to laugh, which is slightly unfair because pain is pain. “It’s been true blue for decades – council, local, national. It’s like, ‘it’s always going to be blue so why should they listen to us?’ The idea that if you live in Tory area you get investment is manifestly not true. All the issues feed into that underlying theme of being taken for granted”. No one is exempt from self-pity nowadays; and so, a Liberal Democrat activist tells me, excited former Tories are stopping her to say, “I’m voting for Sarah!” Another says she heard a group of “dyed-in-the-wool Tories” were surprised, on meeting in the pub, to discover they are all Liberal Democrats now, from a combination of, “planning changes, the way you just have to ring Bojo, bung him some money and you’ve won the business”. I wonder if Chesham and Amersham will surprise itself with its audacity tomorrow. It’s a by-election. The stakes are low. Even if they do elect a Liberal Democrat MP, their taxes will not rise. It will be a murder without blood.

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What does Laurence Fox stand for?

By Tanya Gold

Estate agents are too busy to talk — though one shouts over his shoulder that the Prime Minister wore the same tie to Amersham as he wore at the G7, and he has dandruff too, which matters in a village in bloom — but the man in the art gallery says: “There are an awful lot of people moving out [to here]. Every one of the flats here,” he points upwards “has gone on the market, with the exception of one. Every weekend I see people coming into the shop saying, ‘it’s fantastic round here, we want to move, we want a garden, we’ve been living in the city’”.

I meet such women in Chesham, which is a sadder Amersham Old Town; there is a foodbank with a request for sponge pudding and tinned chicken taped in the window. They are an NCT group; they sit by their babies’ prams, drinking large cocktails. They are from London, and vote Liberal Democrat here, though one voted Labour formerly — “I don’t think Labour know who they are [now]”. They are not angry about the Government’s response to pandemic: “I’m not sure how anyone would have handled it,” says one. But they are worried about child poverty, the future of the NHS, and the lack of affordable housing.

There is almost no Labour presence in this constituency, and the voters know it. Labour say they are campaigning, but the evidence is flimsy. (They are speaking to the press via email). Labour took 12.9% of the vote in 2019. I meet a Labour voter smoking on a bench. “They don’t bother round here,” she says, “it’s a shame. It’s [the political dialogue] all about Boris Johnson, and what he’s doing. It makes you laugh. It’s always about Boris”.

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The prostitution of Cornwall

By Tanya Gold

I don’t find the candidate Natasa Pantelic, a councillor in Slough, but I am sent a statement which includes the words: “This is an opportunity for change — a fresh start — for Chesham and Amersham. They [the Liberal Democrats] don’t care about progressive politics; they just care about power.” There is a Chilterns4ProgressiveAlliance group standing in the centre of Chesham “campaigning for opposition party cooperation in Chesham & Amersham, Batley & Spen and the next general election”. They are genial but they do not have the support of the opposition parties themselves, which is a maddening for them and pleasing to Boris Johnson.

Under these gentle currents is the possibility of future anguish. There is a Cassandra here: Brendan Donnelly, a former Conservative MEP who is standing for Rejoin EU. He sits outside a coffee shop in Chesham and tells me that Brexit will hit us like a thunderstorm soon enough; then the tarmac drives of the mighty Chalfonts will tremble. I watch a pro-Rejoin band perform with a toy cat (a “catidate” and member of Cats Against Brexit Mayhem) that stood in an election “and won more than 200 votes”. The vocalist sings: “Boris Johnson he said he swore he’d never leave me /and Boris Johnson said he swore he’d always love me.” Did he?

Donnelly and the ladies with cocktails aside, I meet few people who are prepared to voice anger about anything other than HS2 or potholes, and I am slightly stunned. So: the worst thing that might happen to Boris Johnson this summer is that he loses a by-election over potholes, and to the Liberal Democrats, with their 11 parliamentary seats and national polling average of 7%. Or that he nearly does. That does not sound like a crumbling blue wall. The political map is not that simple or beautiful.

As I prepare to leave Amersham Old Town, I go into a shop and look at a rack of clothes decorated with embroidered flowers. There is a live bee lurking at the hem of the dresses, disorientated by the flowers that are not real, and, I imagine, increasingly bereft and frightened. I wonder if the voters of Amersham Old Town will ever have a similar awakening.

This conviction struck me most forcibly during a pivotal debate on Brexit at the Labour Party’s annual conference in Liverpool in 2018. Before the discussion, I had wandered around the city’s pubs and conference fringe speaking to delegates and visitors. There was an undue chirpiness in the air. Labour was now the largest political party in western Europe, people would remind me. The glorious leader was playing to packed houses everywhere. Ergo, we stood every chance of forming the next government.

Then, during the Brexit debate itself, the conference rallied enthusiastically behind a motion explicitly putting a second EU referendum on the table. I remember gazing around the hall in despair as speaker after speaker pledged support for the motion, each drawing wild cheers and applause from delegates. That the adoption of this policy was almost certain to result in electoral oblivion seemed lost on virtually everyone present.

At that moment, I tweeted that the conference was effectively handing a P45 to every Labour MP in the North and Midlands. I knew then that this self-inflicted wound would take years — possibly a generation — to heal. Images from the debate would that evening be beamed into the homes of loyal Labour voters across the party’s pro-Brexit heartlands, and millions among them would perceive the outcome as the ultimate kick in the teeth. Labour had betrayed its already-diminishing traditional working-class base and would pay a heavy price.

Nearly three years and one general election annihilation later, and the relationship remains in a serious state of disrepair. That point is proved by what we know so far of Thursday’s election results, and what we may reasonably predict will unfold in the coming days. That Labour, in a set of ballots two years into a parliament, appears to have lost so much ground in working-class communities against a Tory Party that has been in power for over a decade — and during that time imposed a programme of economic austerity which inflicted financial adversity on many of the nation’s poorest — speaks to the magnitude of the former’s estrangement from its one-time core vote.

That Labour’s losing Hartlepool — a seat which, since its creation in 1974, it has held at every general election — came in the end as no great surprise, itself speaks volumes. What was striking, though, was the plunge in the party’s share of the vote there by nine percentage points, and the increase in the Tory share by a remarkable 23 points.

At the time of writing, the picture looks bleak for Labour in the local authority elections, too, with the party in retreat in many areas. Heavy damage was sustained in the Midlands and North-East, and the party has lost control of at least four councils — including Harlow in Essex, a 1960s new town often described as the home of White Van Man.

The mistake — and some among Labour’s ranks are already making it — would be to lay the blame solely at the door of Sir Keir Starmer. The devastating results are attributable to the leader’s attempts to shift the party to the “centre” ground, argues the radical Left, adducing, among other things, the fact that Labour held Hartlepool under Jeremy Corbyn in 2019 (though ignoring the inconvenient truth that it did so only as a consequence of thousands of would-be Tory votes being redirected to the Brexit Party).

For their part, the Starmerites blame the Corbyn legacy, as though the rot set in only with the latter’s elevation as leader in 2015.

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Labour could lose Hartlepool

By Paul Embery

Both camps are profoundly wrong. The schism between the party and the working class began to materialise as long as three decades ago. The historical coalition in which Hartlepool had for generations rubbed along contentedly with Hampstead — blue collar and white collar united in the struggle for social and economic justice — started to fall apart as Labour began to be dominated by the latter, transforming itself into a party of the managerial and professional classes, graduates and urban liberals. Not only was the party abandoning those in provincial and post-industrial Britain, it started to privately — and sometimes publicly — scorn them.

The inevitable result was the steady flow of working-class votes away from Labour. Some were swept up by the likes of Ukip and even the BNP; millions more from that point simply went uncast.

For a long time, disillusioned working-class voters in the Labour heartlands were reluctant to throw in their lot with the Tories, conscious of the stigma that often came with voting for the traditional enemy. It was only in 2019 that these voters, still brimming with anger over attempts to reverse the referendum result, decided in huge numbers to back a Conservative Party that had pledged to “Get Brexit Done”. The taboo had been broken. Having voted Tory once, these voters would — as we have seen — have no hesitation in doing the same again.

All of this means that Labour faces the prospect of being out of power for another decade or more — perhaps forever. That’s why the battle that currently rages for control of the party, between its liberal and radical wings, is the proverbial two bald men fighting over a comb. If either side wins, it will find that the instrument over which it had struggled for possession turns out to be of little practical use — at least as far as forming a government is concerned.

That is because Labour’s problems are structural, cultural and elemental. They run far deeper than questions of party management and whether or not free broadband is a vote winner. If the objective is to win back the Red Wall, then neither the liberal nor radical Left has the correct prescription.

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The Brexiteer who could have saved Labour

By Paul Embery

In fact, the war between the two camps is, in many respects, a phoney one. There is far more that unites them than either would care to admit — or even seem to comprehend. Both are imbued with the same bourgeois, metropolitan, globalist worldview. Both aim their pitch at the student, the social activist, the fellow middle-class progressive, at Twitter. Both obsess about identity politics and “diversity”. Both hitch their wagon to every minority crusade and then afford to it an undue level of prominence. Both are largely ignorant — and often contemptuous — of the lives and priorities of those in small-town Britain, of their communitarian impulse, traditional values, desire for belonging and sense of national pride.

For these reasons, changing the face at the top would be pointless. In fact, given that Sir Keir has personally shown signs of understanding what needs to be done to win back the Red Wall — focusing much of his language since ascending to the leadership on the themes of family, community and nation — his defenestration would, if anything, prove counter-productive. What Labour needs is a root and branch ideological overhaul, not regicide. As matters currently lie, any leader attempting to take the party in the right direction would find himself or herself shackled by a membership and activist base — as well as the greater part of a parliamentary cohort — which simply has no intention of going there.

In the more fashionable cities and the university towns, Labour continues to thrive. Witness, for example, Sadiq Khan’s predicted comfortable victory in London. And therein lies the party’s dilemma. Any organisation seeking to hold together a coalition of interest groups must be wary about indulging one part of it to such a degree that its other elements begin to feel neglected. The greater the success of Labour in the citadels of cosmopolitan liberalism, the more likely it is that the old industrial heartlands will become fretful. That is precisely what has happened.

In the way that the working-class component of Labour’s coalition was expected to — and did — make concessions in the 1990s to enable the party to broaden its appeal among the upwardly mobile middle classes, so the obligation falls today on the latter to compromise so that the party stands at least a chance of recovering the support of the former. That doesn’t necessarily mean abandoning any commitment to a radical (but nonetheless credible) economic programme: there are deep wells of support in working-class communities for a more egalitarian economy, a higher minimum wage, investment in public services, reductions in income and wealth inequality, and so on. But it does mean understanding the small-“c” conservatism and proclivity for social solidarity and cultural attachment that exists across large parts of provincial and post-industrial Britain.

