* * * 

Over the five past decades, I have asked a series of ambitious political leaders the same question: “Do you have any doubts about your ability to fill the role of Prime Minister?”

All but one of them admitted to having qualms: David Cameron. It was exactly two decades ago, and the 39-year old had just been elected Tory Leader. “If I had any doubts,” said Cameron, “I wouldn’t have put myself forward to lead our party in the first place. You have to be absolutely ready to take the difficult and big decisions – including sending troops to war. And I decided I was ready for that.” 

Described by his wife, Samantha, as “the most glass-half-full person in the world”, Cameron will go down in history as the man who took Britain out of the EU. But there is much more to him than his role as the accidental Brexiteer. 

Like nearly half of Britain’s Prime Ministers, Cameron was educated at Eton — where he did not distinguish himself and might well have been expelled for smoking cannabis. But he slipped the noose. At Oxford he was elected to join the notorious Bullingdon Club. “When I look at the photograph of our group of appallingly over self-confident sons of privilege,” said Cameron later. “I cringe. It’s cripplingly embarrassing. The Bullingdon has haunted me for most of my political life.” 

Despite the hijinks, Cameron managed to get a First in PPE, much to the chagrin of his Eton and Oxford contemporary, Boris Johnson, who only achieved a 2:1 in classics. The two men were to have a prolonged love-hate relationship for years to come. As schoolboys, both had declared they wanted to become Prime Minister, although Johnson upped the ante by saying he also sought to be World King. 

When Cameron came down from Oxford, he joined the political finishing school of Conservative Central Office. He was snapped up to become a Spad, working to polish the image of top Tory Cabinet ministers, then left to take a job at the media company Carlton TV, where he became head of communications from 1994-2001.

After failing to win a Tory seat in the Blair landslide of 1997, Cameron watched with growing admiration the presentational skills of the New Labour troika of Tony Blair, Alastair Campbell and Peter Mandelson. When he did finally become a Tory MP in 2001, he privately proclaimed he was “the Heir to Blair”. When elected Conservative leader four years later, Cameron sought to detoxify the Tory “Nasty Party” brand. He wanted to create a party in his own image. The New Conservatives would be modern, diverse, caring and environmentally aware. On his debut at PMQs as the new Leader of Opposition, he said to the Prime Minister Tony Blair: “I want to talk about the future, after all he was the future once.” A year later, he drove a sleigh in the Arctic pulled by snow-white huskies. His new slogan was: “Vote Blue, Get Green” — swiftly lampooned as “Hug a Husky”. 

When Cameron fought his first general election as Tory leader in 2010, he feared the result would be a hung parliament. He privately asked the German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who was accustomed to coalitions, how they worked. She summed it up succinctly: “Well, David, the way it works is that if things go well, then the big party gets the credit — and if they go badly, the small party gets the blame.” “Sounds a good idea to me,” responded Cameron. 

As PM, Cameron invited Merkel to Chequers. One summer evening they were watching the sun go down over the Chiltern Hills, an area of outstanding natural beauty, and Cameron joked: “Just think Angela, if things had turned out differently in the Forties all this could have been yours.” Merkel laughed out loud; the Germans do have a sense of humour. 

At that time, after years of trying, I had been given access to make a fly-on-the wall series, Inside the Commons, filming in areas where TV cameras were normally strictly verboten. In his grand wood-panelled Westminster office, I asked the PM how he rated the Commons as an institution. “You do feel a real sense of history in this place,” he said. “It’s half like a museum, half like a church and half like a school.” Clearly an unusual school where three halves make a whole. When I asked Cameron what he thought of Prime Minister’s Questions, he replied: “There isn’t a Wednesday where you don’t feel total fear and trepidation about what is going to happen. I am normally sitting here preparing for PMQs and about five minutes beforehand you think: ‘Oh no, have I got to do this again?’” 

He admitted that each week, one of his staff would email Tory backbenchers a list of questions that the PM would like to be asked. When I suggested that this made a mockery of PMQs, Cameron said: “If you’re saying it’s appalling, I would say that politics is about the team putting across team messages. So people shouldn’t be too worried about that happening in PMQs.” He saw himself, he said, as “a political decathlete, switching from one discipline to the next trying to give every single one of them my best”. 

But the subject the PM found the most problematic was Britain’s relationship with the EU. He had promised when he became leader that the Tories would: “Stop banging on about Europe.” But he was up against his own party becoming increasingly pro-Brexit — and he was also up against Nigel Farage, whose UKIP party was making dramatic gains at the ballot box. Seeking to pooh-pooh the pretenders, Cameron said: “UKIP is sort of a bunch of fruitcakes and loonies and closet racists.” But Farage seized on Cameron’s words as proof that the political elite despised ordinary Britons who were concerned about the EU and immigration. In speeches, interviews and rallies, Farage sardonically used the PM’s description of Ukippers as a badge of honour. 

Cameron told me he saw himself as “a practical Eurosceptic” who wanted to stay in a reformed EU. He decided to hold an in-out Referendum which he was confident of winning. The two people he most wanted campaigning for the Remain side were his very close friend Michael Gove and his fellow Bullingdon man, Boris Johnson. But Gove was playing a slippery game and refusing to commit himself. Cameron sent Gove a text saying: “You must realise I divide the world into team players and wankers. You’ve always been a team player, please don’t become a wanker.” Gove admitted he was moving towards Leave, but he promised Cameron: “If I do decide to opt for Brexit, I will make one speech. That will be it. I will play no further part in the campaign.” 

This was the opposite of what Gove actually did when he became full-time leader of the Leavers. Failing to land Gove made Cameron all the more determined to bag Boris. The PM had long envied Johnson’s charisma and campaigning skills. But Johnson was keeping his powder dry. On 17 February 2016, as Cameron prepared to announce the date and details of the Referendum, Johnson went to see Cameron in his study at No. 10. The PM told Johnson that if he agreed to campaign for Remain: “You can have a senior role to play after the referendum. I am offering you any post you want in the government – except the top one.” Johnson said he would think about it and they should stay in touch. 

Ten days later, Johnson pinged Cameron a text saying: “I have been a tortured soul, but I have to go with my heart and support Leave.” But, then, barely two hours later, a fresh text from Johnson appeared on Cameron’s device saying “depression is setting in” — that he was “dithering” and might change his mind and back Remain after all. The following day, Johnson messaged the PM yet again, saying that he could not look at himself in the mirror if he campaigned to Remain. Cameron said publicly he was “disappointed” by Johnson’s decision. That was putting it mildly. The word I got from No. 10 was: “The fury here is uncontrollable.” 

The Referendum campaign coincided with a record number of illegal immigrants trekking across Europe and crossing the Channel in small boats to come to Britain. Film of their arrival on BBC, ITV and Sky inadvertently resembled a daily party political broadcast for the Leavers. It chimed with the simple message from Johnson and Gove: “Take Back Control”. 

Cameron accused the Leavers of “resorting to total untruths to con people into taking a leap in the dark”. He authorised a poster showing Johnson rolling the dice, Gove drinking whiskey and Nigel Farage smoking cigars in a casino together with the slogan: “Don’t let them gamble on your future.” Cameron later said: “The campaign turned into this terrible Tory psychodrama and I couldn’t seem to get through to people. It was like one of those dreams where you’re trying to shout but no sound is coming out.” And he continued: “Johnson and Gove have behaved appallingly — attacking their own government and the pair seemed to be different people by the end of the Referendum. Gove, the liberal-minded, carefully-considered Conservative intellectual, had become a foam-flecked Faragist warning that the entire Turkish population was about to come to Britain.” 

In the early morning of 24 June, the PM threw in the towel. The Leavers had won by 52 to 48%. On the steps of No. 10, a shell-shocked Cameron announced his resignation as Prime Minister saying: “The will of the British people is an instruction that must be delivered.” But he was not the man to do it. 

Johnson left it for a few hours after the resignation and then texted Cameron: “Dave, I am so sorry to have been out of touch but I couldn’t think of what to say and now I am absolutely miserable about your decision. You have been a superb PM and leader and your country owes you eternally.” Boris’s 18-year-old nephew, Oliver, felt different. He told his mother Rachel: “Uncle Boris has just stolen our future.” 

For many months after the Referendum result, Cameron would say: “not a day goes past without me feeling haunted by the demons of Brexit that were unleashed”. So does the ex-PM now wish he hadn’t called a Referendum? “If you are asking me do I have regrets — yes. Am I sorry about the state the country has got into — yes. Do I feel some responsibility for that — yes.” In another interview, he said: “It was my Referendum, my campaign, my decision to try and renegotiate with the EU. I accept all of those things and people will have to decide how much blame to put on me.”

Privately, however, Cameron was less self-culpatory. “Boris ruined my bloody career,” he told the former Europe Minister, Sir Alan Duncan, at a private breakfast. I watched Cameron at his final PMQs, in front of a packed House. He produced a bravura last hurrah: self-assured, witty and sometimes poignant. “I have done a bit of research, Mr Speaker,” said the PM. “I have addressed five thousand five hundred questions from this Despatch Box. I’ll leave it to others to work out how many I have actually answered.”

Riding the mixed cheers and jeers, the departing Prime Minister said: “I will miss the roar of the crowds — I will miss the barbs of the Opposition. And the last thing I’d say is that you can achieve a lot of things in politics, you can get a lot of things done. Nothing is really impossible, if you put your mind to it. After all, as I once said: ‘I was the future once.’” Twenty years on, Cameron and Britain are still deciding how much blame he deserves for the future he delivered.

To take the interventionists at face value, you would think the fall of Assad in 2024 is somehow proof of their own wisdom in supporting airstrikes on his regime 11 years earlier in response to his use of chemical weapons. Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary, said last week that “if the West had acted faster, Assad would have been gone”. By not intervening when it had the chance, the West “created a vacuum that Russia moved into and kept Assad in power for much longer”, Streeting argued. It’s a neat story with a pleasingly simple moral at its core: take action or somebody else will.

Streeting’s account of recent history — notably far from his health brief — is the conventional view in London, Paris and Washington; the view of what Barack Obama once described as “the blob”. It is no surprise, then, that it was echoed by George Osborne on his podcast, Political Currency, last week. Osborne described David Cameron’s failure to win parliamentary authorisation for military action in 2013 – inadvertently setting off a train of events culminating in Barack Obama’s decision not to impose his red line against chemical weapons — as one of his greatest regrets from government. “Forget about the suffering the Syrian people have endured for the past 10 years as a result [of non intervention], look at the massive migration flows into Germany, the pressures that put on European governments, the collapse of more moderate centrist administrations, ultimately the small boats that come across the English Channel,” Osborne explained. All could be traced back to the West’s failure to take control back in 2013 when it had the chance.

To support Osborne’s case, he played a clip of the British diplomat Hugh Powell reflecting on the lost parliamentary vote a decade in.

Powell was Cameron’s deputy national security adviser in 2013, and scion of Britain’s greatest diplomatic family. He is the son of Margaret Thatcher’s former foreign affairs adviser, Charles Powell, and nephew of Keir Starmer’s national security adviser, Jonathan. In Hugh’s view, the 2013 vote against intervention was “a massive mistake”. The key point, he said, was that the Assad regime was always fragile and could have been knocked out of power with more forceful Western intervention. “2013 was an opportunity to help crack it well before Hezbollah and Russia came to its rescue,” Powell told Osborne and his podcast partner, Ed Balls. “And with Assad gone we had a good chance of installing a power-sharing government in Damascus that might well have prevented the hidden expansion of ISIS.” It’s a neat story.

The thing is, though, Powell’s explanation is exactly the opposite of what David Cameron insisted was the case at the time. In 2013, Cameron told MPs that he was seeking parliamentary approval for military action for one reason alone: to deter the use of chemical weapons. “The question before the House today is how to respond to one of the most abhorrent uses of chemical weapons in a century,” Cameron began in his statement pleading for their support. “It is not about taking sides in the Syrian conflict, it is not about invading, it is not about regime change, and it is not even about working more closely with the opposition; it is about the large-scale use of chemical weapons and our response to a war crime — nothing else.”

So, which is it? Was it a missed opportunity for regime change, as we are now led to believe. Or was it a failure to punish the use of chemical weapons that had nothing to do with regime change, as Cameron insisted then?

Powell’s apparent admission that there was a wider ambition was picked up by Ed Miliband to defend his decision to vote against military action. Responding to Wes Streeting’s comments, Miliband correctly stated that the 2013 vote was — at least ostensibly — to authorise a “one-off bombing of Syria”. However, Miliband then claimed the reason he did not support this one-off bombing mission was because “there was no plan for what this British involvement would mean, where it would lead and what the consequences would be”.

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Miliband’s account is just as lamentably dishonest as Cameron’s. If Western intervention would have made no difference to Assad’s grip on power because it was a “one-off”, then his argument for not punishing Assad in 2013 is logically bogus. But if it were not, then he cannot at the same time claim with certainty that the air strikes would not have undermined Assad’s grip on power. They were either one-off strikes or they were not. Miliband, like Cameron and Osborne, is trying to have it all ways.

Just as it now seems obvious that Cameron was hiding the real motivation of his policy 2013, so too does it seem obvious that Miliband was too. Cameron couldn’t be honest about his intention because it would’ve sparked even more opposition. Miliband couldn’t be honest, because his calculation was fundamentally not about the policy but his own self-interest. Labour opposed intervention in Syria in 2013 because they believed it was necessary to win the general election in 2015.

The dishonesty of the two sides trying to recast their roles in recent history captures the essence of our governing class’s failure in recent years. For so many of our leading politicians and diplomats, it seems, their views are essentially unfalsifiable acts of faith. Casting my mind back across the great titans of 21st-century British policies it is hard to think of a single big beast who appears capable of genuine reflection on the inadequacies of their way of understanding the world. The world of podcasts is teeming today with former ministers or political leaders explaining why what they have always said remains entirely true.

It is for this reason that I find myself reflexively jumping to Miliband’s defence despite his reprehensible behaviour in 2013. For Osborne, nothing seems capable of shaking his faith in the benign power of the West and its ability to make the world better for all.

Osborne’s attempt to claim the Syrian non-intervention led to the small-boats crisis is particularly lamentable. Of those trying to make it to Britain illegally today, most come from Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and Albania — none of whom are wanting for lack of Western intervention. What is more, the ability of the EU to deal with illegal migration flows across the Mediterranean have grown immeasurably worse because of the Cameron-Sarkozy decision to intervene in Libya in 2011, toppling the Gadaffi regime and creating an anarchic vacuum of power which continues to this day. Where is the real reflection from Osborne et al about this failure, let alone the ones in Iraq and Afghanistan?

There is a fundamental complacency to our outgoing political class today, which seems happy to wallow in what Keir Starmer might call the “tepid bath” of its simplistic analysis, unable, it seems, to wrestle with the complexities of foreign and economic policy today and to level with people about the trade-offs. It is striking that David Lammy’s “progressive realism” places ever greater emphasis on the realism of its creed rather than the progressivism, emphasising, for example, the recent push to develop ties with the Gulf. The days of Tony Blair’s Chicago speech setting out his interventionist “doctrine of the international community” seem as ancient as those of Kissinger.

In Hugh Powell’s account of 2013, for example. Western intervention would have led to the fall of Assad and the emergence of a unity government of some kind. In Osborne’s telling, this would have prevented the various crises which swept over Europe thereafter. Both are essentially declarations of faith.