It also means being prepared to put front and centre the doorstep issues — law and order, immigration, national security — which Labour activists are usually uncomfortable discussing. If that means that topics such as LGBT rights, climate change, gender identity, Palestine and the next woke cause that comes along must take more of a back seat, so be it. The party must begin to look and sound again like those who have abandoned it and reflect their priorities. Until that happens, it will be relegated to the status of a middle-class pressure group.

I have heard some inside Labour’s ranks argue that the old blue-collar vote has gone for good, and the party must now throw everything at consolidating and widening its new young, liberal, metropolitan, university-educated, pro-EU base. But so far as such a strategy would be electorally viable — and that is doubtful — what would be the point of it? If Labour could not bring itself to speak for its old working-class base living in some of the country’s most disadvantaged communities, it would have betrayed its very reason for existing. The objective — and it may never be realised — must be to win back the hearts and minds of those whose votes it must recover if it is to win power and fulfil its historical mission once more — not to write those voters off as a lost cause.

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Is Labour dead?

By Ian Birrell

While polls are rarely useful as tools for predicting the outcome of general elections three years into the future, these latest results will prove valuable for revealing just how bad things have become for Labour. The party’s banishment from large swathes of its former strongholds, and the dogged resistance of voters in those places to all attempts at reconciliation, cannot be attributed to the standard ups and downs of electoral fortune or a desire on the part of those voters to deliver a well-deserved warning shot across Labour’s bows before returning to its fold in due course.

This is much more. The entire axis of British politics has moved. Even in 1983, when under Michael Foot it suffered a crushing election defeat at the hands of Margaret Thatcher, Labour managed to retain much of its working-class base. What we are witnessing today, by contrast, is a paradigm shift. Thursday’s elections were the latest evidence of it. The rules have been rewritten, the landscape has changed utterly. For Labour, this may yet prove terminal — only most of the party still doesn’t realise it.

Hartlepool, Labour since 1964, is one of the most significant by-elections for years. If Labour loses, the pressure on an already wobbly Sir Keir Starmer will be immense. It will give his Left-wing critics ammunition and his Right-wing critics yet more evidence that the broader realignment of British politics is only just getting started.

So, it’s no wonder that a new idea about Labour’s future has been embraced so keenly. Labour, it is argued, should turn to the ‘Blue Wall’; it is not a wall per se, more a sprinkling of liberalising, suburban hotspots across the country which the Conservatives have held for a while, and which are trending towards Labour.

In his insightful blog, political analyst Steve Akehurst identifies 41 seats which have been held by the Conservatives since at least 2010, where Labour or the Liberal Democrats have overperformed their national swing in 2017 and 2019 and where the Conservative majority is below 10,000. Seats causing particular excitement include those of big-name Tories like Steve Baker in Wycombe, Iain Duncan Smith in Chingford and Wood Green, and Graham Brady in Altrincham – and even Uxbridge, Boris Johnson’s seat.

“They largely lean Remain”, writes Akehurst, “and so have larger numbers of the demographics that have turned against the Tories since 2016: under 40s, university educated, more socially liberal. More likely to prioritise issues like climate or housing.”

On a good day, assuming a swing of between 3.75 and 5.75 points, and with Labour over-performing in these “Blue Wall” areas, Akehurst estimates that Labour could win anywhere between 15 and 26 of these seats. Assuming the Conservatives lost some other marginal seats, the collapse of the Blue Wall could demolish Boris Johnson’s majority, put Labour back in power and give journalists one hell of a revenge story.

It is an appealing thesis, not least for political analysts who desperately want it to happen. It is no secret that many of the people who write about politics also tend to be graduates who lean to the Left and want the pendulum to swing back in their direction. Many spent 2019 urging Labour to swing behind a second referendum, while downplaying the disastrous impact this would have in its heartlands and ignoring the fact that Johnson could easily offset losses to liberals by invading the Red Wall, where workers had been drifting away from Labour for 20 years.

Which is exactly what happened. Of the 57 seats the Conservatives gained in 2019, all but three came directly from Labour — and of those 54 seats, 50 voted Leave. While the Conservative vote increased by 1.2 points nationally, it surged by 10.2 points in the Red Wall. The Tories not only massively overperformed in these seats, they reshaped their party around a Leave vote that is more geographically efficient than the liberal vote: spread out enough to have more electoral impact.

And this is why I do not find the Blue Wall thesis convincing. The numbers. It is simply not big enough to bring down Boris Johnson’s majority. Even if Labour were to overperform here, it still needs to find significant gains elsewhere. This is what happens when you double down on liberals in a first-past-the-post system. While your analysts might tell you that you are putting a bet on the future, liberals are often too strongly concentrated in the big cities and university towns to deliver the broad support that you need for a stomping majority in an electoral system like Britain’s. Liberals are increasingly flocking to the big cities and university towns, where Labour is already dominant. This is why Sadiq Khan does not need to worry about his re-election next month.

The Blue Wall strategy also relies on Labour doing a far better job of unifying the liberal factions, which it failed to do in 2019, when only half of Remainers voted Labour and one in eight voted Green or Liberal Democrat. Even today, the latter still hold 12% of the vote while disillusionment with Keir Starmer’s leadership appears to be strengthening rather than weakening, especially among the young graduates who loved Jeremy Corbyn and whose strong turnout is a prerequisite to making any Blue Wall strategy effective. With the Brexit Party resting in peace, the risk of internecine rivalry is greater on the Left than the Right.

More fundamentally, the Blue Wall thesis ignores the fact that the Red Wall has only been partially dismantled. There are still many, many more seats that could easily fall to the Conservatives, so long as Boris Johnson stays committed to the deeper transformation of British politics that is underway — a transformation that is seeing his party rally a cross-class coalition of blue-collar and affluent cultural conservatives.

Here is just one statistic to keep in mind. Of the 44 most marginal Labour seats today, 39 are outside of London and the South. I call this the “Red Wall 2.0”. These are seats that have small majorities of 4,000 votes or less, are filled with pro-Brexit, cultural conservative workers who lean Left on the economy and Right on culture, and which have been trending Conservative.

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Why Keir Starmer is doomed

By Matthew Goodwin

More than a dozen are scattered across the North West and North East while another 13 are in the once reliable People’s Republic of South Yorkshire. These are places that are filled with hard-working, patriotic Brits who want the Government to reform an economy rigged against them while preserving a culture they see as being under threat from increasingly illiberal “woke” activists.

One of those seats, Wentworth and Dearne, is currently represented by Labour MP John Healey, who grasps the fact that across a large swathe of the Midlands, Yorkshire and North the collapse of Labour’s Red Wall was only just starting in 2019. As recently as 2017, Healey’s majority was 15,000 votes. Today, it is 2,165.

It is just a small swing from joining neighbouring Don Valley, which was held by Labour from 1922 until 2019, in the Conservative camp. This is perhaps why Healey has just released a collection of essays by Labour MPs who, like him, have seen their once solid majorities crumble from over 10,000 votes to less than 4,000.

They represent the “new Labour marginals” — the seats that New Labour types once said had nowhere else to go but which ever since then have been trending Conservative. Healey points to people “who feel Labour left them before they left Labour”.

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Labour could lose Hartlepool

By Paul Embery

“Those who feel let down by Labour describe at best an unwillingness to listen, with no respect for their experience, and at worst a rejection of their views as ignorant or backward”, he goes on.

These areas exhibit all of the features that now define the new Conservative Party electorate; blue-collar, pro-Brexit, culturally conservative and hacked off. They are the people who Toby Perkins, Labour MP for Chesterfield, describes as being denied thousands of new factory jobs by Sports Direct which instead gave them to migrants from Eastern Europe, “while voters felt progressive opinion refused even to consider the problem, much less propose solutions”.

Labour MPs who represent newly marginal seats include Yvette Cooper, whose majority crashed from over 15,000 votes in 2015 to just 1,276 today, Dan Jarvis, whose majority has fallen from over 15,000 votes to just 3,571 and Jonathan Reynolds whose majority has been cut in half, falling to just 2,946 votes. Labour strongholds have become redoubts.

At the core of this is who Healey calls the “real middle”, which is “not the middle-class that became New Labour’s fixation”. The real middle, he argues, are the “ten million aspirational workers who live on ordinary incomes around the average of £24,908. They often live in one of the 14 English towns that cover 16 constituencies like Stevenage, Crawley and Harlow. In 1997, New Labour won all but one of them. By 2015, they represented none of them.”

If we take an even looser definition of “marginal” and look, like Akehurst, at seats with (Labour) majorities of less than 10,000 votes then there are 105 seats where the Brexit Party or Conservative Party are second, 82 of which lie outside of London and southeastern England. They include Doncaster Central, Doncaster North, Halifax, Kingston-upon Hull West and Hessle, Rotherham, Barnsley East, Batley and Spen and Barnsley Central. And they include Hartlepool, which is why the forthcoming by-election on May 6 is so important.

If the Conservatives take Hartlepool or come close to doing so, then the implication is not just that Johnson will defend his existing Red Wall at the next election but could easily add another 40 or so seats to it. That would tilt British politics into a much deeper realignment that sees the Tories sink even longer roots into northern, working-class heartlands and Labour increasingly retreat to liberal enclaves.

This is ultimately why the reshaping of British politics is so traumatic for Labour, especially in England. In Healey’s essays you can detect a real fear among some in Labour that the party could soon be breathing its last breath across a large swathe of its oldest and most cherished territory. We could well be on the cusp of an even greater shock. And this is why I for one shall not be holding my breath when it comes to tales about the imminent revenge of the Blue Wall.

Tony Soprano was a figure uncomfortable with the modern world. He used his shrink as a means to alleviate his guilt about his selfish and violent behaviour, but he was also sceptical of the radical ideas behind psychiatry. Conceived during a decade when public emotional behaviour changed a great deal, the Sopranos featured Tony frequently referring to his preference for the reticent “strong silent type” symbolised by Golden Age movie star Gary Cooper.

In between racketeering, extortion and the occasional murder, Tony longs for a simpler moral universe where social norms are clear-cut; a world which would make this anxious middle-aged man feel more at peace, less edgy. That moral hypocrisy, although in Tony’s case extreme, is characteristic of what Matthew Walther recently termed “barstool conservatism”.

Writing in The Week on life after Trump, Walther wrote:

“What Trump recognised was that there are millions of Americans who do not oppose or even care about abortion or same-sex marriage, much less stem-cell research or any of the other causes that had animated traditional social conservatives. Instead he correctly intuited that the new culture war would be fought over very different (and more nebulous) issues: vague concerns about political correctness and ‘SJWs,’ opposition to the popularisation of so-called critical race theory, sentimentality about the American flag and the military.”

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The fantasy of English freedom

By Ed West

And while these barstool conservatives “accept pornography, homosexuality, drug use, legalised gambling”, they dislike attacks on their country, the rapid cultural change brought about by immigration and an elite, urban caste who clearly despise them.

This appears to be true of Britain, too. The Tories were able to make huge gains in the last election because, when it came to values, the party aligned more closely with a lot of Labour voters. But those voters aren’t “social conservatives”. Like their Trump-voting counterparts, the new Tory voters are more likely to have kids outside of marriage than the liberal elite in California or London, who tend to “talk the 60s but walk the 50s”. They don’t oppose abortion or sex education, don’t have any particular issue with homosexuality, and they’ll probably come around on the transgender debate.

The real social conservatives are not generally found in former industrial towns that appear on TV vox pops; they tend to be middle or even upper-middle class, well-educated, married and religious, and in Britain are more common in shires and in parts of west and south London, at heavily upper-middle-class Catholic parishes and the high-performing schools attached to them. These are the people who talk the 50s and walk the 50s, too.

There is a big difference between cultural and social conservatism. The former could be said to be the default in almost all human cultures. The latter is learned and cultivated, and today is a counter-cultural movement popular with a relatively small number of well-educated people.

Cultural conservatism, however, is natural to human society. Researchers at Oxford University, studying 60 different cultures, found that they all share seven basic cultural codes, which involve bravery, helping your family, helping your group, returning favours, deferring to superiors, dividing resources fairly and respecting others’ property.

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Why nationalism matters

By Ed West

These are the moral norms that all cultures naturally observe, but have been slightly adapted in what Joseph Henrich first called “WEIRD” cultures. Western Educated Industrialised Rich Democratic cultures have values suited towards very large-scale societies, where people are unusual in sharing resources with non-family members. There is far less emphasis on the group and the family as a result.

In almost all hunter-gatherer societies, 300 is about the maximum number of individuals that can live together before people start ripping each other’s heads off (and that is much better than our closest relative, the chimpanzee). Yet humans were able to scale up and enjoy the benefits of modernity with one simple trick — religion. Henrich cites the anthropologist Donald Tuzin, who investigated an unusual New Guinea tribe, the Arapesh, unusually living in a group of up to 2,500 without bloodshed; Tuzin found that they had developed beliefs about gods that allowed them, unlike their rivals, to nurture solidarity.

Religion allows humans to co-exist in much larger groups, but as Heinrich’s book argues, one particular religion was able to accelerate this on an unprecedented scale — Roman Catholicism. By banning marriage between cousins in particular, the medieval Church crushed the strength of clans and created a society in which people were willing to cooperate and share with strangers. WEIRD societies.

Even today, people from countries in which cousin marriage was banned the longest still consistently donate more blood, give more to charity and are less likely to cheat in exams or avoid paying parking fines — and also have the most successful democracies. Those parts of western Europe in which the Catholic Church struggled to ban cousin marriage also, and not by coincidence, produced Don Corleone and Tony Soprano.

One result of this high-trust form of society was, of course, liberalism, an entirely novel worldview that relies on people thinking way beyond their clan, to far more abstract levels of society — even to humanity in the general. Yet liberalism is still unnatural, after centuries, and most people are “default conservatives” — they believe that family should come before strangers, and countrymen before foreigners. They feel stung if their flag is burned or their ancestors mocked. However anti-social their own instincts, they, like Tony Soprano, feel an obligation to defend their country from external threats. Conservatism is our default setting, designed for a world that is dangerous and in which we need to be courageous, defend our family and group, defer to superiors and share acquisitions fairly. Liberalism, with its focus on individual rights, is a mutation.

Yet “social conservatism”, as we imagine it in the West, is not the same thing; like liberalism, it is an interpretation of Christianity, although a more disciplined (and perhaps less immediately enjoyable) one. Christianity is the most unnatural of self-disciplines; loving your enemies and laying down your life for non-kin go against all our instincts and Tony Soprano would never be foolish enough to do so. Sexual restraint, especially among powerful men, requires a role model as persuasive and powerful as St Paul, one who can overcome their Roman urge to dominate with guilt.

Sure, historically mafias paid lip-service to Catholicism because that was the cultural norm — the Church was strong and they craved respectability. But modern mafias don’t; the Camorra of Naples have in recent years had a lesbian and even a transgender boss, which is very brave and progressive of them.

Western social conservatism, like liberalism, is weird, and WEIRD. It takes discipline and education, and social conservatives tend to be highly conscientious and well-educated, partly because Christianity is complicated and requires great self-control. The most “consistently conservative” Americans, for example, are found not in trailer parks drooling over Fox & Friends, as their opponents might believe, but in universities.

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In defence of working-class conservatism

By Peter Franklin

As both Left and Right have proved throughout history, education and cultivation can produce the worst type of intolerance. If you look at European history, the most religiously intolerant time was not the Dark Ages, or early medieval period (c.500-1000). Surviving chronicles of that mostly illiterate era recall people talking and laughing throughout Mass, fornicating priests, and a widespread belief in unorthodox, often pagan ideas. You wouldn’t get burnt for heresy in the Dark Ages, contrary to the stereotype, but you might well do in the Late Middle Ages, the Renaissance era, when literacy had become widespread. Some of the worst torturers and sadists of the time could discourse on the Latin poets while turning the screw on a torture rack.

But the society they lived in was far safer and far more restrained; there were far fewer births outside marriage, and therefore lower infant mortality; men had become less inclined to have mistresses; violence, in particular the impulsive violence that plagued earlier medieval history, was in steep decline. That sort of social conservatism has to be learned; it is against our instincts.

Modern conservatism is a sort of alliance between these two ways of thinking, but it is an uneasy one, as Trump showed. His success was to appeal to default instincts in a society where powerful people openly provoke many of those seven basic human moral values. And it is a powerful selling point; far more sellable than the social conservatism that once dominated the American Right, but which depended on a shrinking churchgoing population.

Yet, unfashionable as social conservatism may be, there is a lot of evidence showing that churchgoers are less prejudiced than other conservative voters. They are more trusting, are more likely to volunteer and more satisfied with their neighbourhood and with family relationships. And since 1992 the share of Americans with no religion has quadrupled — and trebled even among conservatives.

There is a danger, therefore, that as social conservatism fades, the Right becomes a repository of the depressed, the disappointed and those in need of a cause and a leader; people who, to some extent like Tony Soprano, are anxious and confused by today’s moral confusion but lacking a firm moral code of their own. Social conservatism may appear off-putting but it offers a real vision, while the barstool variety, appealing to basic emotional brain responses, is little more than a political version of the social media clickbait, porn, junk food and opioids that pervade our time and overloads our minds.

I don’t regret the moshing, which was fun, though I’m mildly embarrassed about the tits. Now a parent myself, I do feel bad for the friend’s dad who drove us all to Wembley and whose gig I spoiled by disappearing. It all came rushing back while being made to watch the rock-themed 2020 kids’ film Trolls: World Tour with my own little girl.

The villain is one Barb, Queen of the Rock Trolls, whose dastardly plan is to unite all the troll nations forcibly under the dominion of rock music. Barb’s obnoxious-yet-fragile character reminds me a little of my own adolescent metal-fan days, screaming in ecstasy at the pint-sized Axl Rose and his leave-nothing-to-the-imagination white shorts. But the (admittedly tongue-in-cheek) depiction of heavy metal as the musical villain in Trolls: World Tour, gets the metal aesthetic both absolutely right — and also absolutely wrong. In depicting loud guitar music as in search of world dominion the film identifies, accurately, the way metal plugs into a High Romantic era of imperial grandeur. But it also misrepresents the cachet that High Romantic aesthetic has (or rather doesn’t have) in the modern world.

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London has never been civil

By Mary Harrington

High Romanticism was baked into heavy metal from the start. Consider the irresistible temptation metal bands feel to play alongside that most High Romantic band format of all: a symphony orchestra. In 1969 the proto-metal band Deep Purple wrote, rehearsed and performed Concerto for Group and Orchestra, alongside the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, in a gala concert at the Royal Albert Hall. The score was lost in 1970, but that didn’t stop noise-loving musicologists from recreating it, and a re-run was staged at the Albert Hall in 1999.

The same year, American thrash band Metallica performed their own symphonic rock happening with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, the live album S&M (Symphony & Metallica). Listening to S&M, the only real surprise is that “Master of Puppets” was ever played without a full orchestral backing; but the affinity between metal and symphonic music goes far deeper. You only have to listen to the last five minutes of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 (composed 1824) to see what I mean: the whole mood is metal.

I’m sure there’s a proper music theory term for what I’m describing, but as my music theory education ended around Grade 5 I’m borrowing the term ‘metal’ to describe an aesthetic that’s both intensely serious and determined to throw the whole sensory kitchen sink at you. (Deep Purple, incidentally, were famously committed to throwing the sensory kitchen sink at their audience, which resulted in their 1972 accession to the Guinness Book of Records as the ‘World’s Loudest Band’.)

In symbolic terms, the Albert Hall — constructed 1871, at the zenith of Britain’s imperial era — was the perfect venue for Deep Purple’s foray into symphonic kitchen-sinkiness. A crowdfunded monument to Victorian engineering, public-spiritedness and looted imperial wealth, the Albert Hall’s inception fused elite seriousness with nationalism and popular culture in quintessentially 19^th century high style.

A century later, though, the empire that helped bankroll the Albert Hall’s construction was dissolved, and the steel industry that forged its columns on the way to extinction in Britain. And yet heavy metal was forged at this fag-end of Britain’s industrial/imperial arc, amid the warehouses of Birmingham, in part thanks to an industrial accident. Aged 17, guitarist Tony Iommi lost two fingertips in a sheet metal factory, and changed his guitar style to accommodate the injury — in the process giving birth to the sound that would come to define Black Sabbath (formed 1968).

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How Birmingham gave birth to heavy metal

By Paul Lay

In one sense, then, the birth of heavy metal music is both a product of Great Britain in its industrial pomp — as well as being a semi-ironic, semi-nostalgic, working-class comment on that bygone era. In metal, class and culture fuse in complicated ways, but perhaps Bruce Dickinson (singer in perhaps the most Union-Jack-festooned metal band of all, Iron Maiden) was onto something when he observed in a BBC Hard Talk interview in 2012 that working-class people are culturally conservative. For along with its Hammer Horror humour and darkness, metal conveys a straight dose of imperial-era seriousness. And among the heavily ironic and post-nationalistic contemporary elite, this makes the genre more than a little embarrassing.

It’s not just the patriotism that offends today’s rationalistic status culture. Metal and symphonic music are both also jacked directly into the European mythological mainframe, where the old gods still lurk. Nowhere is this so visible as in the pivotal role played in the High Romantic symphonic canon by the most myth-laden, po-faced and profoundly metal composers of all time: Richard Wagner. For his crimes, Wagner is more than a touch ‘problematic’ in modern terms. He’s also so metal there’s even a fan Twitter and blog dedicated to counting the ways Wagner is metal.