Today, Powell says the only outside power able to impose order on Syria is Turkey and that President Erdogan will need to send a Turkish Richard Holbrooke figure with the skill and determination to pull Syria’s various ethnic and religious factions together in a Lebanon-style power-sharing arrangement. The references to Holbrooke and Lebanon are inadvertently telling.

Lebanon is a failed state with a record of catastrophic mismanagement and corruption that has destroyed a once thriving country. Living in Lebanon might have been better than living in Syria, Iraq or Afghanistan in recent years, but it was worse than almost everywhere else outside sub-Saharan Africa. Is this really the best solution?

Richard Holbrooke, meanwhile, might be a hero to the interventionists today, but his record carries lessons that are more uncomfortable than they imagine. A biography written by Holbrooke’s friend and admirer, George Packer, is a reminder that he rose to prominence in the Sixties as a far-sighted diplomatic realist who saw that America’s war in Vietnam was going catastrophically wrong in a way that the country’s foreign policy establishment seemed incapable of understanding.

In the late summer of 1966, after returning from Saigon, Holbrooke found himself at the White House with President Lyndon Johnson. “The belief that America could do whatever it wanted remained strong as iron,” Packer writes. But Holbrooke dared to question. “Mr President, I’ve just come back from Vietnam and, you know, I’m a little worried about this… there are some limitations to what the Americans can do in the civilian field in Vietnam.” Johnson then stared at Holbrooke and replied: “Well, son, your job is to get rid of those limitations.”

The wise men of the American establishment were wrong in 1966 and Holbrooke was right. But it was the wise men who would be summoned to the White House, as Packer writes, “to assure Johnson, on the basis of nothing except heavily slanted briefings, an unexamined attachment to the domino theory, and their own code of resoluteness, that this distant country they didn’t understand was a necessary battlefield of the Cold War, before returning to their stately offices and sterling reputations”.

It is an irony — though perhaps a revealing one — that Holbrooke ended his career as such a wise man convinced of his and America’s ability to overcome their limitations in another faraway country, Afghanistan. Today, in his place, we have new wise men, clinging to their unexamined theories and codes of resoluteness convinced of their own fantastical tales of recent history. The truth is that both Ed Miliband and David Cameron are losing their battle for history — and deservedly so. The vote in 2013 and the fall of Assad 11 years later are just two crises in an epoch of Western failure that has given us the world of Donald Trump and Abu Mohammed al-Julani in which we live today. If Britain and its new Foreign Secretary really wants to learn from its recent past, they will need more young Holbrookes and fewer wise men clinging to their unexamined faiths which have long since lost credibility.

This, in its broad outlines, is now the unifying worldview of the Brics powers: a loose pact of frenemies  — currently assembled in the city of Kazan — with whom, according to General Sir Patrick Sanders, we are on the brink of war.

But 10 years ago, this was also nothing less than the official policy of the British government. Britain was the first country — not Russia — to follow multipolar world theory as a guiding principle: the term Brics was coined by the British economist Jim O’Neill, and the country would also produce When China Rules The World, the smash-hit prophecy of American decline. America may have started to “decouple” from China almost a decade ago, but Britain still looks to Beijing as its natural source of foreign investment, as David Lammy’s visit this week proves. To Britain’s governing classes, the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008 was decisive proof that American hegemony was finished, and that Britain could no longer live off the fat of its dividends. This global system had now crashed, and it wasn’t at all certain that the country would now be able to maintain the lifestyle to which it had grown accustomed.

The times called for a new savvy. Concessions to changing global conditions would have to be made. Some scruples, such as the precise domestic arrangements of trading partners, or rules on foreign ownership, would have to be put aside.

This was the political economy of Cameronism. Everyone agreed that Britain, especially now, was a genteel legacy power; and it would have to traffic in this legacy to eke out first-world living standards.

It would mean selling off the last of the stored imperial wealth. It would mean, still more, the relentless merchandising of British heritage brands abroad. If Britain could not win the new Brics powers for liberal democracy, then it might yet win them for Dulwich College, the House of Windsor, and Macallan single malt. The new oligarchs would stash their wealth at British banks; British lawyers and law courts would handle their commercial disputes. They would hunt its fields, fish its rivers, buy its townhouses, and educate their young at its ancient schools — so many of them, in fact, that by 2016 St Paul’s School, George Osborne’s alma mater, would have to introduce a special bursary for the upper-middle classes as fees ballooned.

Few could see any alternative. Niall Ferguson, then something of a house historian to the Cameronite project, glibly predicted in 2011 that 10 years hence, Britain would be coasting off of Chinese foreign investment; Chinese purchases of Chelsea townhouses; and Chinese ownership of Scottish shooting estates.

But above all, this analysis was the making of George Osborne, Chancellor of the Exchequer between 2010 and 2016. Osborne lives in history as the austerity chancellor. Getting on for a decade after his fall, cuts to public expenditure are still held as an example of ‘Osbornomics’, and people like Rachel Reeves still feel the need to distance themselves from his legacy. But what really animated George Osborne was this diagnosis of Britain’s place in a post-Lehman world, of which David Lammy’s recent reset of relations with China is a faint echo.

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At every turn, Osborne sought to sharpen the lines that Cameron hoped would stay pleasingly blurred. As his early biographer, Janan Ganesh, notes, those Conservative colleagues who held to pre-1997 cultural views were for Osborne not merely old-fashioned but troglodytic. For someone such as David Cameron, for whom the Conservative Party is a kind of social forum, the eventual apostasy of Michael Gove and Boris Johnson over the European issue came as a genuine shock. It did not shock Osborne.

He, too, carried furthest the Cameronite idea of Britain’s place in a post-American age. When it came to business-like relations with China, it was the “Osborne Doctrine” that The Economist wrote of, not the Cameron Doctrine. For him, competition in a multipolar world demanded that Cameronism be carried to its logical conclusion: that Britain really become a svelte, socially liberal entrepôt, open for business with anyone and everyone. This was the conceit. And it forms part of an emerging folk history of the 2010s as a period of liberal oligarchy; a never-ending party for dodgy donors and Brics influence-peddlers in which nothing was sacred and all was for sale. This glittering world, as the narrative goes, was eventually brought to an end by Brexit, lockdown, and the de-globalisation that they imply.

It isn’t hard to see why. Osbornism, as a positive economic vision beyond the simple fiscal retrenchment known as austerity, quickly became associated with the fire sale of cherished national assets to overseas buyers. The beloved chocolatier Cadbury was bought by Kraft in 2010; the Chinese firm Geely acquired London’s fleet of black cabs in 2013. By 2016, up to a third of the student body of the ancient boarding schools was drawn from overseas. In a bid to attract further Chinese investment, Cameron and Osborne declined to support anti-dumping measures, sending British Steel into a tailspin that ended with its acquisition by a Shijiazhuang-based industrial concern in 2019.

Osbornism was also supposed to mean the economic dominance of London. Much was made of the idea that Osborne had enjoyed a metropolitan upbringing, and that the squirearch milieu of Chipping Norton meant little to him. For Osborne, it was said, London was Britain’s real proposition to the world: as a discreet provider of professional services, and as a global playground for Brics oligarchs. Osbornism had ostensibly created the tax and visa conditions for just this. Canary Wharf, the Shard, and a 20% stake in the London Stock Exchange were bought up by the Qataris, and the growth of a “Moscow-on-Thames” was watched with smiling equanimity. This was held to be an example of the new ruthless national accounting post-crash, funded at the expense of the luckless provinces in the country’s north.

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Capstone to the system of Osborne was the “Golden Era” of relations with China. Again, Osborne took this idea further than most. Engagement with China did not simply mean investment, but a full economic partnership. This had a logic. Before the decade was out, the European Union and the United States were once again making threatening noises about Britain’s position in Northern Ireland. In these circumstances, would it have been so bad to have in China an economic and diplomatic counterweight? The announcement, in March 2015, that Britain would be joining the Chinese-run Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) was a real coup, one that shocked and angered Washington. As one of the first practitioners of “multipolar world” theory, George Osborne had — perhaps by accident — produced a twitch of something like real strategic independence. If nothing else, Osbornism on the world stage hinted, however briefly, that there might be some alternative for Britain to the thankless enforcement of a rules-based international order, an order which, in the 2020s, does not permit Britain to control its own sea border.

These were cultural events more than they were economic ones. According to the tropes of the time, they spoke to a nation adjusting to stately poverty, whose traditional patterns of life were now sustained only by foreign money. But for Osborne, this was only what the moment demanded. Britain required a brute lesson of its place in the new world — a lesson which Osborne would administer, and of which the sale of flagship national assets was a symbol.

But there was always more theatre than reality to Osbornism. His public image was one of ruthlessness and hard choices, and so went the black cabs, the public schools, the legacy steelworks, along with other marquee national real estate like the Old War Office and the Admiralty Arch, which were both flogged on the cheap. So too was the practice — recently revealed — of selling cheese-tasting courses, magic lessons, and tennis matches with Conservative ministers to wealthy investors like Mohamed Amersi. Fiscal trifles by themselves, but seen by all as a sign of the moral compromises that Britain would now have to make. The fixation on curios like a direct flight from Manchester to China or a special visa for Chinese businessmen furnish two more examples.

All this could be presented as a kind of necessary stooping to conquer in the new Brics world, but none of them even made much money in the first place. Needless to say, no new era of svelte globalism resulted. In 2015, at the height of Osborne’s political fortunes, foreign investment stood at 1.54% of GDP — less than in France, that economic clamshell, where the figure was 1.76%. For all the talk of a “global race”, Britain left the first half of the 2010s no more globalised than it had previously been.

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What Osbornism represented, in unconscious terms, was the anxiety felt by a governing class convinced of national decline after 2008, but which baulked at the possible solutions. By 2015, there was no entrepôt and no global playground, but there was much of the attendant seaminess. This was a system that had all the trappings of an oligarchy, but none of its possible enjoyments. And this pretend oligarchy began to decompose almost as soon as it was assembled. As the British economy flickered back to life, Osborne embarked on a reversal of course that would undo much of his own work. First to be walked back on was the idea of Britain as a bolthole for the global plutocrats of tomorrow. In 2015, Osborne levied an “oligarch tax” on sales of homes by non-UK residents, and called for action against the financial networks that had been exposed in the Panama Papers. Boris Johnson, then the Mayor of London, publicly opposed both of these ideas. Barely a year before the Brexit referendum, then, it was Johnson who was cast as the defender of liberal globalisation, and Osborne who criticised its excesses — the complete opposite of later alignments.

Osborne was also the first to call time on the dominance of London. As soon as the capital began once more to turn a surplus, George Osborne cast around for ways to cream it off and spread it elsewhere. Osborne was the great sponsor of northern devolution, and patronised the idea of a directly elected Manchester mayor. And it was Osborne, not Theresa May, who first played the card of the regions, of London against the “left-behind”. Years before anyone had heard of Levelling Up, George Osborne was the champion of a Northern Powerhouse — such a champion, indeed, that the idea began to dominate talks with the Chinese during his last year in power. These kinds of hang-ups are not usually the subjects of international trade and diplomacy. It was a strange kind of myopia, and it spoke much more to a Little England self-involvement than Brexit ever did.

Flushed with victory after the election of 2015, Osborne was already putting together an agenda for his own premiership, which, among other things, would have seen state expenditure further reduced to around 35% of GDP. This, after the previous five years of cuts, was justified again and again with reference to the international situation — the need for a leaner and possibly meaner Britain in a post-American world. Had this plan succeeded, something like real economic liberalism would have been created in Britain. To accomplish it, Osborne planned to strengthen the party’s ties with those former Liberal Democrats who had delivered the victory of 2015: asset-rich, rural, generally older, either retired or disproportionately employed in the public sector.

A strange choice. Such a group, flushed with assets and state pensions, were the current economy’s main beneficiaries, and had no interest in overturning it. Osborne was attempting to carry out a programme of economic liberalism through the agency of some of the most reactionary classes in England. But as an ideology, Osbornism became evermore reliant on these places so that, in 2024, the two — by a strange twist — are now treated as virtually synonymous. In practice, Osborne’s plan to slash the size of the state was a demagogic one, and it required a demagogic course. It would have meant a popular appeal to the lower-middle classes — the only reliable constituency for economic liberalism. As with so much else, Osborne shrank from the means, and he left it to rivals Boris Johnson and Michael Gove to make such an appeal.

Osbornism, as a distinct ideology, has left almost no material legacy. It was always a politics of phrase and image, and it vanished at a word. In 2024, London is manifestly not the global playground it was meant to be. It is shifty candy stores that now set the tone of its main streets, not the scions of sheiks and the CCP. With furlough in March 2020, the six years of budgetary austerity that compromised the domestic side of this agenda were undone at a stroke, and ideas of a leaner, more competitive Britain were all but forgotten. The Emirati bid for The Spectator and the Telegraph — for which Osborne acted as a consultant — failed, and the door is now to be closed on any future such acquisitions. The Chinese investment is now largely gone, and “Moscow-on-Thames” was quickly rolled up, with old Cameronite retainers like Evgeny Lebedev now figures of suspicion. Osborne is the only national figure on the centre-right who still makes the case for a ‘Northern Powerhouse’, his old party colleagues having now soured on devolution. In 2024, the sole physical marker of Osbornism is a folly: a fairly miserable English leg of the Chinese “One Belt One Road” initiative, a rail line that shudders to a halt in a field near Barking. Far from being a vein of commerce, it is only used once a week, to ship 34 wagons of tourist merchandise to the city of Yiwu. It’s a symbol of a future that never was; an oligarchy that never was; a strange personal affect dreamt up in a moment of panic, and soon dropped.

Instead, Osbornism’s true legacy lies in its phrases, which are still with us today. It can be found in the idea that there exists a popular force of Cameron Ultras in the shires: a “Blue Wall”, whose salient characteristic is social liberalism, rather than being very rich. Whenever we are told that this entirely hallucinated demographic would have no truck with action on illegal migration or a moderation on Net Zero, we are hearing the echo of Osbornism.

As an actual agenda, though, Osbornism was a phantasm; a devilish idea that flickered briefly across the national consciousness and disappeared. What if England really was run to make money? We have yet to find out.

Cameron used all the usual arguments: the rational, the emotional and the downright cynical. He said that if Russia isn’t defeated in Ukraine it will feel emboldened to invade other countries; and that Western support for Ukraine is “extremely good value for money”, as it has weakened Russia, created jobs at home and strengthened Nato “without the loss of a single American life”. He even gave an emotional performance in which he likened US support for Ukraine’s heroic struggle to his “grandfather landing on the Normandy beaches under the cover of an American warship”.

However, Republican hardliners who have been blocking Biden’s $60-billion Ukraine aid package were not impressed. For instance, while Cameron refused to give out any details about his meeting with Trump, we can assume that the latter wasn’t too inclined to help out the same person who, in the past, has described him variously as “stupid”, “wrong” and “misogynistic”. Elsewhere, Mike Johnson, the Republican House speaker who is holding back the vote on the Ukraine spending bill, couldn’t even be bothered to find time in his diary for Cameron.

In this respect, Cameron’s fundraising mission was nothing short of a disaster — yet it is one that is indicative of a broader problem within the British political establishment: their inflated sense of self, which in turn is rooted in national delusions about the US-UK “special relationship”. Almost 80 years since Churchill coined the term, the notion that the UK enjoys a privileged “subimperial” position among America’s Western allies continues to inform the country’s self-identity as one of the world’s great powers.