Wagner drew his inspiration from Europe’s rich tradition of pagan myth, paving the way for countless metal bands to follow suit, borrowing liberally from Germanic and Norse myth alike to equal parts stirring and comical effect. While it’s hard to tell how seriously to take Swedish band Brothers of Metal (the official video for Prophecy of Ragnarök is pure LARP in the original nerds-in-costume sense), perhaps seriousness is beside the point.

Metal’s High Romanticism is not just a musical crossover, but a poetic one too: Iron Maiden made a surprisingly catchy 13-minute musical version of Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Nor is it just an English thing: the German metal band Rammstein is soaked in Goethe allusions and even straight reworkings, for example this rock version of Erlkönig.

The seam of heavy metal dedication to heroism, mythology and sensory overload winds through Wagner’s Ring via another source of ring-themed mythology and metal inspiration, Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. This isn’t just a question of thematic influence: in 2013 Christopher Lee, who played Saruman the White in the 2001-2003 movie trilogy, also released the deeply strange but also strangely marvellous symphonic rock concept album Charlemagne: By The Sword And The Cross at the age of 87.

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By Ian Birrell

So the taproots of metal run all the way through the good and bad of Europe’s imperial and industrial era, to that era’s poetry and deep mythological substrate. In this sense, metal is profoundly conservative, in a far richer way than today’s actually-rather-Whiggish Conservative Party. (The late Roger Scruton, incidentally, liked a bit of Metallica.)

Metal is also conservative in the sense of taking musical skill seriously. The best metal guitarists are astonishingly virtuosic, and often possess a grasp of music theory that would shame a concert pianist — or, as in this video of Tina S Cover absolutely shredding a metal arrangement of the presto agitato from Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, facilitate pretty exceptional performances of a concert pianist’s repertoire. (For a classical/metal solo crossover in the opposite direction, here’s Facundo Lopèz of GEODA playing death metal on a flamenco guitar.)

So why does it all seem a bit, well, camp? 52 years after Black Sabbath was formed, I found myself watching the band’s legendarily wild frontman Ozzy Osbourne voicing the raddled father of Barb, Queen of the Trolls, in Trolls World Tour. You could read this as a sad end to a once-powerful genre, but I prefer to think it attests (like Christopher Lee, Brothers of Metal, or This Is Spinal Tap) to metal’s ability to hover always at the edge of self-mockery, without ever becoming entirely silly.

Metal may look from one angle like sonic overload and half-camp sincerity with a side order of ridiculous costumes. But seen from another angle, it’s the last resting-place of a heroic style that once held cultural pride of place in symphonic music, and was widely popular from the elites downward.

Modern tastemakers have no patience for such elevated sentiment. When they’re not being skewered by The Kids as ‘Britpoppers’, our rulers decry greatness as patriarchal delusion, national identity as a vector for colonial depredations, mythology as a delivery mechanism for fascist sympathies and all sources of shared cultural meaning as dangerously exclusionary threats to egalitarian individualism. The Britpoppers’ monument was not a new Albert Hall but a big tent full of tat: the Millennium Dome. Under such leadership, small wonder heavy metal has to smuggle its Wagnerian aesthetic beneath a studded-leather cloak of high camp.

And still, despite being five decades old, with many of its pioneers either dead, in recovery or voicing animated trolls, metal still likes to think of itself as countercultural. In the ever more intolerantly progressive and anti-intellectual 21^st century, perhaps it still is. For against that backdrop, perhaps the stealth-reactionary aesthetic of heavy metal is still, well, just a little bit metal.

The demolition of Wrexham Police station, a distinctive and assertive 10-storey concrete tower dating from the mid-Seventies took place at 08:30am on Sunday 1 November. Online footage shows the building tumbling over as if swatted by a giant hand. The event will feature in next year’s season of Scrap Kings, a TV show in which “the nation’s kings and queens of destruction . . . bang, blow, smash and crunch their way around the UK.”

Let’s hope that together with local politicians everyone in the Welsh market town is happy when, after the crunching rubble is cleared, a new Lidl supermarket, a drive-through coffee shop and 151 car parking spaces emerge from the ashes.

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It's the end of the line for Britain's industrial heritage

By Jonathan Glancey

One Westminster politician in particular may have relished the banging, smashing news from Wrexham. In October, Robert Jenrick, Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, said that the Government’s new planning reforms will create a “big opportunity to demolish some of the mistakes of the recent past . . . empty derelict buildings in town and city centres that were put, often poorly constructed, not within the character of those places, particularly in market towns in the Sixties and Seventies.”

Although unlisted, the Wrexham Police headquarters was an interesting building. Designed by a team led by the Denbighshire County Architect Eric Langford Lewis and opened in 1975, it fitted into a canon of British civic buildings of its era labelled “Brutalist”, its offices spreading up and out from a central concrete pillar — the tower’s service core — to reach a height of 140ft. This was the tallest new building in Wrexham since the completion of the tower of St Giles, the town’s glorious Tudor parish church 500 years earlier. The police headquarters ought to have been fashionable by 2020, as such Seventies architecture can be, and converted, perhaps, into a hotel or workspaces and laboratories for hi-tech start-ups or whatever the collective local imagination might have in mind for Wrexham’s future.

A local petition hoped to protect the nine-acre building site from becoming the home of just another supermarket — Wrexham is brimful with them — but the prevailing official view was evidently Jenrickian. Will, though, the new Lidl supermarket be a better and more beautiful building than the smashed Seventies police headquarters?

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The hideous spread of 'spreadsheet architecture'

By Peter Franklin

Aside from an unease about the lack of imagination shown in Wrexham, my wider concern here is with politicians and cultural commentators who find the architecture of the generation or two before them hard to understand, much less to like, and thus to protect and renovate for the future. Much the same is true, of course, of music, fashion, art and design.

There is though an irredeemable arrogance at play when it comes to the fate of buildings when a new generation takes against previous architectural styles it feels it has the cultural competence and a kind of divine right to dismiss and destroy. In 1961, Harold Macmillan, Conservative prime minister and arch moderniser, ensured the demolition of the Euston Arch. This monumental Greek Revival propylaeon, or triumphal gateway, designed in a severe Doric style by Philip Hardwick, fronted what had been the London terminus of Britain’s first long distance passenger railway, the London and Birmingham. Opened in 1837, this was the 19^th century equivalent of a Roman road, the scale of its engineering epic, its architecture noble.

When Jim Richards, editor of the Architectural Review, went to 10 Downing Street with fellow ‘Save the Euston Arch’ campaigners, “Macmillan listened, or I suppose he listened as he sat without moving and with his eyes apparently closed. He asked no questions; in fact he said nothing except that he would consider the matter.” With official apathy over the matter on the parts of the government, the London County Council and the British Transport Commission, Macmillan let the wrecking balls get to work.

What, though, could have been going through the Prime Minister’s mind? This, after all, was the same Harold Macmillan, who as a wounded young captain on the Somme waiting in a foxhole for rescue, read Aeschylus in Greek for comfort. Why the tragic gap between Aeschylus and the Greek Revival Euston Arch? Because, I think, Macmillan and those of his generation, especially following the destruction caused by two world wars, wanted to escape at least part of their Edwardian and, at root, Victorian hinterland.

It was Macmillan’s Conservative government that championed motorways, high-rise mass housing and tall commercial buildings on the London skyline alongside the destruction of unfashionable 19^th century architecture.

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St Pancras station and that great Victorian dragon of a building, the Midland Grand Hotel that fronts it, only just escaped demolition after determined battles by conservationists resolute after their failure to protect the Euston Arch. However, even John Summerson, the distinguished architectural historian, refused to support St Pancras. Why? Because, I think, St Pancras was a reminder of what, in spirit, had been a coal-fired Victorian childhood. The old order needed to change yielding place to the crisp, rational, white and new.

While John Summerson was making his mark, at the same time as John Betjeman who helped lead the fight for the Euston Arch and St Pancras, Harold Clunn wrote The Face of London (1932) in which the author praised the ambitious new commercial architecture of the capital. As for Nicholas Hawksmoor’s early 18^th century Baroque church of St Mary Woolnoth this was little short of a modern scandal. How could such a building out of keeping with the style and scale of modern streets be allowed to occupy a City of London site worth a million pounds and ripe for redevelopment?

If, as Robert Jenrick argues, new buildings will have to comply with design codes “so that local people this time around can decide what they want these buildings to look like which are so central to their lives”, there will be no contemporary equivalent of daring Hawksmoor churches, much less soaring Gothic cathedrals nor, of course, police station’s like Wrexham’s.

Sometimes, just sometimes, there are balanced outcomes. The 1960s Preston Bus Station — cinematic, sculptural, heroic — designed by Keith Ingham and Charles Wilson of the Building Design Partnership, survived prolonged attempts to have it demolished to make way for more shopping. Between 2016 and 2018 it was renovated by John Puttick Associates. Against Wrexham’s and Jenrick’s grain, local people truly like this Sixties adventure in concrete.

I wonder what if Wrexham had followed Preston’s path, realising that architectural fashions change but tend to return to favour. In the meantime, we should think much harder than politicians seem to have been able or willing to do in recent decades and not so much to demolish what we don’t like at one particular moment, but to build more intelligently and caringly than we tend to do in the first place.

Like much in contemporary liberalism, this response combines high-minded hysteria with ignorance of history. The Human Rights Act became law in 1998 and came into force in 2000. Was the UK a tyranny until then? Power was significantly more accountable. Judgements involving basic political values were not the property of a judicial elite, but made by legislators who could be removed in democratic elections. Attacked by liberals and some Conservatives as a species of “elective dictatorship”, this was in fact a system that secured self-government. There was no Supreme Court standing above government that could nullify its decisions. Political choices among conflicting goals and values were made openly in parliament.

Only 20 years ago, the British judiciary lacked the capacity, and probably the will, to become seriously involved in politics. Judicial independence was never in doubt. At the same time — and not unrelatedly — the judiciary did not assert the authority to overturn acts of government. It would have been unthinkable for it to pronounce, as the Supreme Court did unanimously in Miller 2, that a decision on proroguing parliament would have “an extreme effect on the fundamentals of our democracy”.

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Clearly, this is political language — and of a crude, silly, over-heated kind. Equally clearly, that is not how the judges see it. In their minds, their views on political questions are so self-evidently correct that they are not political views at all. For them, it seems, the fact that politics remains a sphere of irresolvable disagreement shows that collective decisions about basic freedoms are best decided by an elite that is not politically accountable. It is no accident that the dominant strand in liberal thinking over the past generation has been a species of anti-political legalism.

A compelling case can be made for returning to the pre-1998 regime. Whether the Supreme Court is allowed to continue in its present form is not the most important issue. Disestablishing the Court, and returning it to a more limited role as a Lords committee of final appeals, could have a useful symbolic role in curbing judicial overreach. But whether a body with the title of Supreme Court continues to exist is not the real issue. Nor is the central question of how judges are chosen. An American-style system of political nomination should be firmly rejected. The proper remedy for the politicisation of the judiciary cannot be to make the judiciary yet more political. Instead, judges should be deprived of the powers that enable them to make political decisions.

The Conservative manifesto suggests derogations from the HRA where it hobbles government in its most essential tasks. Human rights laws have obstructed the deportation of terrorists and other criminals and limited the terms under which they are sentenced and released, exposed the armed forces to vexatious historic law-suits and dictated the conditions in which prisoners are held in British gaols. Amending the Act to prevent these abuses would be an advance, but would not remove the power of judges to impose unjustified limits on the authority of government. The single most direct route to this end would be by repealing the Human Rights Act, and withdrawing from the European Convention on Human Rights.

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It will be pointed out that the ECHR, which the HRA incorporated into UK law, was framed largely by British civil servants. But in the nearly 70 years that have followed since it came into force, the scope of the Convention has expanded greatly, as European judges have interpreted its provisions ever more broadly (Judicial over-reach extends beyond the inflation of rights; the ruling by the Court of Appeal that a third Heathrow runway would be unlawful shows courts acting as arbiters of public policy).

A British Bill of Rights has been proposed as an alternative, but would not necessarily reduce judicial over-reach. Drawing up such a bill would be a protracted process, and with much of the legal profession in thrall to theories that enhance their own standing and scope of operations, the resulting rights would probably be little different from those in force at present. The rule of law would still mean rule by lawyers. If the HRA were repealed, and the UK no longer signed up to the ECHR, the situation would alter fundamentally. Britain would become like Australia, a modern democracy that operates without a national bill of rights.

Liberals will respond with horror to any suggestion of returning to the pre-1998 British ancien regime. Yet it secured the values an earlier generation of liberals rightly prized. Homosexuality between men was legalised in 1967, as was abortion except in Northern Ireland. (In a civilized reform, same-sex marriage became lawful in England and Wales in 2013, and Scotland a year later. Extending the benefits of marriage, it widens the good life available to gay people. Human rights are irrelevant.) The Race Relations Act making it illegal to refuse housing, jobs or public services to people on the basis of their ethnic origins, was passed in 1968. In all these cases, liberal values were secured by legislation, not the judicial adjudication of rights.

Relying on parliament rather than the judiciary for our freedoms is a distinctively British liberal tradition. John Stuart Mill never supposed human freedom could be embodied in a list of rights. Having himself served as an MP, he assigned to legislators the task of determining the scope and limits of freedom. Parliamentarians, not a jumped-up collection of lawyers, was supreme. Legislators should ask whether harm to others is at issue, and if so, which mix of freedom and restraint would best promote general well-being. Unlike basic rights, liberties could would vary widely according to changing circumstances.

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There is much that is wanting in Mill’s utilitarianism, not least his assumption that harm and well-being can be assessed in easily agreed terms. But Mill’s account of how questions of freedom are to be decided has crucial advantages over the rights-based legalism that has effectively replaced it as the official philosophy of the British governing classes. Mill recognised that vital freedoms may conflict with one another, and when they do, the conflict should be settled by elected law-makers not judges.

The decline of this British liberal tradition began well before the passing of the Human Rights Act. Writing in 1990, I noted:

“If there is a single characteristic that typifies liberal political philosophy over the past quarter of a century, it is its domination by a jurisprudential paradigm…It has generated a series of intractable conflicts, which portend deepening division, growing ungovernability and even a sort of chronic, low-intensity civil war…of these conflicts the abortion question is only the most obvious, but it serves well enough to illustrate the fateful implications for political practice of the hegemony of a rights-based jurisprudence that has been inflated by the inordinate claims of liberal theorizing—that, since fundamental rights cannot be moderated, their judicial interpretation can only mean unconditional victory or complete surrender for the protagonists in the dispute. This is not a recipe for civic peace, or for a stable liberal civil society.”[1. “An epitaph for liberalism”, Times Literary Supplement, January 12, 1990, reprinted in Post-liberalism: studies in Political Thought,1993, pp. 238-9.]

A diagnosis that may have seemed hyperbolic 30 years ago may look less so today. The effect of turning practically every major public issue into a question of human rights is to make conflicts of values intractable. The abortion issue was only the beginning of a culture war that has left American politics hopelessly polarised. Britain has followed America down a road that leads to a war of all against all, fought out between contending social groups armed with inordinate rights.

Contrary to the legalist philosophy that has shaped liberal thinking over the past 30 or more years, human freedoms are not a system of dovetailing rights. Protecting often divergent human interests, they are the site of unending value-conflict. A failure to recognise this fact has created the hyper-liberalism that now attempts to impose on society a particular set of values that much of the population does not accept.

Like human identities, rights are not unilateral acts of self-assertion. In order to be enforced, they need recognition in society, which is particularly problematic when one right collides with another. The right to free speech is at odds with the right to be protected against hate speech, the right to stage protest marches with the rights of people to go about their daily business, the rights of transgender people with those of people who demand single-sex facilities, and so on.

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Liberal legalists say warring rights can be moderated, and their conflicts resolved, by judicial process. But the conceptions of public interest and social wellbeing to which judges appeal in order to revolve these conflicts are not themselves matters of legal judgement. They are inherently and unalterably political, and the political opinions of judges have no more authority or value than anyone else’s.

The legalist philosophy in which rights insulate freedom from the hazards of politics is an illusion. All the majestic panoply of the American constitution will not stop Trump turning America into an illiberal democracy if — in a scenario the time-wasting fiasco of impeachment has made more likely — he wins a second term.

In Britain, liberals often ask what life would be like under a Corbyn government without the HRA. The answer is that it would be not much different from life in Britain with the HRA. When it suited his purposes, Corbyn would ignore, override or circumvent human rights, as he has done in regard to the investigation of Labour anti-Semitism. It was not a regime of rights but the moral decency of voters that prevented an institutionally racist party coming to power in this country. In contrast, the European rights regime has not stopped far right parties advancing to the point where they have entered government in several countries. Human rights have no magical power to shield freedom from political challenge and defeat.

If the government is serious about reviewing the position of human rights laws in this country, it should not be put off by hysterical claims of a slide into despotism. Inspired by legalist ideologies that are at variance with the British political tradition, the regime of rights that has been imposed over the past two decades need not be accepted as permanent. Clinging to a faddish orthodoxy is not the most authentic kind of conservatism, or the most effective way of protecting freedom.

Liberals, eh? Dontcha just hate ‘em? Or should I say ‘so-called’ liberals, who aren’t really liberal at all because they want to silence their opponents. And whatever happened to John Stuart Mill? He’s been taken off the curriculum of course — because he’s a Dead White Male and the Cultural Marxists who control the universities don’t think their snowflake students will be able to read him without bursting into tears…Want to hear more? Sign up to my YouTube channel…

Of course, I don’t really have a YouTube channel, but a lot of people do. And this sort of Right-wing dissent from liberal orthodoxy proliferating on social media and video-sharing websites these days.

The raucous and antagonistic online culture has sprung up as traditional media’s gatekeeper role has diminished. And such are the financial incentives — rewarding controversy and gotchas rather than reasoned debate — that decent money can now be made from stoking the Right-wing id with jeremiads about millennial snowflakes and Cultural Marxism and post-modernist wreckers. It’s a problem.

The circuit of this alternative media is now pretty well established: mostly YouTube-based discussion programmes, broadly opposed to the progressive cultural consensus. There are different styles. For example, the Triggernometry podcast is presented by two very funny comedians and has a fairly informal approach, full of jokes and occasionally quite profane, whereas Conversations, hosted by former Deputy Prime Minister of Australia John Anderson, is more polished and old-fashioned. Nevertheless, the programmes have the same kind of guests, who tend to make the same kind of points, in the same kind of way. 

There are two topics that arise time and time again. First, cultural decline, i.e. the gradual loss of knowledge and understanding of the great art, the great literature, the great achievements of Western civilisation. This is usually ascribed to the dominance of the academy by highly politicised Left-wing academics with a bad case of what Sir Roger Scruton called “oikophobia”, that is a strong feeling of dislike and repugnance towards their own cultural and religious inheritance. 

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The second subject is the increasing censoriousness of culturally dominant progressives, who are keen to silence and delegitimise critics of the Current Year social consensus. A stern and humourless progressive piety reigns in the citadels of the British cultural establishment, empowered and encouraged by the dynamics of social media. 

These are important subjects. However, they cannot be the only topic of conversation. Clearly there’s a problem. What about the solutions? 

When I worked for a pro-life organisation, we used to grumble about media bias, how big broadcasters stacked the deck against pro-lifers in interviews and debates, and how the print media gave endless column inches to outright liars and propagandists. Such complaints were all rather futile. We should, instead, have been asking: “Given the media landscape, what are we actually going to do?” It’s hard to fight a battle on a field you didn’t choose, but you do still have to fight.

In his thoughtful piece for UnHerd after the death of Sir Roger Scruton, Ben Sixsmith noted, correctly, the lack of intellectual heft within British conservatism. The problem isn’t just in the academy; it’s in virtually every field of cultural endeavour. Where are the conservative painters and poets and sculptors and TV writers? Perhaps more importantly, where is the institutional infrastructure to support conservatives in the arts?  

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If conservatives genuinely want to challenge the progressive hegemony, they need to get serious and they need to get organised. They can’t afford to get bogged down in cultivating resentments. Resentment, as Scruton himself often noted, is a corrosive and dangerous dead end. 

Of course, tweaking the nose of the po-faced consensus, with its bizarre, ever-changing shibboleths and bureaucratic vindictiveness, is great fun. There is a glorious heritage in Britain of robust opposition to hectoring officialdom. People who stand at the back and hurl tomatoes at the stage will always be needed. But conservatism can’t be just about that. 

Sure, it might feel good to say the unsayable and to get hundreds of RTs for a devastating put-down of Polly Toynbee or some withering remarks about the suffocating piety of BBC drama. But, generally speaking, the juggernaut rolls on regardless. The task is not to make the drivers of the juggernaut feel embarrassed or angry, but to actually stop the juggernaut. This is one reason to be concerned by the preponderance of comedians among the heroes of the anti-woke counterculture; while comedy can advance dissident goals to some extent by breaking progressive taboos, it is ultimately a destructive force, not a constructive one.

Maybe conservatives should take a step back from the day-to-day combat of the culture war. Now, don’t get me wrong, I am not one of those conservatives who retires to the fainting couch with a glass of sherry when the culture war is mentioned. 