The reality, however, is that for a long time this “special relationship” has existed only in the minds of British elites. As for Americans, they were already likening Britain to a “butterfly content to flutter pathetically on the periphery of the world” in the pages of Time magazine in the Seventies. American officials have continued to pay lip service to the idea of the “special relationship”, but, as a senior Obama advisor later admitted, the US-UK bond “was never really something that was very important to the United States”. He added: “From my perspective it was very important for us to mention the special relationship in every press conference that we had when the UK people were here… but really we laughed about it behind the scenes”.

Similarly, Blinken’s reference to the “infamous special relationship” during a joint press conference with Cameron in December also had a sardonic air to it. And, during Cameron’s latest visit, we can imagine that there were similar scenes of mirth behind closed doors, after the Foreign Secretary spoke in grand Churchillian tones about the UK’s and US’s common responsibility to stand up for freedom and democracy in Ukraine.

Did Cameron really believe that he could wish Washington’s own propaganda into existence? Or was this simply another opportunity for him to steal a headline in what must surely be the final months of his zombified political career? Whatever the case may be, we must assume that Cameron is perfectly aware that the US has been working for some time to “Europeanise” the war — that is, to get Europeans to bear the burden of supporting Ukraine. They’ve also probably made peace, in national security circles, with the increasing likelihood that some kind of negotiated settlement is the only way to end the conflict — even if not before the next elections. In this sense, Trump’s peace plan “to end the Ukraine war in 24 hours”, by having Ukraine surrender the provinces of Donbas and Crimes in return for the war’s conclusion, probably enjoys much greater bipartisan support in the US than most are willing to admit.

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After all, viewed in a realist sense, Washington can be said to have taken from this conflict what it wanted, in terms of driving a wedge between Europe (and Germany, in particular) and Russia, preventing the rise of a Eurasian geopolitical reality, and re-establishing America’s economic and military influence over Europe. This reality is going to remain unchanged even if the war should come to an end. Overall, then, Cameron was right to acknowledge that the US’s interests have been served quite well by the proxy war in Ukraine — for them, it really has been “good value for money”. The same, however, cannot be said of the UK — or Europe as a whole, which has suffered a huge economic blowback from the conflict, and is now facing the threat of an all-out war with Russia.

So, why is the UK leading the charge to further escalate the West’s involvement in Ukraine, doubling down on the military victory-at-all-costs narrative? Regardless of whether one takes the latter to mean the forceful return to pre-2022 or pre-2014 borders, there’s ample agreement, even in Western quarters, that either would be impossible to achieve without leading to a direct Nato-Russia war. What needs to give? And how should we explain the flippant way in which British leaders talk of how we have moved “from a post-war world to a pre-war world”?

One factor that arguably plays a role has already been mentioned: the British establishment’s distorted perception of the UK’s power. This goes a long way to explaining Britain’s increasingly aggressive posture against Russia, a country that, in military terms, dwarfs the UK in every possible respect: manpower, tanks, naval assets and aircraft. Moreover, the war in Ukraine has depleted British stocks to the point where Britain has run out of defence equipment to donate to Ukraine, while British-supplied artillery has run out of shells. As Lieutenant General Sir Rob Magowan admitted in a recent Defence Committee meeting, the UK would not be able to endure a conventional war with Russia for more than a couple of months.

One might argue that, in the eventuality of such a war, the UK would be part of a multinational Nato-led coalition. But other European countries face similar problems. As it is, the West is already unable to keep up with the artillery requirements of a geographically limited conflict such as the one unfolding in Ukraine. According to a recent estimate in the Financial Times, Russia’s annual artillery munition production has risen from 800,000 pre-war to an estimated 2.5 million, or 4 million including refurbished shells. EU and US production capacity, on the other hand, stands at about 700,000 and 400,000 respectively, although they aim to hit 1.4 and 1.2 million by the end of this year. More generally, meanwhile, it’s well understood that Nato’s armies are unprepared — in psychological as well as in military terms — for a long-running, symmetrical conventional war of the kind being fought in Ukraine, having been developed for completely different scenarios. So why are we even flirting with this possibility?

But perhaps the real question should be: how did we come to legitimise and even normalise the possibility of a large-scale war with Russia when deep down we all know that it would result in catastrophe, even if it remained limited to purely conventional measures? Our political and military leaders would likely reply that we don’t have a choice: that we are faced with an evil enemy bent on destroying us regardless of what we do. The implication is that there is nothing we can do to prevent this outcome; we can only prepare for it.

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This deterministic narrative isn’t just untethered from reality; it’s also incredibly dangerous. As Nina L. Khrushcheva, a Russian-American professor of international affairs at The New School in New York, recently said: “Putin has not shown any desire to wage war on Nato. But, by stoking fear that he would, Nato risks creating a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. Even I — a consistent critic of Putin — find this thoroughly provocative and foolish.”

The implicit message shouldn’t be underestimated: that whether Western leaders believe their own propaganda or not is irrelevant — what matters is how this is perceived in Russia. If the latter believes that Western countries are serious about the inevitability of war, it’s easy to see how it might conclude that Nato could decide to strike first at some point, and might therefore choose to pre-empt such as an attack by making the first move — as it did in Ukraine, but on a much larger scale.

This becomes all the more terrifying when we consider that we are dealing with a country armed with thousands of nuclear weapons. In the public debate, the risk of nuclear war is generally treated as an impossible scenario. Some even still maintain nuclear weapons act as a powerful deterrent against escalation.

Yet, none other than general Cristopher Cavoli, Nato supreme allied commander and head of US European Command, recently cautioned against the danger of thinking in these terms. Among other things, he noted that the US and Russia have virtually no active nuclear hotline, as they had during the Cold War, hugely increasing the risk of accidentally triggering a nuclear conflict, especially given the ongoing escalatory actions and rhetoric on both sides. “How,” he asked, “do we go ahead doing all of this and re-establishing our collective defence capability without being threatening and accidentally having the effect we don’t want?” The implication was that, by inflating the threat of war, we also risk conjuring it. And yet, only in January, it was reported that the US was planning to station nuclear weapons in the UK for the first time in 15 years.

This was the febrile context into which Cameron touched down in Washington this week, stoking further American intervention after which… who knows? In the best-case scenario, Cameron’s vanity trip will at least provide fodder for when he decides to write a second unreadable memoir. And in the worst? It’s all very good for Cameron to say that the war in Ukraine is “good value for money” — but as America’s politicians are starting to realise, the cost of nuclear war most certainly isn’t.

In one sense, it is dispiritingly obvious why Cameron is now being seen in such a positive light: the calibre of those around him. In comparison with much of the rest of the Cabinet, yes, Cameron does suddenly appear bigger. Here is a man able to walk and talk fluently into a camera saying reasonable-sounding things with confidence. And with it comes the swooning from those who wished he had never left in the first place.

What is undoubtedly true is that Cameron has succeeded in his time as Foreign Secretary, shifting Britain’s tone on the war in Gaza, almost immediately upon appointment in November 2023, from that of unconditional ally to increasingly-concerned critic. In doing so, according to his supporters at least, he has played a significant role clearing a path for the United States under Anthony Blinken to follow. Domestically, his positioning has also had the effect of making Keir Starmer seem shifty and slow — which is more than any other Cabinet minister has achieved.

Yet, let us step back for a second. This time last year, Cameron was in the United Arab Emirates teaching a course on “Practising Politics and Government in the Age of Disruption” at New York University Abu Dhabi. The idea of the programme, it seems, was how to take “long term” decisions when the world is in tumult. “One of the questions in my course,” Cameron wrote in the country’s state-owned paper, The National, was “whether states and governments are capable of long-term thinking and delivering major projects that can transform their nation’s prospects”. On this score, his host country stood out. “There is little doubt that when it comes to the UAE, the answer is a solid ‘yes’,” Cameron added glowingly. Eeesh.

This was Mr Cameron, a mere private citizen, before returning via the House of Lords for a final flourish at the top table of British politics. But this does give us the perfect opportunity to judge him by his own standards. Is his appointment evidence of the kind of “long-term thinking” that might transform a nation’s prospects, or, alternatively, exactly the kind of short-termism that marked the age of disruption?

Surely, it makes no sense that James Cleverly, who was doing a perfectly good job in the Foreign Office, was shunted over to the Home Office to learn yet another brief with almost no time to implement it. Cleverly, unlike Cameron, has a future in democratic politics and so has at least some marginal incentive to think of the long-term good of the country. Cameron’s incentives, in contrast, are entirely short term. As Foreign Secretary, he has a year — at most — to make as significant an impact as possible. Then he will be gone, almost certain never to return to frontline politics.

Cameron is running what is in effect a one-year foreign office. His policy, as such, has been to set down markers with eye-catching interventions that will shape events and, as a bonus, create a legacy for himself. Is this a foreign policy for the long term, advancing Britain’s core strategic interests? Take, for example, his warning, last month, to Republicans in Washington not to “appease” Russia. It certainly caught people’s attention: “Cameron drops all diplomatic niceties,” read one headline in the American press, later posted out by the British Embassy in Washington. “He’s getting a lot done,” ran a rather prosaic headline in The Guardian, reflecting on his first 100 days.

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But while such an intervention might have nicely burnished the Foreign Secretary’s personal creds, it did little for British influence in Washington. And that’s because Cameron does not have to think about a future relationship with Donald Trump or a majority Republican Senate. He can just say what he thinks is right for now.

As a result, there is, I am told, frustration with Cameron among some foreign embassies. Only interested in the here and now, he isn’t inclined to dedicate time to the issues which will be around long after he’s gone. We shouldn’t really be surprised. Cameron is only doing in the Foreign Office what he has always done, appealing to the blob of moderate conservative and liberal opinion in a way that looks and sounds reasonable but dissolves under the glare of long-term scrutiny.

As Prime Minister, Cameron was also fond of “candid” foreign-policy declarations that rarely lasted. On his first big trip after winning power, Cameron lambasted the EU for blocking Turkish membership. “When I think about what Turkey has done to defend Europe as a Nato ally,” Cameron declared, “it makes me angry that your progress towards EU membership can be frustrated in the way it has been.” Six years later, attempting to dismiss concerns about future Turkish immigration, Cameron said the country would not become a member “until the year 3000”.

But then, Cameron’s entire premiership was littered with foreign policy catastrophes caused by muddled strategic thinking and short-term calculations, from the disaster of Libya to the failure of Syria and, of course, the abject refusal to prepare for the prospect of defeat in the Brexit referendum.

One government minister told me the problem today wasn’t necessarily that he was wrong to change the British government’s tone on Gaza or the substance of what he said to American Senators on Ukraine, but that his conduct suited his interests far more than Britain’s. “He is pursuing standard Foreign Office policy,” the minister said. “That doesn’t mean he’s wrong. But we have to see this for what it is — a vanity trip.”

Even the former PM’s closest supporters admit that Cameron’s return to government came with an eye on his reputation which had been dragged through the mud by Brexit and the Greensill affair. As one friend put it to me, the very fact that he was seen to be having a successful time as Foreign Secretary meant he was less likely to have to return to the UAE for the big money because now he could expect more traditional opportunities to open up in big British or American firms.

Others argue that Cameron has made decisions that will stand the test of time, creating a diplomatic space from which a future Labour government will benefit, particularly over Gaza. And perhaps from his seat in the Lords, Cameron will use his rehabilitation for political gain, rather than financial, in the inevitable fight for control of the Conservative Party that will follow the next election. But should we count on that? “It’s about rehabilitating his reputation,” as one Cabinet critic put it to me. “It’s about him and his future, not ours.”

The irony is surely not lost on any of us that — at least in Cameron’s telling — the UAE has such transformative rulers committed to the long-term interests of their country, while here in Britain we have the Lord of Chipping Norton.

There is less agreement about the onset of our second bout of David Cameron. His appointment as Foreign Secretary last month roughly coincided with Xi Jinping’s first visit to the United States since 2017. The two events conspired to convey a sense of things going “back to normal” on China. There were Biden and Xi smiling together. Here was Cameron, who during his time as prime minister instigated a “golden era” of relations with China, responsible for Britain’s foreign policy.

Have we learnt the lessons of that era? Or, pandemics aside, do we remain naive about the CCP? An exchange last month between Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer at Prime Minister’s Questions offers some clues. Starmer began his attack with a jab at our new Foreign Secretary’s work with Beijing since leaving office in 2016, citing concerns expressed by the security services that Cameron’s jaunty and likely lucrative interim may have been “engineered” by the Chinese government, who clearly think they have a friend in Dave.

In response, Sunak delivered a string of official terminology: “The government’s position on China is clear: China represents an epoch-defining challenge, that’s why we have taken strong and robust steps to protect ourselves against the risk that it poses.” He went on to say he wouldn’t take lectures from Labour, who have “taken almost £700,000 from an alleged Chinese agent!” Their discussion of China ended there.

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Sunak’s accusation aimed to strike a nerve. In January 2022, MI5 issued a warning to MPs about Christine Lee, a lawyer known for her connections across the political spectrum and for donations to Labour and the Lib Dems. Lee was also known in the British Chinese community for having campaigned to raise its election turnout rates, and for an initiative to identify and promote young British-Chinese politicians.

This was not, however, a classic case of “spies expose secret information in service of public”. MI5 were alleging that Lee’s donations were engineered by the CCP, which no publicly available data seems to suggest. Lee’s work and closeness with the CCP, however, were openly described — albeit in Mandarin — on Chinese government websites, where she was named as a “director” of a body overseen by the CCP’s United Front Work Department (UFWD), which operates mostly in China but has a side-hustle running influence and interference operations abroad. This had been the case since 2018 and had been highlighted by news articles and a book on CCP infiltration published in 2020.

Lee’s connections in China were even older. In fact — and this is a key point routinely overlooked — they were a crucial part of her influence in the UK in the first place. MI5’s announcement was the first time the UFWD was named as a specific threat in the UK, but during Cameron’s “golden era”, those with connections to the UFWD were hailed by the British government as “bridge builders” and “ice breakers” and given opportunities to make money and friends in high places. Lee’s own law firm was listed as a preferred partner by the Department for International Trade up until a week or so before MI5 outed her in January 2022.

At that time, the rumour among China watchers was that MI5’s notice — which came to light amid the scandal over lockdown parties in No. 10 — had been, as one person put it, “sitting on a desk in the Home Office for a long time”. It was supposedly released by Priti Patel, then Home Secretary, to divert media attention from the lockdown parties.

Few people know whether this is true. Certainly, however, the notice has not been truly substantiated, the promise of further such notices (and an inquiry) has not materialised, and Lee is suing the Government. Hence Sunak’s surreal use of the phrase “alleged Chinese agent”. It is, after all, the Government that “alleged” Lee was an agent. There remains no alternative account of why the warning was released when it was.

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No similar notice has been issued about Xuelin Bates, a Conservative party donor who married Lord Michael Bates in 2012. During Bates’s nearly two-year stint at the Home Office, during which time he worked as under-secretary for Criminal Information, Xuelin worked as a consultant for the Chinese government while appearing at events to promote Chinese education and business alongside a convicted fraudster linked by court judgments to the proceeds of organised crime. Shortly after Bates stopped his work as a Minister of State in the Department for International Development in 2019, Xuelin was appointed to a role at the same UFWD-overseen body in China as Christine Lee.