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In Western countries in the modern era, it is entirely natural and reasonable for there to be culture war, i.e. a rigorous, ongoing debate about the attitudes, expectations and moral imperatives that should govern public and private life — especially in areas such as education, entertainment and the media. The alternative is so-called Tory pragmatism, the school of thought whose main principle seems to be “whatever the Guardian editorial page says, but four years after the editorial appears rather than 18 months”.  

The point is not that the culture war shouldn’t be fought; rather, conservatives need to fight smart, and remember the culture bit as well as the war bit. This means thinking about strategy and not just tactics. One tendency in the world of Right-wing podcasters and YouTubers is to seek out the latest person to fall foul of the dreaded libs and thrust a microphone in front of them. 

The problem is that those people don’t always have anything very interesting to add, and that giving them more publicity simply feeds into a reactive and antagonistic atmosphere of snark and counter-snark. It also contributes to a climate where grifters can flourish; it is very easy to carve out a niche for yourself as The Person Who Says What They Don’t Want You To Say, without contributing much of value to conservative thought and action. 

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Which brings us to another difficulty. There are really (at least) two factions on the Right-wing side of the culture war: classical liberals or libertarians, and traditional conservatives. They have overlapping concerns and shared enemies, but fundamentally they have quite different aims and so want to fight different battles in different ways. 

Traditional conservatism, my own part of the political forest, is not simply concerned with removing restraints on speech and clearing obstructions from the public square. It has a vision of the true and the beautiful, a particular understanding of what a good and orderly society should look like. For adherents to this philosophy, the future cannot simply lie in joining forces with the libertarian loudmouths and provocateurs. 

Imagine a podcast or YouTube video series that wasn’t content to condemn the decline of Western civilisation or the absurd censorship attempted by academic liberals, but actually sought out conservative artists to interview them about their work. Imagine a new media show that was not a lament about how X university won’t teach Dante or Plato or Shakespeare, but instead gave a voice to a young poet seeking to write within the great tradition, or an up-and-coming architect seeking to build beautifully and creatively, or a painter rejecting the sterile conceptualism of establishment art.

It won’t be enough on its own — not without the impressive and enviable institutional support available for conservative artists in, say, the USA — but it would be a big step in the right direction.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It’s been the hardest year of my life,” said Liam, 41, whose wife is from Chile. So you might presume it would be easy to predict how this struggling retailer would be voting? But no, not in this bizarre election. For, to my amazement — not least since we were standing in the constituency of one of the best-known Brexiteers and Liam believes Boris Johnson to be “a bit of a buffoon” — he told me he would be voting Tory on Thursday.

“It’s time to get Brexit sorted. I’m a Remainer but I run a business that relies on imports from abroad and we have got to get this done and dusted. I don’t want any more delay to this process that has made me suffer for so long.”

Our chat on a chilly December evening highlights the unpredictability of this political struggle as Brexit divides the country, reshapes parties and shakes the electoral kaleidoscope. Few constituencies show this better than Esher and Walton, where a recent poll suggested the Foreign Secretary, Dominic Raab, holds just a 5% lead over the Liberal Democrats, despite winning a 23,298 majority two years ago.

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This slice of suburban Surrey should be bedrock Britain for the Tories: the sort of place a donkey wearing a blue rosette would get elected. But as Johnson pivots his party towards disgruntled Labour voters in the Midlands and North, might they lose this seat stuffed with wealthy commuters in their southern heartland?

Monica Harding, the Liberal Democrat candidate, is convinced she is set for victory. “I really, really think I will win,” she said when we met in The Wheatsheaf pub. “People are really cross about Brexit. Most accepted the referendum result and then backed the Tories in 2017, expecting them to deliver it neatly. Now they see it has been a complete shambles.” It seemed significant, also, that Raab is keeping his head down and his team not letting journalists join them out campaigning. The Foreign Secretary, however, is optimistic of retaining his seat. “I am not sitting here biting my finger nails,” he told one friend.

It was not hard to find people who have deserted the Tories in Esher and Walton, a seat that strongly backed Remain and is home to 10,000 businesses. Yet while the curse of Brexit clings to this constituency, just as in all 649 others in this wretched election called to break the deadlock at Westminster, other big issues are bubbling beneath the surface. And not just the obvious ones of crime, hospitals, and schools causing concerns across the country. Changes taking place in the spillover suburbs that surround London present longer-term challenges. And that is why this wealthy heart of Surrey presents a warning to the Conservatives.

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This is a place I used to knew well, having lived in Oxshott for the first 17 years of my life before my family moved to Sussex on the day Margaret Thatcher became prime minister. It was a firmly middle-class village set amid the prosperous Surrey commuter belt, an oasis of suburban middle-class dreams close to the capital filled with golf courses and tennis clubs. Men in pin-striped suits and bowler hats packed the trains to London in the morning, then teenagers filled them later to escape the embrace of cosy community and a stifling sense of conformity. There was an old-fashioned grocery store in the village, parties in the village hall — and I can still recall the excitement when the first Chinese and Indian restaurants arrived in the area.

The grocery store is still there, although now rebranded. Inside, I found Nish Patel, its 29-year-old boss who took over the shop with his brother earlier this year. This affable man, born in the Indian state of Gujarat, told me how he arrived in Britain 10 years ago, speaking no English and had already run another shop nearby. As he explained his plans to improve the store, I reflected how Patel embodied the energetic and entrepreneurial spirit of immigration. Yet, unexpectedly, he turned out to be a keen Brexiteer. “I am going to spend my life in this country so I want it to be safe,” he explained. “We need to know who is coming in and out. We have a lot of burglaries here.”

The streets remain tidy, the lawns clipped, the woods by the station full of friendly dog-walkers — but this is an area that has changed fast. There has been the usual suburban churn as old people move on and young families move in, seeking more space in homes and often a sanctuary from urban life in London. Many are from migrant backgrounds, like the Patels. I recall five years ago a Surrey councillor telling me there were 30 languages spoken in neighbouring Mole Valley, with ethnic minorities making up one in seven pupils in some primary schools. There is a mosque in Dorking, just down the road from the setting for that ultimate 70s suburban sitcom, The Good Life. What would Margot have said?

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Emmanuel Macron's alienating ambition

By Anne Elisabeth Moutet

Statistics show that, unlike Patel, most ethnic minorities do not support the Tories. Yet this slice of Surrey has also become spectacularly wealthy. It is now filled with foreign billionaires, hedge fund chiefs and famous sports stars — including Chelsea players and their Russian owner, since the club’s training ground is in nearby Cobham. It is little surprise to find a study revealed Elmbridge pays the highest income tax in Britain. When I located my former home, it seemed almost the only one on the road that had survived rather than being replaced by a massive post-modern palace. At one neighbouring property, an interior design company was hanging Christmas tree lights on a tree by the front door. A worker said they charge £198 for the service — more than one-third of median weekly disposable income for British households.

Many residents live behind big gates and banks of cameras, corroding any sense of real community. “I canvass sometimes speaking on the entry phone to someone I can see at a window,” said one Lib Dem activist. Yet there are homeless people living in nearby woods, former council houses sell for seven-figure sums and far too few new houses are being built in a constituency that is almost two-thirds protected by Green Belt restrictions. These kinds of issues trouble even Tory voters and are storing up problems, whatever happens on Brexit.

I met Gareth Hughes, an 84-year-old former civil servant and oil engineer who has lived in Oxshott for half a century, by the village shops. Once we would have been almost neighbours — but he said he has seen big changes since my time. “We had one house opposite us knocked down, a family lived there, and then it was knocked down again and made bigger,” he said, adding that his own two children had been forced by high prices to live in other parts of the south-east. “This area was always prosperous but it has become much more wealthy and now none of our children can afford to live here.”

As this thoughtful man who once worked under Michael Heseltine said, what is the point of creating ‘affordable’ housing when the definition – 80% of average local market rates — puts it out of most people’s range? One study found Elmbridge, where there has been a sharp fall in numbers of younger people owning their homes and average properties cost almost £600,000, to be the hardest place outside London to get a foot on the housing ladder. Hughes has seen the legacy of such change with a weakening of communal institutions such as clubs and charity events — and while backing both Brexit and the Tories, takes a dim view of modern politicians. “They don’t seem to get anything done. They have been squabbling over Brexit and everything else seems to have been sidelined.”

This is probably the single point that unites the country — and many people in Esher hold Raab responsible as a key player behind the parliamentary paralysis. “No, I’m not voting for him ever again,” said one well-spoken man, declining to be named. “They can stuff their Brexit and the lot of them, they fucked up our country.”

Another middle-aged woman refused at first to tell me how she voted on Brexit after almost losing one of her best friends over the issue. “I’ve known her since we were 10. We are in such a sorry state of affairs, so I pledged never again to tell anyone how I voted.” Eventually she whispered that she was a Leaver on the basis I would not identify her.

A few minutes later I met Hugh Monro, a firm Remainer from Cornwall, who was attending a local school governors’ meeting but expressed the widespread despair over Westminster with unusual eloquence. “It is a pantomime,” he said. “If it wasn’t so important it would all be very funny. Instead we have a farce, written by Kafka but performed by the Marx Brothers.”

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By Tanya Gold

Metamorphosis meets Duck Soup? Certainly some prominent politicians have been transformed by the Brexit debacle — including Ian Taylor, former chairman of the Conservative Group for Europe and Raab’s predecessor in this seat for 23 years. “Sadly, I no longer recognise the Conservative Party as it is today,” he said recently.

Such is the perplexing state of political flux. His new political party, the Lib Dems, claim to be attracting many richer voters who were nervous about inadvertently letting a tax-grabbing Marxist into Downing Street but now feel emboldened to back them after Jeremy Corbyn’s dismal campaign. Almost all Lib Dem voters told me they disliked their party’s stance on revoking Brexit. The Tories meanwhile, said they were picking up support in poorer parts, reflecting their focus on struggling citizens in the Midlands and North. “Voters are very negative about Corbyn,” said one source. “And while this constituency voted 58% Remain, that does not mean they do not respect how the rest of the country voted and that Boris managed to get a deal.”

London’s sprawling suburbia takes in chunks from four counties. Yet it is Surrey that best symbolises the great Brexit divide. The county is home to 11 Tory MPs who include some of the most prominent figures on both sides, from Leavers such as Raab and Michael Gove, through to Remainers such as former chancellor Philip Hammond and Sam Gyimah, who defected to the Liberal Democrats shortly after standing for the leadership. Seven months ago, the Tories lost their grip on four councils after a drubbing in local elections.

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Will Boris lose his seat?