This hardly sounds like a house well in order. Many within the British state are still surveying the damage, patching leaks, and wondering how deep the rot has set. Part of the problem is that China is not limited to conventional intelligence services such as the Ministry of State Security (MSS) and the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) intelligence wing, which are comparable — though much less constrained in their operation — to Western intelligence agencies. Rather, it operates in a far more unfamiliar, sweeping, penetrating manner with intelligence and surveillance running through the CCP at every level.

Take the UFWD, which is one of the six main CCP departments. One of its formal responsibilities is to gather intelligence on the activities of what it calls “Overseas Chinese”, which mostly includes recent or temporary Chinese-born migrants in places including the UK. For the purposes of so-called “Overseas Chinese Affairs” — a category important and well-known enough to be given a two-syllable acronym, qiaowu (侨务) — the UFWD can call upon a senior official in the Chinese embassy in London, Jiang Lei.

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Part of Jiang’s job as “Overseas Chinese Affairs Counsellor” is to go to as many “Overseas Chinese” events as possible — from sports prize ceremonies and cultural evenings to business networking meet-ups and academic conferences. At these events, Jiang can network with and offer business opportunities to all manner of people. The British Chinese businessman at the centre of the “Chinese overseas police stations” furore openly discussed the UFWD’s assistance for “Overseas Chinese” entrepreneurs in an online interview with Chinese state media.

As well as micro-managing Chinese civil society outside of China, CCP surveillance also targets Westerners. UFWD cadres tend to zoom in on an influential British person or group who appear sympathetic to China — and then seduce them with promises of funding, prestige, paid work, and useful connections. This form of “soft espionage” targets business, research, public bodies, culture, industry, and politics, shaping narratives and gathering information.

The complexity of this holistic approach partly explains why British politicians disagree so much over how to define the threat China poses. The Government’s “Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy”, published in 2021, called China “the biggest state-based threat to the UK’s economic security”, “an increasingly important partner in tackling global challenges like pandemic preparedness, biodiversity and climate change”, and more simply as a “systemic competitor”. A later version of the review called China an “epoch-defining and systemic challenge” — hence Sunak’s recital.

Many have since lined up to criticise this nauseating pick-and-mix approach, calling for China to be labelled a “threat”. But the symbolic discussion about rhetoric has also morphed into a concrete one about policy. The Government is currently drawing up plans for a formal registry of foreign influence agents. This could classify China as a “threat” in such a way that would affect the “grey-zone” activities of Lee and Bates and their ilk.

Whatever form the registry takes, it is unlikely to be a panacea. The Australian and American versions are deeply flawed. In Australia’s case, the public register introduced in 2018 was at one point spammed by former PM Kevin Rudd in an act of protest. In the US, there are unfeasibly few China-related entries, and the system functions more than anything as a way of prosecuting those who fail to register, as in the case of individuals associated with one of China’s “overseas police service stations”.

The UK government is currently consulting over exactly how the register should work, with unenthusiastic parties, such as China-facing consultancies, asked to share their concerns. Businesses have also been given the chance to state objections regarding separate powers, legislated for in 2021, that enable the Government to scrutinise investments by Chinese entities in sensitive industries. There thus remain doubts about the “strong and robust steps” Sunak referred to in the Commons — especially since there has long been a sense that big business, hooked on China’s huge market, continues to pull the Government back.

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The response of the CCP-sceptic lobby to this dynamic has been to cast doing business with China as a “risk”, and to brand moving investments out of China — or “de-risking” — as a means of protecting future balance sheets. Key to this argument have been tensions over Taiwan. If China invades, so the story goes, and if the US sanctions China, then your company will pay for not “de-risking”.

The conversation about British “de-risking” ought to be fraught. Between 2012 and 2022, China was the UK’s seventh-fastest growing export market — a significant statistic given that the six countries ahead of China were all smaller geographically than England (North Macedonia, Panama, Luxembourg, Lithuania, Switzerland, Gibraltar). Most important, however, is the fact that the UK’s bloated financial sector is massively exposed to China, by some metrics more than any other Western country.

In October, UK banks held secretive meetings about this exposure and drew up an overview that they shared with Western governments. The UK’s largest bank, HSBC, is in a particularly tight spot following attempts by a Chinese shareholder — seen off for now — to split the bank in two, with its profitable Asian business going to a theoretical China-headquartered daughter firm. The coup attempt was dealt with partly by reference from executives to healthy profits. But given that nearly half of the bank’s profits are made in China, is there any way HSBC can perform an elegant “de-risking”? Probably not, which means that if the “Taiwan risk story” comes true, the UK will suffer an exceptional hit.

With Britain facing such towering risks and diplomatic sensitivities, good judgement is required. Lost amid the outpouring of disdain for Cameron’s lobbying for Beijing is the real scandal: our new Foreign Secretary’s “epoch-defining” record of poor judgement on China.

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The key is 2013. That year, Xi sealed his position as China’s undisputed leader by releasing a communique, Document Number Nine, which stated that China was being infiltrated by “Western anti-China forces” posing a threat to the existence of the CCP, and that an aggressive counter-offensive was required. Free media, free speech, academic freedom, economic liberalism, independence movements are all bad, per Document Number Nine, and must be obliterated within China.

This was the year that Cameron chose to launch an unprecedented period of UK-China cooperation. As British civil servants, university administrators, and business executives began to devise ways to make sure Britain became China’s “best friend in the West”, CCP cadres and officials executed Xi’s aggressive counterattack.

All the while, the CCP worked hard to propagate the image of a friendly Xi, peaceful and productive. Pumping money into academic institutions and the media helped (The Telegraph, The Financial Times and The Economist have all been paid to publish CCP propaganda). This was Xi the eco-warrior, the anti-corruption crusader, the defender of globalisation. Above all, this Xi was nothing to be feared. As he told the United Nations in 2017: “For several millennia, peace has been in the blood of us Chinese and a part of our DNA.”

Document Number Nine was largely ignored in the West, but it set the tone for a transformation in Chinese society: the implementation of Xi Jinping’s personality cult, the securitisation of society, a military build-up, political purges, the neutralisation of Hong Kong, the intensification of ethnic cleansing in China’s colonies of Tibet and Xinjiang, a revolution in “Overseas Chinese affairs” work, territorial clashes with China’s Indian and Bhutanese neighbours, support for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and more assertive incursions against Taiwan and the coastal waters of the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei and Vietnam.

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Taken together, these policies make the character of Xi and his regime clear. The writing is on the wall. Yet, even now, we have only half woken up to it. Some still see Xi as peaceful, at worst merely a committed and effective “CEO China” who has amassed power “without bloodshed”, as one prominent British professor, Kerry Brown, wishes us to believe.

This is not to say that our politicians and diplomats should go out and insult China or commit to defending Taiwan or the Philippines. Nor is it to say that it is Britain’s job to challenge China on the world stage, or to follow the United States in whatever Pacific tangle it might find itself in. It is just that whatever else Britain’s China policy does, it must never again make Cameron’s mistake of taking the CCP at its word. It must guard first and foremost against the illusions that would incapacitate us.

The Romans said “Fas est et ab hoste doceri” — right it is to learn, even from the enemy. Whether or not the UK government chooses to designate the CCP as an “enemy”, we should aspire to learn from one of its favourite slogans “shishi qiushi” — seek truth from facts.

***

The views expressed here are personal, not those of UKCT.

So much of our political commentary is spent speculating about how these absurdist battles will play out. Will Keir Starmer’s judgement over Gaza be vindicated come election day? Will Rishi Sunak prove us all wrong? Is the Prime Minister showing courage or weakness in sacking Suella Braverman and bringing back David Cameron? What we all seem to agree is that history will be the judge, that when the general election comes around we will have our answers. Somebody will win and somebody will lose; one will have ridden the tide of history and the other will end up as mere flotsam. But there are currents in politics pulling at events far below the surface, often more powerful than those we obsess about in our day-to-day coverage.

“The success of… movements of protest cannot be measured by their immediate political failure,” wrote Lord Blake, the great biographer of Benjamin Disraeli, who in his earlier career led the rebel alliance of romantic Tory ultras called Young England who worshipped the old aristocratic order. By any metric, Disraeli’s Young England failed politically. And yet, for Blake, these movements cannot be understood solely by their parliamentary success, but must be regarded “as symbols and examples that lend an imaginative glow to the dull course of party politics; showing that there are other ways to fame than conformism, diligence and calculation”. The same is true today.

We must shake ourselves from the notion that victory and defeat are the only things that matter. There are other ways in which the course of a nation is affected, often with more profound consequences than what a leader says or does.

Britain’s relationship with Europe is the perfect such example. Between the Schuman declaration of 1950 — the foundational moment of today’s Europe — and Brexit, there were any number of apparently decisive moments which turned out to be less decisive than they first appeared. In 1971, the House of Commons finally voted to join the Common Market and that was that: a long-running drama came to a conclusion. Harold Macmillan, who had failed to lead Britain into the EEC the previous decade, waited in Dover to hear the news and lit a beacon to announce the historic turning point, which was then answered across the water in Calais. Four years later, the British public ratified the decision by a crushing margin in the country’s first ever referendum. The end.

As Robert Saunders captures in Yes To Europe, a triumphant Harold Wilson was hailed a political giant for his skilful handling of events. A cartoon in The Daily Express portrayed him parading in triumph through the streets of London, a Roman emperor in a chariot drawn by Ted Heath and Roy Jenkins with Margaret Thatcher throwing flowers from the sidelines. Behind him were the poor, huddled masses of Labour eurosceptics dragged along in chains. The Sunday Times summed up the wisdom of the day: “If politicians are to be judged by their ability in the end to get what they want, Harold Wilson is a great politician.” But politics has to be about more than this. While Harold Wilson got what he wanted, within a year he was gone, a broken man.

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Suellaism is here to stay

By Tom McTague

We never seem to learn this lesson. In 1977, Professor Anthony King published the first history of the referendum campaign, painting the “Yes” victory as a triumph for the moderate political centre against what would now be called the populists. King speculated what might have happened had there been a No vote: it would have undermined Wilson and Callaghan while strengthening the Labour Left. As Saunders says of King’s argument: “Benn or Foot might have become leader, opening a fissure between ‘the moderate centre’ and the ‘extreme Left’. Roy Jenkins and Shirley Williams might have left to form a new party, carrying many of their most popular colleagues with them, all of which could have had the cumulative effect of banishing Labour from power ‘for at least a generation’.” But as Saunders puts it: “This, of course, was almost exactly what happened a few years later.”

By 1980, Michael Foot was leader of the Labour Party and Thatcher had become prime minister. By 1990, Thatcher — who had campaigned for a Yes vote — had become euroscepticism’s first martyr. By 2000, the Conservative Party was preparing a “Save the Pound” election campaign and by 2010 its leader was vowing to veto the new European treaty if elected. And we all know what happened in 2020. The great current of history can move in the opposite direction from how it looks on the surface; a political riptide difficult to spot from the shore, but powerful nonetheless.

Sometimes political decisions move in one direction but the mood of a party or country moves in another. In retrospect, the Labour Right won their struggle with the Left in 1975, but were seen to have betrayed the soul of the party. Something similar happened for the Blairites after the Iraq war and for unionists after the Scottish referendum in 2014. Perhaps we are also seeing that play out now after the Brexit referendum of 2016.

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Keir Starmer should have no hope

By Richard Vinen

While this week in Westminster was extraordinary, perhaps that’s not for the obvious reasons. Suella Braverman was sacked, the Tory right had the wind taken out of its sails by the Supreme Court, David Cameron returned and Keir Starmer saw off the Left of his Party. The centre is back in charge of both political parties and, by extension, the country. Whatever happens at the next election, there will be no great changes. Our relationship with Europe, Ireland, the Middle East, China and the United States will largely remain as is. We will maintain our nuclear deterrent, the rough balance of tax and spending, education and health policies. All will be well for those who prize macro stability.

But what is happening under the surface? Who is winning the battle for the soul of each party? First, let’s take the Labour Party. The obvious point is that Starmer has emerged from this week with his authority intact and his chances of becoming prime minister enhanced. His party is now even further ahead in the polls than it was before. As things stand, he stands a very good chance of not only being elected, but serving as prime minister well into the 2030s. All this can be true and important — and for it to also be true that having a third of your parliamentary party rebel on an issue of core judgement before you’ve even become prime minister is a warning of problems to come.

Should Starmer become prime minister, foreign policy will quickly intrude on his premiership. Donald Trump might well have already won the presidency or could do so soon afterwards. It goes without saying that a Trump presidency will present particular challenges for a Labour prime minister leading a pro-European, pro-Palestinian movement. Let’s remember that Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza may still be raging in a year’s time — or even in five year’s time. The humanitarian crisis may be even more acute, the pro-Palestinian Left even more angry. Looking at the Labour party today, its foreign policy remains remarkably similar to what it might have been under Clement Attlee, Harold Wilson or Tony Blair — and yet culturally the Left has become more more anti-American, anti-Israel, and pro-European. These are not things Starmer can simply lead in another direction, only manage.

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David Cameron destroyed the Tories

By Aris Roussinos

On the Conservative side, it is hard to know where to start. There is more than a passing resemblance to John Major in the mid Nineties who, like Sunak, was more in line with establishment thinking than his own supporters’ instincts, and was forced into pathetic shows of nationalism to compensate for his overall failures of policy.

This week, Sunakism took control of the Tory party, with Cameron and other centrist figures brought into the cabinet. The prime minister’s Rwanda policy was then thrown out by the Supreme Court, who said it breached a whole array of international treaties that Britain had signed up to. In response, rather like Major’s doomed beef war with Europe, Sunak has gone to war to defend the policy, with the absurd notion that he will pass a law to simply declare the country safe. Like Major in the late Nineties, the likely result is that this will do little to ameliorate unhappiness within the Conservative Party or increase his chances of holding back the tide of support for Labour, which has declared its opposition to the scheme.

Perhaps the most important thing here is not whether Sunak will succeed or fail with his approach, but what will happen to the mood in the Conservative Party. From 1997 onwards, Britain’s place in the European Union seemed to grow ever more secure as Tony Blair triumphed signing up to one treaty after another, only for the Conservative parliamentary party to grow ever more sceptical until, eventually, the sceptics won.

Today, you have to wonder what is going to happen to Britain’s membership of the European Convention of Human Rights. Suella Braverman has been kicked out of the cabinet, but will Suellaism eventually take hold of the Conservative soul? This will not be decided in a single election, or even multiple elections, but by trends working away under the surface, buffeted by events, stories, scandals and political groupings operating beyond the remit of mere leaders, lending Blake’s “imaginative glow to the dull course of party politics”.

Braverman may never become Tory leader. She may end up leading a faction in parliament that suffers defeat after defeat, like Bill Cash in the Nineties or Tony Benn in the Eighties. But that doesn’t mean her politics will die or Britain’s membership of the ECHR will remain secure. The same is true of the Labour Left, which will not disappear simply because Keir Starmer triumphs in 2024 or does not.

Politics is not some placid, obedient sea able to be parted by whichever Moses is in charge at that moment. It is tidal and choppy, issues, constantly being shaped not just by leaders and calculation, but by events, scandals, ideas and, yes, the losers of politics.

In the past four years, we have had six Home Secretaries (including Braverman twice), four Prime Ministers, and eight Housing Ministers; in the past seven years of great geopolitical danger, we have had seven Foreign Secretaries. At around a year, the lifespan of those holding the great offices of state is as evanescent as that of a caged hamster, and their labours just as futile. If every Government minister resigned today, and let the civil service run the country until Starmer’s formal assumption of power, nothing meaningful would change.