By Paul Embery

Brexit is not the only reason that southern seats could tilt from the Tories. As young families move in, Lib Dems surge after partially recovering from their post-coalition backlash, and Johnson shifts his party towards socially-conservative northern voters. “There is a general feeling that public services are not working for them and the Conservative brand has been tarnished,” said James Johnson, former Number Ten strategist who ran polling for Theresa May. “In future elections, this is going to be problematic. They are going for a short-term win that could have long-term repercussions.” He added that high-profile politicians such as Raab and Iain Duncan Smith in his suburban Essex seat were most at risk from tactical voting.

Even the most devout Corbynista would accept Esher and Walton is not their natural terrain — although I did find one possible Labour voter. “I’m fed up with the whole thing really,” said Katy Nursey, 35, an interior designer parking in Oxshott with her infant daughter Ava. “I work in London and see so many homeless people on the streets. It’s just awful.” She was worried also about the health service after hearing friends and family members complain about bad experiences. Later I met a Polish dental nurse who was selling her house to return home after 10 years living in Britain — one more sign of the intensifying staff crisis in health and social care.

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How the Tories could conjure a youthquake

By UnHerd Contributors

Jane Drown, 60, a former management consultant who is backing the Lib Dems, said many local voters like her would happily pay a bit more in tax to boost public services but they despair over the extremism of both main parties. “Look at all these Four-Wheel Drive cars on the roads when there are people sleeping rough,” she said. “The big issue is inequality. Many people want to redress the balance but will not vote for Corbyn, who seems so old-fashioned and scares the shit out of this affluent middle-class area.”

I met her in a Costa cafe, shortly after talking to an Esher shop worker who could no longer afford to visit the local cinema — the same one that I used to cycle to on my Raleigh sports bike to see films such as Jaws and Star Wars with friends — following its makeover by the upmarket Everyman chain. “This is a constituency with two halves,” said Drown. “There are all those wealthy people in their gated developments but there are also people really struggling to make ends meet on benefits or low incomes. You need a lot of money to live here.”

Who knows if this constituency will provide the “Portillo moment” of the 2019 election, when a high-profile politician loses their job before the cruel glare of cameras at their count? Yet for someone who grew up amid the comfortable certainties of this area, it seems incredible to even suggest the Tory tradition might be under threat in this slab of rock-solid Surrey. It is one more sign of our political fluidity as tectonic plates shift beneath Westminster — and the ramifications go far deeper than current tribal battles. As I talked over coffee with Drown, she spoke with passion about the area’s growing wealth, its glaring inequalities, its gated homes — and its hidden underbelly of grafting people and grinding poverty. “Esher,” she said, “is a metaphor for the country.”

I had just moved house — which is a pretty poor excuse. Particularly since I’m a journalist, and so should be on top of most of the goings on in British politics. I suppose what I’m trying to say is: it’s easily done!

Many of these democracy-loving activists go further than Izzard, though, and equate the act of voting itself with civic virtue. When they demand that we “use our vote” next week, they are, in fact, asking us to line up faithfully behind a particular party. And they imply that anyone who chooses not to “use” their vote is somehow abdicating their civic duties — and insulting those who died for universal suffrage.

To all young people – please do register to vote by end of tomorrow (26th) and use your vote on 12th December. Don’t let the older generations decide your future. Have your say about the future of our country, our continent, and our world https://t.co/5au3gPGi8j

— Eddie Izzard (@eddieizzard) November 25, 2019

Frankly I’m getting a bit tired of it. In fact, I might not vote at all. Not because I’m lazy or apathetic, but because each of the three main parties is so woefully inadequate when it comes to meeting the challenges facing modern Britain. It shames the whole democratic process that the system has propelled such a broad sweep of mediocrity to the frontline of politics. The thought of voting for any of them fills me with disgust.

Sure, I understand that people died for my right to vote. But what many don’t seem to grasp is that the right not to vote is part and parcel of the democratic system those brave people fought for. Indeed, as anyone living in a country where people are bused to polling stations (with the threat of losing their liberty if they do not comply) to vote for a single candidate will tell you, not voting can itself be a revolutionary act.

But many of my friends, who are equally repulsed by the politicians offered up by our political system, are slowly being guilt-tripped into falling into line as the general election draws near. They now tell me — scold me, in fact — that I should vote for the “lesser evil”. This would, presumably, result in less evil, which is no bad thing. But what happens if I look at several very different evils and am unable to decide which is worse?

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Liberal smugness will destroy the Left

By Giles Fraser

Until this year, I was a member of the Labour Party. I had been for 15 years. It wasn’t one single incident which led me to leave, but rather the darkening penumbra of conspiratorial anti-Semitism which seemed to emanate from much of the newly enthused party membership. I didn’t want to be around it. I didn’t want to be infected by it. And so I left.

When I look at Jeremy Corbyn, a person his fanatical supporters like to call a “man of principle”, all I see is a hypocrite. He is against “all forms of racism” except the form of racism most commonly deployed by the Left. He is for human rights, except for in those countries where nominally Left-wing governments hold power. He is against war and imperialism, yet can barely bring himself to condemn the Russian bombing of civilians in Syria. Hypocrites of this stripe are ten a penny in his party and they do not enthuse me one bit.

One of the most dispiriting things about Labour’s anti-Semitism scandal is the speed at which nearly all the party’s MPs, many of whom were previously critical of the leader, have lined up faithfully behind Jeremy Corbyn now that an election is upon us. Purported anti-racists are currently campaigning to put the man responsible for the return of anti-Semitism to mainstream politics into No 10. Their ‘principles’ turned out to be entirely dependent on electoral expediency. This is the very definition of virtue signalling. Clinging to a cushy job in parliament takes precedence over the fears of Britain’s Jews.

The Tories, meanwhile, have their own problems with anti-Muslim bigotry; and Boris Johnson is a self-serving chancer. Besides, temperamentally, I am not a conservative. I wrote about the consequences of Conservative-imposed austerity at length in my book Hired. I saw some shocking things during the research for that book (which you can read about on UnHerd) and have no intention of voting for a party which helped to foster the dark world of squalor, precarity and quiet desperation that exists behind the façade of bourgeois affluence.

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Audiocast: How dead-end jobs killed small-town pride

By Charlotte Pickles and James Bloodworth

That leaves the Liberal Democrats. Liberal Democrat leader Jo Swinson is far less objectionable than Jeremy Corbyn or Boris Johnson — even if she is a charisma-free zone. However, in terms of austerity, her party is almost as culpable for the mess the country is in as the Conservatives. Moreover, the party’s stance on Brexit, in which it would effectively overturn the result of the 2016 referendum, is profoundly undemocratic and would result in a further erosion of trust in democracy.

I think I’ll pass on all of them.

Many won’t of course, even though they share my concerns. Their blind-loyalty is such that they will put their misgivings aside and dutifully turn out to vote. As an old aphorism goes, you could pin a red/blue/yellow rosette on a dog in certain parts of the country and many would still place a cross by its name. It’s why around half the parliamentary seats in the UK are safe seats: places where thousands of people vote reliably and consistently at any given opportunity.

I resent this dull-headed tribalism. It’s one of the reasons I became a journalist instead of going into politics, which I briefly considered once upon a time. I’ve no interest in standing on a stump and trotting out my party’s ‘line’, if it means acquiescing in institutional anti-Semitism. And perhaps most important, I’ve no interest in lying to myself in order to preserve some ideological house of cards. Why bother? Any gains a Labour government might bring to the poorest in society will eventually be poisoned by the maggot eating away at its rotten core. It’ll take the party down with it. We must not allow it to infect wider society.

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The Left's long history of antisemitism

By James Bloodworth

Unfortunately, it is the tribalists of both sides who are on the march at present. Is this is a consequence of social media? Or are the fanatics are filling the spaces vacated by religion. Either way, a lot of people seem desperately to want something and someone to believe in. Intolerance is a by-product of this rigid in and out group dichotomy. Anti-Semitism and racism apparently acceptable prices to pay.

When the day of the vote arrives, I will probably spoil my ballot paper. I hope that others will do the same, a collective protest of sorts. I hope many more will stay at home. I don’t want the anti-Semites, the anti-Muslim bigots and the conspiracy theorists to turn out next Thursday. I would also prefer it if the unthinking, the blindly loyal and the bullied into it stayed home too — even if such sentiments are out of step with the ubiquitous online exhortations from do-gooders to “use your vote”. Though I recognise this is probably a forlorn hope in the current climate, when each day seems to reaffirm Yeats’s line about the worst being “full of passionate intensity”.

Indeed, if you look at the overall figures for the electorate in Scotland, and include those who didn’t vote in 2016 — a group that is perennially ignored in this sort of discussion — you find that 42% of adult Scots voted to Remain, another 26% voted to Leave, and 33% didn’t vote at all.

In other words, sit 10 random Scots around a table, perhaps at one of the many election-themed Christmas parties next month, and four will be Remain voters, three will be Leave voters, and three will have stayed home. The dining partner you turn to first will be more likely not to have voted Remain than to have done so.

(If this was an academic article we would now have a lengthy footnote about the need to treat overall turnout figures — and therefore statistics about non-voters — with a bit of caution. It’s not an academic article, so you’ll have to take our word for it. But even so, our basic point stands.)

The same sort of claim is often made about London — which as everyone knows is packed full of metrosexual Remainers — despite it being a city where 40% voted Leave; or, on the other side of the coin, about somewhere like the West Midlands, the most Leave-voting region in the UK, but where 41% voted to Remain. Of the 12 regions or nations in the UK, only one of them (Scotland) had a split more extreme than 60:40 one way or the other, and even there, only very marginally so.

Of course, regions are big places, which contain multitudes. You get more polarisation if you look at smaller geographic units, whether it’s the local authorities by which the referendum results were originally counted (but which are of very uneven size), or the smaller parliamentary constituencies (for which, in most cases, we have estimates). But most of those are pretty diverse, too.

Of the local authorities, for example, the majority were no more divided than 60:40 one way or the other, and just 24 (that is, 6% of all the local authority counting areas) saw a pattern of voting that was divided by 70:30 or more. Of the 650 parliamentary constituencies, 59% were at most divided by 60:40, and just 59 (or 9%) saw a division greater than 70:30.

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Places such as Boston (on one end of the spectrum), where 76% of people voted Leave, or Lambeth (at the other), which was 79% Remain, really are the exceptions. Most areas are just not that polarised. And even in these outliers, once you factor in the non-voters, the apparent overwhelming hegemony of the “winning” side is much reduced. Walk down a street in Boston, for example, and under 60% of people you encounter will have voted Leave. In Lambeth, the most Remain-voting authority in the UK, only 53% of all those who could vote, voted Remain.