But still the play drags on. In a desperate act of political necromancy, Sunak summoned Cameron from his lush Cotswolds exile to mark the end of the Conservative populist experiment. The Brexit referendum, which the former prime minister called and lost, was as much a rejection of his own record as of the distant European Union: of his underinvestment in infrastructure and demolition of state capacity, his failure to manage immigration, his reshaping of the British economy as a pliant provider of services to Chinese, Russian and Qatari capital, and of his misbegotten adventure in Libya, still collapsing African states like dominoes to this day. 

Through their pursuit of austerity, the Cameron and Osborne dyad created our current penumbra of decay and underinvestment. Britain’s trajectory of relative decline makes any town even in notionally prosperous southeast England visibly poorer and more neglected than a town of corresponding size in Poland or East Germany. In real terms, British workers are still worse paid than when Cameron came to power. 

Arguably then, Cameron did more than Blair to midwife 2020s Britain in all its squalid dysfunction. His was perhaps the last period when the unintended consequences of the Blairite revolution could have been painlessly undone; instead, he bedded them in, cementing Blair’s destructive post-1997 innovations as sacrosanct pillars of the eternal British constitution. The dismal calibre of Tory politicians we suffer today is the direct result of the selection procedures Cameron introduced, in an effort to weed out conservative thought from representation in the Conservative Party. Like Cummings’s recent appearance as a humble penitent before the Covid enquiry, subjecting himself to the mercy of a system he once wished to overthrow, Cameron’s return to Westminster is the symbolic endpoint to the Brexit revolution: whether or not the system is capable of reform, the Conservative Party is not the vehicle to achieve it. 

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Who will save us from boarding-house Britain?

By Aris Roussinos

Reform of the British state should have been carried out quietly, with an air of unruffled competence just as Blair achieved, in an administrative revolution imperceptible to surface-skimming lobby journalists. Instead we were given years of shrill noise, breakneck Westminster gossip, and inaction. As a result, through its own dysfunction, the Conservative Party has managed to place all British conservatives in the role of dissidents: increasingly hostile to institutions of the state — the police, the judiciary, border guards — that are in other European countries seen as the bedrock of conservative order. 

How many times must we write the same obituary? The effigies to be sculpted may change with ever-increasing rapidity, but the cause of death remains the same. The Conservative Party was a victim of its own electoral success: in constructing a ruthless vehicle for achieving power, it forgot that power is merely a temporary means to achieve lasting ideological ends. It is doubtful that it is in the interests of British conservatism for the Conservative Party to survive the next election, but if it does, it must use its time out of office to define its core aims and how to achieve them if ever granted power again.

The useful analogy, perhaps, is with America’s distinct but parallel attempt to ride the populist wave of discontent. The Trump administration, in its first iteration, was similarly chaotic, facing similar hysterical opposition from an ideologically hostile press and equivalent internal sabotage by dissident state functionaries. There too, at the end, public officials took care to signal their opposition to their notional political masters and their loyalty to the incoming regime. But where America differs from Britain is the overall vitality of its organised conservative movement.

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Suellaism is here to stay

By Tom McTague

As the likelihood of Trump returning to power grows, American conservative ideologues have spent the past few years devising a comprehensive strategy for effective governance. The Project 2025 strategy centres on the parallel belief that “the federal government is a behemoth, weaponised against American citizens and conservative values”, a politicised deep state which serves in practice to stifle Republican rule. An entire waiting cadre of loyal officials has been recruited, trained and motivated to reform American governance at every level from the first day of the second Trump administration. Whether or not the results will be positive for the country, experience of political failure has given the Republican Party a purist ideological zeal, a theory of governance and a desire to impose its will entirely absent from their British equivalents. Where Republicans recruit and nurture loyal conservative footsoldiers, the Conservative Party weeds them out like unwanted gatecrashers at a garden party: the results are as we see.

The ongoing Tory civil war, reignited first in the letter from the New Conservatives accusing Sunak of betraying the Red Wall realignment, and then in Braverman’s poisonous dissection of the Prime Minister’s failings, is surely no longer a campaign to win a last few dismal months in Downing Street, but instead a battle for what comes next: either a vision for a new iteration of the party, harder-edged and keener to win, or the opening salvoes of a new Right-wing force in British politics. Perhaps the Conservative Party’s surviving remnants, dusting off the rubble of defeat, will follow their American equivalents in political exile by addressing the causes of their failure directly, and by devising a strategy for governance underpinned by a meaningful conservative philosophy. But the causes of popular dissatisfaction remain as livid as ever, the popular mood more febrile, and the desire for radical change grows ever more insistent. 

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Will Dominic Cummings destroy Westminster?

By Aris Roussinos

The brutal October 7 Hamas attack on Israel has been theorised as a case of catastrophic success for the terrorist group, and much the same could be said of the Conservative Party’s current term in office. The 2019 election was a victory from which the Conservatives may never recover: they have been buried beneath their own landslide. The voting public granted the Tories the opportunity to remake Britain in their image, and unfortunately for us they succeeded. 

But as well as euthanising Braverman’s ministerial career, events in the Middle East remind us, through the very existence of the state of Israel, that even the most unlikely sounding political visions, undertaken in the least propitious circumstances, are eminently achievable. As Herzl famously declared: “If you will it, it is no dream.” The demands of the British public for a stable, secure and prosperous nation are not impossible to satisfy. For all its relative decline, Britain retains vast untapped potential waiting to be unlocked, requiring only sufficient political vision, will and discipline to do so. In ridding ourselves of the Conservative Party, we may yet birth a vigorous and reformist British conservative movement. 

Just over a year ago, Sunak claimed his mandate to govern came from Boris Johnson’s victory in 2019, a victory that was, he insisted, “not the sole property of any one individual” but that of the entire party. “And the heart of that mandate is our manifesto,” Sunak declared triumphantly outside No 10. “I will deliver on its promise.” 

Within a year, Sunak had junked it completely: corporation tax was hiked to 25% and HS2 scrapped. Sunak then spun these moves as part of a new mission to end the “30-year political status quo” which he wasn’t a part of. Then, a month later, he sacked Suella Braverman and made David Cameron Foreign Secretary.

In terms of short-term political tactics, there is a certain logic at work. The story — for a day or two at least — is no longer about the former Home Secretary or the “hate marches” that have so divided the Conservative Party since the mass slaughter of Israelis on October 7. But what are voters supposed to make of it all? Is Sunak still out to end 30 years of political failure? Or just the past seven years of failure since Cameron was last in office? 

The reshuffle reveals the terminal nature of the crisis now facing this Government. These are its dying spasms. A year ago, Sunak tried to resuscitate the Johnson coalition by appointing Braverman Home Secretary. The gambit inevitably failed. Johnson’s coalition was gone by the time Sunak took charge, killed by Partygate and Truss’s mini-budget. Sunak then tried the hopey-changey thing, but voters hated it, with polls at the weekend predicting a landslide defeat for the Tories worse than in 1997. Now Sunak seems to be trying to rebuild the Cameron coalition that was upended by Brexit. But Cameron’s coalition is also long gone. 

And the war for the future of the Conservative Party has begun.

For the Conservative Left, Cameron’s appointment to Foreign and Braverman’s sacking from Home is long overdue. “The fanatical fringe we call the Tory hardline Right will be the death of modern Conservatism unless Tories wake up to the reality that these people are not the party’s friends,” Matthew Parris wrote in The Times on Saturday, urging Sunak to sack Braverman. The most obvious option for Sunak would have been Kemi Badenoch, who also shares similarly “sound” views about cultural issues, but does not carry with her the same sort of melodrama. Had Badenoch been promoted to the Home Office, there would at least have been a semblance of intellectual coherence about this reshuffle. As one senior Tory who is fond of Cameron put it to me yesterday: “This isn’t a strategy, it’s about shafting your enemies.”

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Don't be fooled by the march for peace

By Giles Fraser

The political story here, then, is simple: Sunak defenestrating the Right of the party. It is, in a sense, Sunak’s coming-out party: the moment he reveals his real politics. He will now fight the next election as a moderate, liberal conservative. The problem for Sunak is that while Braverman might easily be discarded, Suella-ism will prove much harder to get rid of. Ultimately, she is expressing a feeling about modern Britain that is shared within the Conservative Party — beyond the fringes of its hard Right.

In many respects, Braverman’s downfall is her own fault: she botched her attack on the police in The Times, failed to clear it properly with No. 10, went too early and failed to use the power of her office to achieve concrete results. Braverman is far from the first Tory Home Secretary to take on the police; she is just the least successful. Theresa May, remember, took them on in 2015 and won. 

At the heart of Braverman’s attack on the police is a much more interesting ideological shift taking place in the Tory party, and one, whatever its faults, that has a far more coherent story to tell about British politics over the last 13 years than Sunak has yet to come up with. Her story is this: the Conservative Party has failed. It won elections, but failed to change the country. Yes, it took Britain out of Europe, but — and here is the essence of Suella-ism — the Blob remains in charge: the courts remain all-powerful, schools promote their own ideology, police declare that “jihad doesn’t mean jihad”. It is time, she insists, to take back control.

One fundamental mistake people make with politics is to constantly seek to dismiss people they don’t like as a throwback to some distant era. As such, Braverman is a modern-day Enoch Powell, or little more than the latest incarnation of the Tory party’s unchanging, loopy hard Right. But far more interesting is to see politicians for what they are: expressions of the Britain that exists now, with all its anxieties, paranoias, prejudices and complexities. Keir Starmer is not Harold Wilson — he is the leader of an altogether new Labour party, representing a new coalition of voters, which is why he is finding the crisis in Gaza so challenging. Likewise, the concern for those who so obviously loathe Braverman should be that she is touching a nerve about today’s Britain.

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Hard truths about Britain's immigration crisis

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

I have felt a sense of gnawing unease that something fundamental has changed in the country since October 7, and perhaps even in the West; as if we’re living through some kind of great national argument where things are being said that cannot ever be unsaid, images seen that cannot be unseen. The Braverman battle with the Met is part of this national row, but only one part of it. 

In the four weeks since Hamas’s orgy of slaughter, we’ve had four mass demonstrations in London, all in support of Palestine, which, taken together, amount to the biggest display of antisemitism in Britain since the Thirties, even though the vast majority of protesters were not hate-filled. In response, unlike France, we’ve had no mass display against antisemitism or sense of outrage at the hostages currently being held in Gaza, only a mob of nationalist hooligans rampaging around London looking for a fight. I can well understand why, for many Jews, this has been a far more profoundly unsettling moment than I can ever comprehend.

The images that I have found most unnerving over the past weeks are the little acts of social breakdown that now seem to be bleeding through everyone’s Instagram reels and Facebook accounts: the thugs in balaclavas surrounding the one lone man brave enough to stand with a placard likening Hamas to Isis; the fights breaking out in train stations; the racists on buses asking if passengers are Jewish; the placards calling Suella Braverman and Rishi Sunak “coconuts”. Even the degree of violent, elemental loathing for Braverman which seems to be considered fair game hints towards something darker underneath. “She’s fucking gross,” spat the comedy-commentator Jonathan Pie in one of his recent videos. “Full of hate and bile and lies; just lies and filth; utter filth that comes out of that monster’s mouth.”

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Rishi Sunak's pointless revolution

By Tom McTague

We’ve lived through moments of murderous trauma before, of course: 9/11, 7/7, Charlie Hebdo, Lee Rigby, the Bataclan. But have any been quite as psychologically successful as this one in revealing quite so much division, quite so quickly? Each of the previous terrorist attacks brought about a moment of cohesion. The opposite has happened here. Part of this seems to be the nature of the violence that was on display. September 11 was purposefully cinematic in its scale; October 7 in contrast was made for the mobile phone: genocidal snuff pornography, its depravity the point. A pogrom designed to divide — and so it has.

It would take a brave soul to believe that the removal of Suella Braverman and the appointment of David Cameron as Foreign Secretary can somehow whisk us back to a time before the division, when common sense and level heads reigned. This wasn’t true then and isn’t now. If she wants to win the Tory leadership, Braverman is going to have to explain why she achieved so little in office. But whatever happens to Braverman herself, the Tory liberals are going to need a better story to explain their own failure if they are to defeat Suella-ism in the long term.

It’s been a while since anyone would believe any ascribed quote on Twitter. In my trembling little bubble at least, people have been saying the site is clinically dead for at least two years — although admittedly I do follow a lot of tired, cynical journalists. And let me tell you, they are mad as hell, and they are not going to take it anymore. In real terms, freelance rates are lower than they were in the last millennium. No wonder so many of them decided the only route to solvency was to monetise themselves. Those of us who remained on the Twitter mothership during and after the pandemic watched an exodus of solo shuttlecraft head into the new media business-model troposphere. There they remain in geo-stationary orbit, a flotilla of atomised Substacks.

Everyone seems sort of resigned now to social media becoming less interesting and to us all spending less time on it. Nothing lasts forever. Twitter went from agreeable agora (c.2008) to brittle umbrage mill (c.2012) to enraged existential mobclash (c.2016) to a colourised trench-warfare horror scene. Then, it was sold.

It felt odd. Twitter always had the illusion of being, not publicly owned exactly, but common land at least. It was just there, like the roads and parks and pavements and internet. Suddenly it was worth $44 billion? Oh, but there was worse to come. The self-acknowledged Coolest White Guy on Earth had bought the site. And, excitingly, there was even worse to come. Artificially Intelligent Caligula was about to implement his Plan:

Phase 1: Sack all non-suck-ups and losers.
Phase 2: Wipe 70% off market value (totally cool, hold your nerve bro).
Phase 3: Invite back all the weird angry people previously banned.
Phase 4: Change name from Twitter (lame) to X (super-cool, mysterious).
Phase 5: Introduce frequent ad hurdles to acclimatise users to revenue grooming.
Phase 6: Introduce blue-tick charge to acclimatise users to subscription fracking.
Phase 7: Kick back. Wait for the world to deal with radical vibe shift.

It’s a far cry from those calm, underpopulated early days. Remember being on Twitter then, when it felt like everybody was in a social media sitcom. Silly puns and harmless banter — on one level, it seemed a shortcut to sophistication. There you were at some psychedelic Algonquin Round Table, wisecracking with preposterously accessible famous people as if you belonged there. Bloody hell, Caitlin Moran just retweeted a gag of mine and I’ve got 500 new followers! Ooh, Stephen Fry liked something I said and now I’ve got people in my timeline saying things like “Ahoy old chap!” Oh good, Piers Morgan’s alerted his adoring fans to some crack I made about Test Match Special and now I’ve got a dickhead with numbers for a name saying something horrible about a photo of my baby granddaughter.

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A brief history of profanity

By Ian Martin

At another level, it was an infant-school playground with randoms tearing around making friends in a hurry. I started to follow a very wide spectrum of people interested in comedy and music and politics and beyond. I now look back to 2008 and realise that the overwhelming majority of my current non-professional friends were made then, on Twitter. We’d meet occasionally in Soho pubs, and everyone was exactly like the online version of themselves.