We’re not saying that regional variations didn’t exist in votes and views on Brexit. Of course they did, and do, and we’ve both happily written about them in the past. But they were differences of scale or direction, and were often quite small; yet instead of being treated as such, they’ve become fossilised into a series of false binaries that now dominate far too much of our political discussion. There isn’t, for example, really any such thing as a “Leave constituency” or a “Remain city” — although we will grant an exception to Gibraltar (96% Remain), where you do have to feel a bit sorry for the 4%.

Nor are we trying to claim that Brexit does not divide Britain. It does, and in important ways. People identify as Leave or Remain, in a greater way than they do with political parties, and see the world through these lenses — just as they used to view politics through partisan eyes.

Multiple pieces of research have shown the extent to which this can make us judge people or not want them as their friends. A new study, in a book we’ve edited (and which is available for a very reasonable price) shows that the referendum vote can even affect how who you want to move in next door to you, far more so than any of the other variables that were tested.

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Brexit is going to drive us all mad

By Ed West

At this point you might, fairly, object that everyone happily refers to parliamentary constituencies as Labour or Conservative or whatever, despite the fact that not everyone in those constituencies will have voted for the winning party. You could even argue the problem is worse in Westminster elections, where because of the electoral system it is usually the case these days that the local MP is someone most voters did not back .

Yet this seems to us slightly different. For one thing, in our first-past-the-post system, a party “winning” a seat actually matters — each seat won changes the outcome, in a way that doesn’t apply in the referendum. And besides, maybe we would anyway do better to remember that while a party may win a seat, they don’t own it or all the people in it.

You might also object that we are both massive hypocrites, because we’re pretty certain that if you searched the things we have written in the past, you would almost certainly find examples of us committing these very errors. To which we can only plead guilty, and pray in our defence Luke’s gospel, chapter 15, verse 7: “I say unto you, that likewise joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine just persons, which need no repentance”.

And you could also argue that we’re over-reacting, that these phrases are just useful shorthands, and that everyone knows they are not to be taken as absolute. Sure, shorthands are fine and often essential — except we would argue that not everyone does know this, and that through repetition alone shorthands can come to be seen as true.

Too much of the discussion following the referendum has focused on the majority outcomes in areas, and not enough on the presence of minorities. That tendency has real consequences for what policies we get on things like Brexit, and whose voices get heard.

The same applies, by the way, to much of the discussion of the socio-economic or demographic cleavages in the Brexit vote. You know all the clichés: the middle class voted Remain, as did the young and BME voters and graduates; the working class, the old and those who did not go to university voted Leave.

True, the majority of each of these groups did indeed back that outcome (although again, in several cases, once you factor in non-voters even that doesn’t always hold), but there were millions, literally millions, of exceptions, who too often get written out of the narrative. There are a whole series of overlooked Brexit tribes — old Remainers, graduate Leavers, BME Leavers, working-class Remainers, middle-class Leavers — who still get almost completely ignored in most discussion.

Ditto for party divisions. We hear very little about Conservative Remainers, even though their behaviour was one of the key drivers of the outcome at the last election, and people seem to completely ignore SNP-voting Leavers (a group that, proportionately, was about the same size as Labour Leavers, and were also crucial to the 2017 result).

With Labour, curiously, the opposite occurs: we hear a lot about Labour Leavers, probably too much, and not quite enough about Labour Remainers, despite the latter making up the majority of Labour supporters in 2016, 2017 and now.

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By Matthew Goodwin

These two errors frequently come together when discussing the relationship between political parties and the referendum. Just because a majority of people in a constituency voted Leave, and just because a constituency returned a Labour MP, this does not mean that a majority of Labour voters in that seat voted Leave. This has now been pointed out so often that it should not need repetition, but it clearly does, because people keep on making this mistake.

The most recent debunking came from British Election Study data, which showed that even in seats where a majority voted to Leave, most Labour voters in that seat had voted to Remain. Yet in turn, much of the coverage of this work then suffered from exactly the same problem of focussing only on the majority group.

In their haste to argue that this showed that Labour needed to please its Remain-backing voters, many commentators overlooked that the very same study showed significant minorities (around 40%) of Labour voters in these seats who had voted Leave. It would be a brave electoral strategy that would stick two fingers up to 40% of your support.

If you are on Twitter, we would recommend an account called @VoterBritish. It’s a bot, which is tweeting details of the thousands of people who took part in the British Election Study, one respondent at a time. Each tweet summarises key information about the individual, and then reveals who they voted for.

It constantly surprises you: you read that someone favours hanging, wants to grind down the poor, loves Brexit and favours tax cuts, but then discover they voted Remain and Liberal Democrat. (We’ve made that one up, although there probably is someone like that lurking in the data set somewhere.)

The bot is a reminder of the point we are trying to make: that the statements we often make about people in elections or referenda are, or at least should be, probabilistic, not absolute. It’s not that there are not under-pinning factors driving the way people vote, merely that voters are much more complicated than most discussion of this sort of analysis ever seems allows.

Even individual voters are complex and contradictory, so this will certainly be true of any group of voters — whether we define them by place, or profession, or past vote or anything else.

Philip Cowley and Robert Ford’s Sex, Lies, and Politics: The Secret Influences That Drive our Political Choices is published by Biteback.

Jonathan Swift said you couldn’t reason a man out of a position he hadn’t been reasoned into in the first place, and this is why most politics is tribal, not rational.

So it is with me, though I have built a reasonably sound superstructure of reason on the bedrock of my immovable love of certain, unchanging things. What has always, ultimately, been my politics was absorbed like the lore of a tribe, not taught to me or even suggested to me, or much discussed — just known, very deep down, as essential and desirable. Every political organisation I have ever joined has been, by comparison, cardboard, fraudulent and unsatisfactory, like a cheap hamburger.

For me, my politics came as a succession of heavy, deeply moving images of what sort of country I lived in — serious, warlike, chilly, full of the potential of power or even violence but, in reality, often almost silent. The sleek, fierce warships I saw at Rosyth aged, perhaps, three; the heroic engineering of the Forth Railway Bridge; the compact, hissing power of steam locomotives, all under dark skies, and all in a cold climate.

And then, I piled on top of that the world I met in various preparatory schools, one of them a choir school: the chilly beauty of the choir at evensong, the potent silence of a cathedral holding its breath between prayers, the arches reaching upwards into shadow, the strange and alluring mixture of magnificence and austerity that Protestantism brought. “Father, hear the prayer we offer. Not for ease, that prayer shall be, but for strength, that we may ever live our lives courageously.”

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By Justin Webb

And, from there to Tennyson and Newbolt. Once I knew, almost by heart, Tennyson’s long poem about Sir Richard Grenville’s little ‘Revenge’ sailing into the midst of a Spanish fleet which towered over her, and fighting to the very end, against appalling odds, to destroy those “Inquisition dogs and the devildoms of Spain”. And Newbolt’s Drake’s Drum — with its legend that in England’s peril the drum would sound and Sir Francis would rise from his salty sea grave, his hammock his shroud, “slung atween the roundshot in Nombre Dios Bay” and return to “drum them up the Channel, as we drummed them long ago” — made more real to me by living in deep Devon lanes a short walk from Buckland Abbey, where the alleged drum still hung.

A little later, I was allowed to stand on the very spot where Nelson had fallen on the deck of HMS Victory, at Trafalgar in 1805, and was not spared a visit to the dark place far below, where he had died, as the surgeons did their savage work on wounded seamen all around him, on a deck painted red so the blood would not show so much.

Then along came Macaulay, and Horatius at the Bridge and “How can man die better than facing fearful odds, for the ashes of his fathers and the temples of his gods?” How indeed? It remains a good question, though I no longer hope at all for the chance to see if it is true.

“Britons sing!” I and my schoolfellows on our West Country hilltop would pipe to the tune of Jeremiah Clarke’s Trumpet Voluntary, as the Atlantic rains dashed against the windowpanes. “Britons, sing, that all the world shall know we are free! Trumpets! Fling the Challenge over the boundless sea!”

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By Peter Hitchens

Note that part about freedom. We really were brought up to believe we were the freest people on earth. We were proud of that, proud that our police were unarmed and our courts were fair, even when we had only a faint idea of what these things really meant. There was something after that about “Christian service and true chivalry”, but in many searches since I have never been able to find the original words of this song, which I may well have been one of the very last people to sing, and which may well now be illegal.

We were not in the least embarrassed by these sentiments. The dormitories in which we slept were named after seadogs, the more senior, the more majestic. I can still remember the order of them, from Blake through to Nelson. We had not heard the word “Profumo”, not yet, and we had been mostly protected from the implications of Suez, though I sensed a weakening in authority, of which I was quick to take advantage in a thoroughly Leninist way (“Insert the bayonet. If you meet steel, withdraw and try elsewhere. If you meet mush, push harder.”).

I remember also, for the first time, holding a golden Sovereign in my hand and being troubled by the thought that a society in which such coins had (almost unbelievably) been normal daily currency might have been better in some ways than one which relied on scruffy rectangles of paper. I longed for the solidity which my tribal upbringing seemed to rely on, but which was visibly crumbling around me.

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Cuba killed my communism

By James Bloodworth

Avoiding my headmaster’s incessant and urgent suggestions that I should expose myself to fresh air and exercise, of which I already had quite enough in my view, I hid from sight in the unfrequented school library, where nobody ever looked for anyone (we were expected to grow up to be naval officers or gentleman farmers, not intellectuals). And so I absorbed a whole version of history through the unequalled cartoons of Sir Bernard Partridge.

It was then that I became quite sure that we had lost a world of immense stability and peace in 1914, and that what had come after (and what I now lived in) was a shabby, gimcrack imitation of it, lit by a harsh and glaring light, and invaded by tinkling music and braying voices. And I have spent much of my life being told I think the 1950s were a golden age. The 1950s? That tatty, threadbare, apologetic, smelly era — golden?

So I was not a Tory, or even a conservative: I was by nature and upbringing an actual reactionary — as it happened, the perfect preparation for my long later years as a homicidal Bolshevik. The same almost berserk passions were engaged (Bolshevism is thoroughly Edwardian in so many ways) in pursuit of a distant, supposedly beautiful ideal. Since the end of that, I have never really been able to stomach the insipid potions of supposed ‘mainstream’ politics, which, set beside the deep passions of my reactionary and revolutionary phases, are much as non-alcoholic lager would be after a generous measure of Calvados. Why even bother?

Someone should have taken me in hand, I suppose, and given me a normal modern upbringing, all about shiny new hospitals, equality, and the United Nations. But they came too late. I had already heard the distant trumpet call of a much more seductive, much older world view. And I am glad of that. I wouldn’t have missed any of it, and if now I can laugh cheerfully at the absurdities of our politics, tiny figures scuttling through cavernous halls built for much greater men, it is because for a few short, dreamy years I was given a glimpse of a lost past, just before it vanished forever. And from then on I knew what I liked.