Maybe it was possible to build a social media community, but how would that work? By simply assembling a genial cross-section of liberal-Left Twitter? No. In a real community, you’re not shouting about Daily Mail headlines in the street. You have no idea what Sheila over the road’s views on Self-ID are, or what the builder at number 36 thinks about Just Stop Oil. I mean, you have an inkling. But their precise positions are not articulated in pithy, unequivocal one-liners in block capitals filling their front windows. I don’t know what your street’s like, but the most we’ve had around here was a Not My King sign and a missing tortoise poster.

The golden age of Twitter, like that of the fabled pre-war Edwardian version, was simply a long summer with benevolent weather. 2009 was the turning point for me. We still had a Labour government, just. My carefully curated Twitter circle was a model village of civilised people, insulated from the hateful wrongness of the outside world. Then, as now, the one thing Twitter was really good at was breaking news, which was the usual slurry of national misery and international catastrophe, with little shards of personal tragedy.

And, inevitably, tragedy sometimes happens to people you don’t like. David Cameron’s six-year-old son Ivan, who had severe epilepsy and cerebral palsy, died suddenly. Cameron paid a moving tribute to the NHS staff who had cared for him. Prime Minister Gordon Brown (weird, typing that phrase) had himself lost a child, and spoke on behalf of all of us when he offered heartfelt condolences.

Well, nearly all of us. By then Twitter encouraged people to bark their own brutal truth to power. One of the people I followed tweeted with a shrug that the net result of Ivan Cameron’s death was one fewer potential Tory in the world. I stared and stared at it, trying to discern some reflexive, ironic meta-joke I hadn’t quite understood — but no, that was the whole tweet. Child’s death, silver lining. I told the person that it was a horrible thing to say. They refused to apologise, and explained that they struggled with tone. Who was the real victim here?

Clearly, if I could be shocked, it was because I had been hypnotised by the geniality of my magic circle. Perhaps following a few arseholes would give me some perspective. After all, we don’t like everyone in an actual community, do we? Even people we like wind us up now and then. Maybe mixing a few bad people into my Follows would make this illusory community more “real” somehow. I started with a few easy ones, including the exotically named Iain Martin, my alternative-reality centre-Right counterpart. I was always getting abused for something he’d written; he’d got mistaken for me a few times.

But I wanted to see what it would be like if you followed only terrible people. For a month, I went experimentally dark. I followed Westboro Baptist church members, Holocaust deniers, Islamophobes, homophobes, all the phobes, all personally wounded by the injustice of “these people” just being in their eyeline. Misogynists were everywhere, social media affirming the warning Germaine Greer had sounded half a century earlier — that women have very little idea of just how much men hate them. Now, they had a very keen understanding of exactly how much. There were men, hating them graphically, cruelly, dismissively, in plain sight.

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Who will rule Twitter next?

By Aris Roussinos

Sometimes, I tried engaging. A few of the hateful people were perfectly civil. I had several conversations with a cheerful woman from Sarah Palin’s office who had every sympathy for me, living in England under the yoke of Marxism. She told me how the NHS worked (death panels, population control) and how Birmingham was a Sharia state. No guns, that was our problem.

Not many of the other accounts I followed seemed to do light conversation. Confederate Nazis called me the worst thing they could think of (gay) and wished unimaginative ill upon me, with unimaginative swearing. Someone even went to the trouble of opening a Twitter account in my name, simply to post me warnings. The just-for-you revenge Twitter account became a thing. The nastier ones, as always, were targeting women, set up by men obsessed with their former partners. I had my own for a while, bless him. Definitely a him. He followed only me, posted to only me. By the time he sighed his last message, he seemed exhausted by the whole enterprise: “I hope that everyone you ever loved is dead.”

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By Kathleen Stock

It’s tempting, of course, to project my own weary old man’s vibe shift — weltschmerz to ennui — onto the blank, threadbare screen. The renamed site may be under new management, but everyone seems to be doing that Unicode “shrug” emoji, expecting not a renewal but a gentle unmooring. Approximately nobody is ever going to call it X. Twitter will remain a vital channel for mutual support groups, for campaigners, for people plugging their work. But honestly, in terms of human interaction, it was always faddish. That was its point. It was born to die.

Twitter and I are losing interest in one another; it can’t even be bothered to pester me with vaguely relevant ads. Like many others, I’m just running down the clock now as it enters its Sunset Boulevard phase. It’s slowly leaving me, not the other way round.

It’s hard to shake the feeling of parliamentary necrosis within the Tory party. In the last few weeks, around a dozen MPs have indicated they will be stepping down at the next election. The party is decaying before our eyes.

At every election, a few old faces and former big-wigs shuffle off the stage, but what is striking now is the youth and vigour of those announcing their early exit. Chloe Smith, Chris Skidmore, and Andrew Percy were Bright Young Things of the Cameron era and are still barely into their forties. William Wragg, elected in 2015, is 34, while Dehenna Davison, the breakout starlet of the Red Wall, is only 29. This is not the stream of usual retirements, but an exodus of some of the party’s most promising hopes for the future.

Equally, it seems like those who could form the backbone of an opposition cabinet are mulling their options. Though none has explicitly handed in their badge, Matt Hancock’s appearance on I’m A Celebrity suggests that he will be standing down, having irritated both the whips and his local association by spending a fortnight chowing down on kangaroo penis rather than attending to their political needs. Michael Gove, despite his renewed interest in housing and Levelling Up, also feels like he is easing his way to retirement.

It’s not hard to see why they might step away. Most of those who have announced they are off represent seats the Tories won on the way back to government and are likely to lose on the way down. For some, this is exacerbated by the proposed boundary changes. Fighting an electoral battle is a gruelling experience, especially when you anticipate losing comprehensively. Even if they do defy the current polling, these MPs would find themselves on the opposition benches for the first time — denied both the chance to chase ministerial briefs and to get stuff done.

The departure of so many young MPs, however, points towards the changing nature of how we see parliament — less of a vocation, more of a career choice. For much of the 20th century, those who went into parliament at a young age stayed in and around politics for life. Harold Macmillan was first elected to parliament in 1924, three decades before he reached the highest office (and more than six before he gave his final speech in the Lords). Churchill’s parliamentary career spanned 64 years, and like Macmillan he found himself losing seats before staging a comeback. On the other side of politics, Attlee served a similar time. Those who only stayed in office a term or two tended to have entered politics late, a nod to public service in their later years.

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By contrast, the trend of youngish MPs returning to private life seems to be increasing. Labour’s opposition period also saw young MPs walking away, whether they were established (David Miliband) or up-and-coming (Tristram Hunt). These departures, like some of the Tory ones, were partly tied to ideological disagreements with their own side and the prospect of a long time in opposition, but also the increasing onerousness of being an MP.

A parliamentary career was once seen as a rather gilded time of public service. It appealed to the bright and young who wanted to change the world, often off the back of early success in private life, and the elder statesmen who fancied some time giving something back. Now it is a far less appealing prospect. Increasingly, constituency workloads have placed more demands on the time of parliamentarians, while social media has exposed them to new levels of abuse. The generosity of the expenses regime has been curtailed, and salaries have lagged compared to the outside world. Though still nearly three times the median wage, an MP’s pay is likely lower than an inner-London headteacher’s, never mind comparable private-sector roles.

As the incumbent party staring into the wilderness, the Tories are going to feel the brunt of this. This will be compounded by the general malaise which haunts the party; its inertia means few will feel that the party is going in their direction, or that the period in opposition will be a brief one. An early, dignified exit might well seem preferable to defeat or a lacklustre term watching Labour enjoy themselves.

This unwinding will only magnify the Conservative Party’s problems. Losing experienced MPs in winnable seats as well as those that go to Labour will increase the damage done. The Tory opposition will lack institutional memory and parliamentary experience. It’s hard to keep the government on its toes when you are still finding your feet in Westminster. Meanwhile, returning MPs will have significant sway over the post-defeat direction of the party. The narrower this group is, the narrower the road becomes.

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Britain's squalid housing crisis

By Mary Harrington

This is not just a problem for the party, but for politics too. Poor oppositions allow poor governments to flourish without proper scrutiny. Equally, the longer it takes for the Tory party to be rebuilt (or, indeed, replaced) the more one-sided our politics may remain. It’s essential to have the balance there to hold Labour to account, and to make an active case for Right-of-centre politics. In an era where people are becoming more disillusioned with democracy, the retreat of one party could be dangerous.

In the meantime, rebuilding the parliamentary party will become even more difficult as the party’s popularity diminishes. The Conservatives have always relied on a vanguard of talented wunderkind to shape and lead the party — the post-war intake of 1950 had Heath, Macleod, Maudling (and Powell), while Clarke, Howard and the rest of the Cambridge Mafia sustained the party through the late Eighties and Nineties. Cameron and Osborne led the party back to power while still under 50, and now the mantle has passed to the youthful Sunak. Each generation brought with it a fresh energy to the political problems of the day. Now they seem to be fleeing.

Where the next vanguard comes from is unclear. The Tory vote has collapsed among younger people, with some polls suggesting the party is at single-figure support in the under-50s  The party is especially struggling with the professionals it used to tempt into the parliamentary party. Failing to connect with these voters not only harms the party’s long-term electoral process but narrows the pipelines of potential MPs. At the same time, a party’s ideas are defined by its people, and the fewer young MPs the less it will be connected to the needs of those demographics.

On an individual level, the actions of these MPs are entirely rational. Their political career is likely to be ended at the next election and stepping down now is beneficial for everyone — the party has a chance to select a new candidate well in advance, and the MPs can have the pick of the best jobs they might be offered. They also get to ease away over the next year or so, spending more time with their families after years of what can be a very isolating job.

For the party, however, it feels like a symptom of hastening decline. MPs are drifting away, not even committed to the pretence that they might win. Equally, they seem to show little interest in the rebuilding project and fightback that is likely to be needed. For the rest of this parliament, it will make them harder to control, with little to fear from the games of the whips. Moreover, unless managed well, this lack of optimism will infect the bloodstream of the backbenches, making them more likely to stand down or just check-out.

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Where are the one-nation Tories?

By David Jeffery

As the rot sets in, more MPs will be looking to polish their CVs. Public affairs and lobbying firms will offer handsome remuneration without abusive DMs or Saturday mornings knocking on doors. Matt Hancock will likely try to follow Ed Balls and Michael Portillo into the world of inoffensive TV. It’s hard to blame them, with their lack of enthusiasm matched by many Tory members, activists and voters.

The worrying thing for the party, though, is where the infusion of new, hungry talent might come from. If the necrosis spreads too far, too fast, there will be no recovery. The Conservative Party will decompose — leaving Labour, and Britain’s voters, deprived of any meaningful Opposition.

What was it about the final years of Blair’s premiership that ensured his political legacy? There’s the obvious point that when he became PM it was his first and only job in government and he had energy but no experience. By the time he left, he knew exactly how to get things done but was running out of road.

I was Blair’s Political Secretary between 2005 and 2007 and had a front row seat for the end of the “Blair Years”. They were rugged times. There were new opponents on the benches opposite with the election of David Cameron as Tory leader. And there were old enemies on manoeuvre on the Labour benches, as Brown’s attempts to dislodge Tony became increasingly obvious and frantic. Remember the rolling resignations of the Parliamentary Private Secretaries — Khalid Mahmood, Wayne David, Ian Lucas, Mark Tami, David Wright and Chris Mole? Probably not, but it was the “How many letters have been submitted?” moment of its day.

Eventually, Labour MPs were ground down by the relentless friendly-fire attacks and Blair stood down as PM in May 2007, a year earlier than he had planned. Yet he never became bitter. I remember a meeting in the Den, the PM’s room between the private office and the Cabinet Room, when a colleague exasperatedly said: “But Gordon just wants to be Prime Minister!” After a moment’s reflection, Tony replied: “It’s not an ignoble ambition.” Thoughtful and scrupulous.

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The only way Boris can survive Partygate

By John McTernan

The Labour Party’s internal wrangling was an opportunity Cameron seized. He repeatedly found ways to create alliances with Labour rebels to oppose government policy — the core was the awkward squad which included Corbyn who voted with the Tories numerous times. But the number of rebels was growing. It is an iron law of politics that ministers who serve loyally when in the government suddenly find their consciences when they return to the backbench in a reshuffle. Where once they had demanded the whips push through their policies, they now found their personal and political integrity required them to question — and often oppose — government legislation.

By the third term, there had been many reshuffles and the number of former ministers outweighed our majority. In response to this, I ran a small group we called the “Non-embittered Former Ministers”. We also added Keith Hill as the Prime Minister’s PPS. A former union official, he added reach to our political networks among MPs, and every week allocated the precious hour after Prime Minister’s Questions when backbenchers got to meet with the PM to raise concerns, float policy ideas or introduce guests. On one memorable occasion, I brought Shakira in to meet the Prime Minister — she was in Westminster for a parliamentary event. Tony started to explain that he knew her music and admired the way it combined Colombian music traditions with modern American pop music. “Ah”, replied Shakira — silencing us all. “So you think I am some kind of allegory of globalisation?”

But it wasn’t all about party management. There was the pressure, too, of external inquiries. This was the first time the Metropolitan Police had ever investigated Number 10 — a complaint from an SNP backbencher that should have been dismissed immediately as party politics led instead to the “cash for honours” probe. In the absence of any evidence, the Met spent 18 months trying, and failing to find any. The PM’s behaviour was respectful: he let it be known that being interviewed under caution would be a resigning matter — a contrast with the attitude of the current Prime Minister. And he unreservedly backed the few of us, including myself, who were questioned by the police. His confidence that it would come to nothing was morale-boosting during a deeply stressful period.

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New Labour was beyond parody

By Ian Martin

In the end, third terms should be critical for legacy. Margaret Thatcher’s third term, despite the disaster of the “poll tax”, embedded and made irreversible many of her changes. The task New Labour set itself was to leave most of the Tory reforms, but to rebalance some and to rebuild the public square which had been brutally neglected. So, mass picketing and car park show of hands strike ballots were left outlawed, but workers rights were extended, in particular with maternity rights and the statutory right to bank holidays on top of annual leave. The “right to buy” your council home was maintained, but two million social homes were renovated to Decent Homes standards. Choice in health and education was built on, and extended, while waiting lists were slashed — with a now nearly unimaginable guarantee of an 18-week wait for routine treatment.

In turn, most of Blair’s reforms became irreversible. The National Insurance increase to fund the NHS was kept, and has been mimicked by Boris Johnson’s government. Health performance has been hampered by persistent underfunding, the pandemic, and the ill-fated Lansley reforms which are now being abandoned — but the NHS was kept on the road by appointing former Blair adviser Sir Simon Stevens as Chief Executive of NHS England.

There were also significant moments. The G8 meeting in Gleneagles in 2008 deciding to make poverty history by wiping out the debt of heavily indebted countries in the Global South. London winning the bid for the 2012 Olympics. And the tragedy of the 7/7 bombings which drew great compassion and leadership from Blair.

Of course, Blair’s leadership ended in resignation, and New Labour’s third term ended in defeat for Brown. Unfortunately, for a decade party members took the quixotic view that the only reason voters elected increasingly Right-wing Tory governments was that Labour was insufficiently Left-wing. And under Miliband and Corbyn the party moved further and further away from the centre and further and further towards destruction.

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Tony Blair's war on reality

By Mary Harrington

Blair didn’t despair. He made the argument about how Labour could win again. And he has consistently continued to make critical policy interventions — such as driving the argument on vaccination rollout. This strategic patience has paid off. The true legacy of the 2005-2007 Blair government is finally becoming clear. Labour’s desire to win is back. Policy ideas are unashamedly Blairite. And Starmer’s mantra “Opportunity, Security, Respect” could come straight from a Tony Blair conference speech.

History will be the ultimate judge of Tony’s reputation. It will weigh the Iraq war against the Good Friday Agreement which ended the war in Northern Ireland. For Labour Party members and activists it has thankfully settled into the realisation that Labour’s electoral record in the last eleven elections is: Lose, Lose, Lose, Lose, Win, Win, Win, Lose, Lose, Lose, Lose. And the only way to win is to build on Tony Blair’s record rather than spurn it.

Every Thursday: eminent guests and student debaters meet in the hall. It has been a House of Commons for speechifying embryos since 1823. Points of order; references to honourable gentleman; rules-based pedantry; pomposity; ambition. “An incomparable school of politics”, Jan Morris called it.

The show is watched by the fish-cold marble faces of grown up to grandeur Union men: Gladstone, Asquith, Curzon, Macmillan, and Salisbury. To speak here is to join an exclusive club. To speak well here may be the first croaking syllables towards ultimate power. One day: you — yes, you boy! — can be a bust.

The Union is where Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, and Jacob Rees-Mogg began their political ascents. But, as you may have gathered, Oxford has launched more than contemporary Tories. The university’s yellow-grey colleges educated Dr Johnson and Sir Walter Raleigh, the only English Pope, Earl Hague and Shelley, ten Viceroys of India, VS Naipaul and Bill Clinton. Oh, and the Financial Times columnist Simon Kuper.

It was summer, 2019. People who read the FT were still unsure why Brexit happened, beyond knowing that whatever made it happen was not good. At that moment Kuper appeared, and wrote an article that was so delicious, and so put-all-the-dots-together, it immediately went viral. What machine spat out Brexit? Oxford. Which wackily irresponsible creche raised Boris Johnson? Oxford. The reason Kuper provided was not good. An old story (unearned privilege; naughty toffs) that has always chilled Britain’s fretful not quite upper-middle classes. It was just what Remainers wanted to read. Finally, an explanation that satisfied all their priors.

Now the viral article is a short and typical non-fiction book. Chums: How A Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK. Kuper’s story is simple. One afternoon he flicked through some old Cherwells, where he had been a student journalist in the late Eighties, and realised that the names there were the same ones bothering the pages of the Times in the late 2010s. Gove, Cameron, and Johnson; Hunt, Hannan, and Rees-Mogg. He had covered them back then, and here they were again, running Britain into the ground by levering it out of the EU. “Though we didn’t realise it, we were witnessing British power in the making,” Kuper writes of his time at Oxford.

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What Oxford taught me about posh people

By James Rebanks

The Brexiteers were not just Brexiteers. They were Oxford Brexiteers. They belonged to a generation that faced no wars, no real poverty, no famines, and not a single earthquake. A generation “without tragedy” — if we ignore Edward St Aubyn, who drifted through Oxford in those years. Instead, la haute had Brideshead Revisited on ITV, champagne, strawberries, and the polished company of sloaney girls in floaty dresses. A dreamy epicurean garden world of velvet and lavender, where young men lofted Nigella Lawson through parties on a sedan chair, far from the Trade Unionists and Left-wing council officers who despised them all.

After Oxford they moved into opinion journalism, then to politics. Bored, nostalgic, and louche, they seized on Brexit as a Thing To Do, and for a game to play. Their dislike of Brussels was personal, not political. The EU might get in the way of their God-given, Oxford-inculcated right to rule. “Brexit was above all their generational grand project,” Kuper argues, “designed to protect the powers of their personal fiefdom of Westminster.”

Other than Dan Hannan, who is approvingly compared to the steely early Bolsheviks, Kuper does not think much of his Oxford Tory Brexiteers. Nevertheless, he is good on Boris. On the sad clown tensions; his “killer” cynicism; his studied Wooster-Waugh role-playing. Then again, no one left in London media should be in this game if they can’t file 1,000 classy words of Boris pop-psych at this point. As Kuper points out himself: “[Boris] possessed the political asset of being all too easy to write about.”

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Boris Johnson's speech was a joke

By Will Lloyd

As for Boris, so for Brexit. So easy to write about, if your aim is to titillate rather than explain. Did Brexit happen because Michael Gove, David Cameron and Boris Johnson learned that “the rules didn’t apply to them” in Oxford in the Eighties, as Kuper suggests? Did Brexit happen, as Fintan O’Toole argued in Heroic Failure, because England’s toffs ‘n’ plebs still harbour a sickly yearning to hear the sound of trumpets on the plains of Omdurman? And did Brexit happen, as every half-drunk Etonian I’ve met since June 2016 has insisted to me, because Boris Johnson got into Pop, and David Cameron didn’t? In a century, these tropes may be of sociological interest to historians, but they will not have much explanatory power.

Admit it: we all like a conspiracy theory. History becomes simpler that way. We can ignore material conditions, and argue that change comes about in the small rooms where men manufacture opinions. Chums is this kind of history. Kuper, like fellow Oxford man Cecil Rhodes before him, believes that ideas, not circumstances, ruthlessly organised and disseminated, are what move things.

Oxford can fool anyone there into thinking this way. Walk around cobbled Radcliffe Square at night, when it gets spooky and hushed, and you may believe that this private place is the inner sanctum of Britain. The centre of the centre, the bullseye, and the only place that really matters. The fact that none of this is true — there is no experience quite as shattering as sneaking into a high-altitude, Nobel Prize-winner stuffed seminar at All Soul’s and realising that half the room is as stupid as you are — doesn’t stop Kuper. “To understand power in today’s Britain,” he writes, “requires travelling back in time to the streets of Oxford, somewhere between 1983 and 1993.”

Oxford always loved a romantic tale like Chums, though Kuper would hate to think he’s written one. The university delights in being the mover behind massive historical events. Romantics say Oxford was responsible for the discovery of America, based on the fact that a paragraph from Roger Bacon’s Opus Majus gave Columbus the idea of a westward passage to India. When Roger Boyle devised his law of gas expansion in his grubby High Street lodgings in 1662, wasn’t he launching the Age of Steam? When Edmund Cartwright — Fellow of Magdalen — invented the power-loom in 1785, didn’t he make the Industrial Revolution inevitable? To this list Kuper adds Brexit. Another Oxford fantasy, like Tolkien’s Middle-Earth, and Carroll’s Wonderland. Made at the Union, delivered in Westminster.

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Why it's time to abolish schools

By Will Lloyd

Kuper is far from romantic about Oxford though. As with the current Vice-Chancellor Louise Richardson, and many students there today, he seems embarrassed that it exists at all. Embarrassed — only after saying what a powerful and important and special place it is, even if it is powerful and important and special in negative ways.

Chums ends up baffled by Oxford. Kuper cannot see the point of the place in our supposed-to-be meritocratic age. Like Hooper walking through the Marchmain’s palatial house in Brideshead Revisited, Kuper is troubled. “It doesn’t seem to make any sense,” says Hooper, “one family in a place this size. What’s the use of it?”

Kuper doesn’t trust the house to clean itself up. Outside forces must intervene, before young over-valeted men with long faces — he raises the ominous spectre of Jacob Rees-Mogg’s nephew play-acting at the Union recently — get big ideas again. So make a use for it. Make it a postgraduate “Institute of Advanced Studies”, he says. Or go even more full FT: convert Oxford into a start-up hub, and make “even more money from corporate conferences and executive education”. He thinks this will make Britain a fairer place.

This is like cutting a man in half and telling him to dance. Kuper wants to maim Oxford — but why stop there? Once you have abolished the undergraduate system that has endured for eight centuries, you may as well bring it all down. Bulldoze it. Cull the Magdalen deer park. Pull down the Sheldonian, crater the Bodleian. Wouldn’t the Union make a wonderful bingo hall?

Don’t pretend Oxford can be fixed, or that it is more powerful than it actually is. Don’t pretend, as Kuper does, that countries can ever have justly selected ruling elites. Either shutter Oxford (and watch in horror as another elite arises from another elite forcing house) — or otherwise accept it for what it is, and always will be. A microcosm of British society: stratified, argumentative, semi-democratic, drunk. An artefact of cruel, cold beauty that will never be fair.

The candidate was Carrie Symonds. Unknown to his advisers, Johnson had become close to her, and around this time, one friendly MP walked in on the pair in “a compromising situation” in his House of Commons office. Undaunted and unembarrassed, Johnson persisted with the idea of making Carrie head of staff, calling in Zac Goldsmith to offer support. Only after a (named) aide threatened to resign did Johnson drop it.

If ever a book invited lazy thinking from journalists, then First Lady: Intrigue at the Court of Carrie and Boris Johnson is it. We know what 76-year-old Ashcroft thinks about a lot of things, so it is easy to assume that the billionaire won’t be a fan of Carrie, who is very much a modern, liberal, green Tory (though they share an interest in animal welfare). The book on David Cameron that appeared under his and Isabel Oakeshott’s name, though very readable, was a piece of score-settling by a man who felt his beneficence to the Party had gone under-appreciated.

He remains something of an outsider so, one might think, this new title is presumably another piece of axe-grinding. Plus, given that many of the juicy bits have already appeared in the newspaper serialisation, why bother with the book itself? And evidently some will object to the imbalance of an idiosyncratic rich man examining the life of a woman half his age. One reviewer became “absolutely furious” at Ashcroft referring to Carrie, then 31, as a “young lady” in the introduction; for her, the narrative never recovered.

There are parts that made me squeamish, and certainly some of the anecdotes from her early years feel slightly invasive, inevitably in a biography of this type. But to disqualify Ashcroft because of an imputed attitude to women is short-sighted. And to say his book is a misogynistic hit job just isn’t good enough.

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The fake feminism of Carrie Johnson

By Tanya Gold

The days when he would use his wealth to elevate him above libel laws and ventilate nonsense about David Cameron putting his penis in a dead pig’s mouth, or his wife having an affair with one of her security people, seem to be behind him. (Francis Elliott and I checked the latter rumour when co-writing the first biography of Cameron and established it was untrue, but it was still doing the rounds seven years later and Ashcroft and Oakeshott reported it as gossip.)

And the result of Ashcroft’s, shall we say, maturing as a political biographer should not be ignored.[1.  I helped in an indirect and minor way with research for his book on Jacob Rees-Mogg.] Can anyone seriously claim that the story of a Foreign Secretary trying to sign up his new girlfriend for a job for which she is not qualified is not in the public interest? Or that the story is made up? There are too many sources for the book to be dismissed as a hatchet job. True, many remain unnamed, but that should deter no one. It would be naïve to expect otherwise with so fevered a government still in power. So unless Ashcroft has invented them, which is pretty much inconceivable, there is plenty in this volume that deserves to be taken seriously.

The picture that emerges is of someone with more strong opinions than her husband, but no less unhappiness in early life or, later, determination to achieve her goals. Her commitment to green issues, admirable to my mind, is a constant thread. Ashcroft applauds her bravery in waiving anonymity in the case of sex criminal John Worboys, who drugged her in the back of a taxi, her campaign against his release from prison and her willingness to discuss her 2021 miscarriage. He cites her charm, what fun she can be and ability to get on with influential journalists, which is indispensable in PR.

Her early life, financially comfortable rather than lavish, makes for sad reading. She is distant from her father, a journalist called Matthew Symonds, who had another family. The product of an extra-marital affair, she attended two top private schools in London and was brought up as an only child by her mother, Josephine McAfee. She studied drama at Warwick University, spent time in PR and then, after meeting Zac Goldsmith’s cousin at a party, began working for Zac and subsequently for the Conservative Party. She became a special adviser to John Whittingdale and then Sajid Javid before, at 29, becoming the Tories’ communications director.

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By Graeme Archer

But in Westminster she is not universally liked. We know something of this from Dominic Cummings, never one for deft understatement, but the evidence compiled here goes well beyond any campaign he could have organised. Her shortcomings as a colleague are rehearsed at some length (one colleague on the campaign trail called her “utterly, utterly useless”), as is her lack of interest in policy and her enthusiasm for holidays and smart restaurants. She once described the job of being Tatler’s political editor as her dream job.

There are numerous stories of Carrie being hard to work with and of her desire to get on (no more a crime in a woman than a man, of course). She even has her very own expenses scandal, in which she used the names of junior colleagues when claiming taxis. One source said: “She’s lucky she didn’t end up in more serious trouble… It was misuse of CCHQ funds. She used the names of those just starting out on their careers. That was unforgivable”. Whether the cabs were for her private use, or to meet one of the two married Tory MPs (one was Johnson, the other for some reason remains unnamed) with whom she had a relationship, we may never know.

Normally personality traits in a Prime Minister’s spouse would matter only to the PM, but according to Ashcroft this one seeks to involve herself in areas where she is under-qualified and insert her allies into positions of influence. She appears to have been largely responsible for Allegra Stratton’s ill-fated hiring, for instance. Carrie is also portrayed as remarkably thin-skinned where media criticism is concerned, especially for someone so familiar with the transience of the news trade; the PM apparently spends inordinate amounts of time smoothing her ruffled feathers.

Carrie’s defenders will point to the sacking of John Whittingdale and Henry Newman, two of her supporters, as evidence of her lack of influence. But that seems to have been the result of one of the PM’s knee-jerk responses to criticism, following Lord Frost’s public suggestion that he refresh things by removing the woke crowd. Clearly, there is a body of opinion that disdains the greenery-by-stealth approach that she embodies (and which a braver PM would embrace). Either way, Carrie is scarcely the “private individual who plays no role in Government” that her spokesperson claims.

And there is plenty of evidence that Johnson, who hates confrontation, went to extraordinary lengths to avoid rousing his wife’s temper. He would beg aides to help him keep her happy, at one point asking if someone could be given a job title without actually doing the job, just so it looked as if that person performed that role. Was this another Boris joke? Conceivably, but that can’t excuse everything.

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By Aris Roussinos

Those who know Johnson well know him to be an organisational disaster. (I’m told his diplomatic protection team often have to remind him to do up his flies.) The expert in mitigating his chaos used to be his former wife Marina. Carrie, perhaps because she is of a more recent generation than Marina, apparently sees no reason why she should mother her husband. As one of Ashcroft’s sources says: “When the marriage [with Marina] ended, he lost his domestic support, the steadying influence, and he traded that in for a demanding girlfriend and strong disapproval from his children”. Even Prime Ministers are entitled to private lives, but are we really to believe these details have no effect on how the country is run?

Without the research that went into First Lady, we would be guessing — trying to join the dots between Cummings blogs, drip-drip news of Covid parties, flat refurbishments and Johnson’s pinball machine decision-making. What the book lacks, though, is the case for the defence. There are few voices supporting her, beyond that of her former boss John Whittingdale. Carrie refused to cooperate with the book, sticking to the “not a public person” line, when even her much-admired Tatler calls her “the most powerful woman in Britain”. Perhaps if she had engaged, or encouraged friends to engage, she could have neutralised the accusations and conveyed a more favourable impression of herself.

Nevertheless, this book offers an account of where Carrie came from, what she wants, what makes her tick and, most important, the influence she has on our PM.

The polls tell the story. Prime Ministers with a disapproval rating of 70% rarely last long. Nobody defies gravity forever. Margaret Thatcher didn’t; nor did Tony Blair, despite winning three elections. Johnson has won only one. And the next test is not far away. On 5 May voters across the country will go to the polls in the local elections. A terrible set of results, and more letters of no-confidence will surely flood in. For Rishi Sunak, Liz Truss and their rivals, the prize must seem so tantalisingly close…

And yet, and yet. Political history is littered with examples of potential leaders who struck too soon or waited too long, future England captains whose moment never came. Nobody remembers the R. A. Butler governments of the late Fifties and early Sixties, because they never happened. A decade later, Roy Jenkins sharpened the knife, raised it high about his head and prepared to plunge it deep into Harold Wilson’s back… but the blow never fell. And a decade after that, everybody knew Tony Benn was going to become Labour leader one day — but he never did.

The list goes on. Willie Whitelaw delayed and delayed, loyal to the last to the beleaguered Ted Heath, and then found himself overtaken by, of all things, a woman. Michael Heseltine timed his deadly attack on Margaret Thatcher to perfection, only to discover that many of his fellow Conservative MPs would never forgive him for it.

Kenneth Clarke won three separate parliamentary ballots in three different Tory leadership contests, yet never wore the crown. David Davis arrived at the Conservative conference as a runaway favourite with two busty women in T-shirts reading “It’s DD for me”, only to find that the party faithful preferred a smooth-talking shepherd’s-hut enthusiast instead. Even Boris Johnson’s first leadership bid exploded on the launch pad, sabotaged by his chief engineer.

And then there’s the most disastrous campaign of all, the Labour moderates’ risible attempt to unseat Jeremy Corbyn in the summer of 2016. “Angela is a star in the Labour firmament. She will be at my right hand throughout this contest and if I am successful, Angela will be alongside me as my right-hand woman.” The words of the future Labour leader Owen Smith, talking about his erstwhile rival Angela Eagle. That was just five-and-a-half years ago. Dame Angela is still there somewhere, lurking unnoticed on the backbenches. But poor Smith isn’t even an MP.

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How to bring down a Prime Minister

By Dominic Sandbrook

It would be nice to claim there’s a clever formula for success, or to tease out some immutable “lessons from history”, but that would be disingenuous. There’s no formula. Indeed, the joy of political leadership campaigns is that nobody can quite predict the strange chemistry that makes a winner, the peculiar combination of luck and personality, the unforeseeable, unrepeatable point when man (or woman) meets moment.

Take Labour’s Roy Jenkins, the embodiment of metropolitan citizen-of-the-world liberalism, whose admirers often describe him as one of the best Prime Ministers Britain never had. In the spring of 1968, the only question was not if, but when. Following the humiliating devaluation of the pound a few months earlier, the Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, seemed crippled beyond recovery. The public had tired of his endless slipperiness, and as a smart and urbane crisis Chancellor — Rishi Sunak parallel alert! — Jenkins seemed the only plausible successor.

On the Labour benches Jenkins commanded what he called “a dedicated group of commandos, waiting as it were with their faces blackened for the opportunity to launch a Dieppe raid against the forces of opportunism”. Their leaders reported that they had assembled an elaborate system of ‘dissident cells’ comprising more than a hundred supporters, as well as an ‘inner group’ who would co-ordinate the revolt. At a secret meeting on 17 June the chief plotters even produced a definitive list of some 120 potential rebels. All they needed was the signal to strike.

It never came. A couple of weeks later, Jenkins told them to hold off for the time being. The premiership was so close — but he “did not want to be implicated in actually launching an action”. A convicted assassin, he believed, would never wear the crown: “I will never be caught with a dagger in my hand unless it is already smoking with my enemy’s blood”.

So Jenkins waited, and waited… and the moment passed. Wilson stayed on at Number 10 and Labour lost the next election. Gradually, almost imperceptibly, Jenkins lost his sheen. He went from tomorrow’s man to yesterday’s, without ever having been today’s. By the time Wilson retired in the spring of 1976, Jenkins’s chance had vanished. He had fallen out with the party’s Left wing over Europe, but there was a palpable sense, too, that he lacked the killer instinct.

Later, in his memoirs, Jenkins fell back on the excuse that he had never been ambitious enough, a clever way of complimenting himself for his own failure. But some of his supporters told a different story. “Roy was too ambitious, not insufficiently ambitious,” wrote his friend David Marquand. “He never thought it was the right moment; he always thought it was too risky”. The stakes were too high; he was paralysed by the fear of missing out. I wonder if, one day, Sunak’s friends will tell a similar story?

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Nothing can save the BBC

By Dominic Sandbrook

What of Jenkins’s insistence that the assassin never wins the ultimate prize? Well, there’s always the lesson of Heseltine in 1990. But such a flamboyant showman would have been deeply distrusted by many Tory MPs even if he’d never lifted a finger against Margaret Thatcher. And there are plenty of telling examples of political hitmen who made it all the way. Stanley Baldwin, instrumental in terminating Austen Chamberlain’s leadership in 1922, became Tory leader himself two years later. And Harold Macmillan succeeded Anthony Eden in 1957 precisely because many Tory MPs thought that by knifing Eden in the back, he had showed the cold, single-minded ruthlessness that Rab Butler lacked.

Then there’s the best-known political assassin of all, an object lesson in pitiless opportunism. Margaret Thatcher had spent the first four years of the Seventies nodding and smiling at Ted Heath’s policy U-turns. Not once had she whispered a word of dissent. And when, after the second general election of 1974, she announced that she was challenging him for the leadership, nobody seriously thought she would win.

The story goes that when, as a courtesy, Thatcher visited Heath to warn him of her intentions, he said coldly: “You’ll lose.” The Conservative parliamentary party, agreed his old rival Enoch Powell, “wouldn’t put up with those hats and that accent”. Even Mrs Thatcher’s family thought she was wasting her time. “You must be out of your mind,” remarked her husband Denis, not entirely supportively. “You haven’t got a hope.”

Yet as it turned out, Thatcher beat Heath by 130 votes to 119. (“A black day,” declared another of his old rivals, Reginald Maudling.) And now the strange magic of leadership contests took effect. With Heath gone, four new contenders, notably his lieutenant Willie Whitelaw, threw their hats into the ring. But it was too late; all the momentum lay with Thatcher. As the Telegraph remarked, it looked as if “a whole herd of fainthearts left it to a courageous and able woman to topple a formidable leader” and then “ganged up to deny her her just reward”. When the second ballot was held a week later, she stormed to victory. “My God!” exclaimed one Tory vice-chairman when the news came through. “The bitch has won!”

The other great canard about leadership elections is that you should keep an eye on the dark horse, with John Major’s victory in 1990 as Exhibit A. But was Major such a dark horse? He was, after all, Chancellor of the Exchequer, having just served a short stint as Foreign Secretary. It’s true that if the leadership election had been held a year or two earlier, he wouldn’t have stood a chance. But Major had timed his run to perfection, his victory a perfect example of how, in politics, you make your own luck. It would have been easy for him to waver in 1990: to bide his time and sit this one out. But he calculated, quite rightly, that he would never have a better chance. With cool, understated efficiency, he took it.

In reality, most dark horses never come remotely close to winning, and many soon relapse into utter obscurity. Who now recalls Peter Lilley’s leadership pitch in 1997? How many people look back on Michael Ancram as the great lost leader of 2001? Is there, perhaps, some parallel world in which Stephen Crabb faced Liam Fox in the final round of the Tory contest in 2016? Can there really be a universe where Mark Harper battled Esther McVey for the crown three years later?

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Putin has history on his side

By Dominic Sandbrook

Yet all of these people, presumably, must have imagined the pieces slotting into place: their colleagues marvelling at their unexpected talents, the other contenders falling away, the momentum sweeping them towards that historic audience at Buckingham Palace. Alas, it almost never works out that way. If you enter the contest as an outsider, you’re probably doomed before you start, because most MPs like backing winners.

A good example is one of the most colourful dark horses in modern political history, the hard-drinking, grammar-school-smiting Labour intellectual Tony Crosland. When Wilson resigned in 1976, Crosland fancied his chances. He looked at his rivals. Jim Callaghan, the favourite: too old. Michael Foot: too Left-wing. Roy Jenkins: too Right-wing. Denis Healey: too arrogant. Tony Benn: too mad. And it all seemed so straightforward. One by one the others would blow up, and Crosland would come through the middle.

So the future Prime Minister summoned his protégé, Roy Hattersley, who would surely play a key role in the victorious campaign. They got straight down to business. The most important thing, Crosland said, was to get a “decent vote” in the first ballot, and build strength from there. “I take it you’ll vote for me.”

Silence. Then, at last, Hattersley confessed. He didn’t want to waste his vote, and had already promised to back Callaghan. Crosland couldn’t believe his ears. It was all falling apart, and the campaign had barely started. “You’ll not vote for me?” he said. “Then fuck off.”

Crosland finished dead last in the 1976 leadership election, with just 19 votes. And the winner? Callaghan, just as everybody had predicted. Dark horses aren’t dark horses by accident. Favourites are favourites for a reason.

So are there no lessons at all for Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss — or for Jeremy Hunt, Penny Mordaunt, Tom Tugendhat and the host of other putative dark horses? Well, here are a few thoughts. Most politicians only get one chance. Miss your moment, and it never comes again. Courage is usually more admirable — and more effective — than caution. If you do stand, don’t say anything stupid. Ideally, don’t say anything at all.

None of this is very helpful, I know — not least because there are so many obvious exceptions. So to finish, here’s one ironclad rule of leadership contests, which may not be what the current hopefuls want to hear.

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Test article

By Aris Roussinos

Really, honestly, it would be better to lose. Losers always have more fun. Just ask yourself: would Roy Jenkins have been able to enjoy quite so many agreeable three-course dinners if he’d been Prime Minister? Or would he rather have been defending the Government’s policy on salmonella? Would Denis Healey have been free to appear on TV with Roger Moore and Dame Edna Everage? Or would he rather have been at a meeting in Frankfurt with Helmut Kohl? Would Ken Clarke have been happier organising a junior ministerial appointment for John Bercow, or smoking his fifth cigar of the night in some West End jazz club?

For this is the great unspoken truth about leadership contests: it’s a competition to see who’s going to be the most despised person in the country in a couple of years’ time. Yes, you get to have your picture on the Downing Street stairs, just along from Gordon Brown and Theresa May. But as they would surely tell you, being Prime Minister is awful. Everything goes wrong, and everybody hates you. So instead of agonising about when to declare and what to say, just don’t do it. You’ll have a much happier life if you stay out, and the country will thank you for it.

Here endeth the lesson. Liz, Rishi: don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Stumblingly, young Nige is starting to live out the two contradictory impulses that will frame his life. One: a conservative’s respect for, and needy desire to be part of, institutions. Two: a libertarian’s outsider fantasy of bomb-tossing nonconformity. Yeah, the boy loves the club, but he quite fancies running a bulldozer through those front doors too. Luck will let him do both.

Nigel Farage, for all his talents, was lucky. He was time-and-place fortunate. His pampered enemies underestimated him, and thought him a punchline until the joke brought their house down. Many of them were no life experience professional political hermits like Danny Alexander or Ed Miliband. They raised no whirlwinds. Mostly, as David Foster Wallace put it, they weren’t “enough like human beings even to hate.” They were overpumped with focus-grouped shrewdness, not human instinct.

Farage was messily and chaotically human. He is, in that dreaded national formulation, a character. He has an anuran face, an aquatic aspect — the ideally fishy tribune of an island where the moss is still damp and the rain is still thin.

In the 2010s he smashed through the Overton Window like a breeze block. First with Ukip, then with the Brexit Party. And even as he did so, he was being very badly behaved — not that this ever made a scratch in his popular image as a plain-speaking common sense merchant. Fortune favours the charming miscreant sometimes. The rest was Britain’s exit from the European Union.

At least, that’s the life that emerges from Michael Crick’s new biography of Farage. One Party After Another: The Disruptive Life of Nigel Farage feels, quite simply, long. Five hundred beigely judicious pages read like 5,000. Crick’s annoyingly pokey reportorial style — a staple of Channel Four News for decades — is absent here. It’s a dull, reasonably objective attempt to tell the truth. There is voyeurism (we buy books like this to peep through the bedroom keyhole, don’t we?) but not a single nose-turning jab of biographical GBH.

Crick comes perilously close to making Farage… boring. He drowns him under mudslides of irrelevant detail. There are paceless accounts of infighting among Ukip’s National Executive Committee; a whole chapter about a dodgy party call centre in Kent; more information on Neil Hamilton’s time as an MEP than even the most deranged politico could be expected to digest. Still, sanding away the trivia reveals two major themes: alcohol and luck. In Farage’s life they combine and recombine like clouds on a windy day.

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Farewell, then, Gina Miller

By Will Lloyd

His luck was personal and political. Ukip’s rise was only possible after the unexpected death of the wall-eyed billionaire tyrant James Goldsmith in 1997. His demise took his Referendum Party, Ukip’s lavishly financed rival, into the soil with him. Tony Blair’s decision to approve a new proportional voting system for the UK’s European parliamentary elections gave Ukip their first big breaks — and Farage’s first media appearances proper — in 1999.

Later on, Farage was sceptical about the need for a referendum. Ukip’s central policy was so outrageously unthinkable for most of Farage’s career that, in spite of his crashingly loud public idealism, it seems like he doubted whether it could ever happen. His electoral successes (not luck) eventually pushed David Cameron into promising a vote on exiting the EU in 2013 — but it was Cameron’s unexpected majority in 2015 that made the referendum happen.

During the campaign, Farage had the lowest personal popularity rating of any of the major party leaders. Jeremy Corbyn was more popular. Farage did have political nous, though. Like Cummings, he understood that the old Left and Right labels were meaningless. “We don’t want to represent a wing,” he said in 2004, “but the heart and wishbone of the nation.” He didn’t think that English politics had changed since the 17th century. “You are either a cavalier, a democrat, and a libertarian, or you are a doctrinaire, morally intolerant roundhead.” He had identified one of the oldest, deepest, most durable divisions on the island. Spookily, the political map of the Brexit vote ended up resembling the regional distribution of support for the King, Court and Tories against Parliament, Merchants and Whigs in the Civil War. Except in 2016 the cavaliers won. Whoops.

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Power is corrupting the Tories

By Will Lloyd

For years, Ukip suffered from the pandemonium of being a party staffed entirely by cavaliers. Crick (without any sense of humour) gives the impression that the whole trembling structure could come crashing down at any moment. But Farage’s luck holds. The early Ukip days are clogged with writs, squabbles, and changes to office locks. The dramatis personae are livestock auctioneers, umbrella makers, undertakers, investment brokers, hoteliers, Rowan Atkinson’s brother, and a barrister described, in a simile that is too fun to be Crick’s, as “an escapee from a Joanna Trollope novel”. Tiny factions of them argue obscurely in the bitter wilderness.

Like Shakespearean fools, they tell unspeakable truths and babblingly predict a future others cannot see. The first full-length account of the party, Mark Daniels’ Cranks and Gadflies, described the membership as “idiots, paranoiacs, and conspiracy theorists.” Daniels — real name Mark Fitzgeorge-Parker — was also Ukip’s press officer at the time. Farage admitted they were all “bumbling amateurs”.

Peak bumble came in 2010. Farage was in Buckingham on polling day, where he was going to fail to win a seat in Westminster, again. It was planned as a photo-opportunity, which would have been a very Farage way to die. A blue Wilga 35A plane — “rather like a tractor” Farage thought — would pull a Ukip banner and its leader into the air, then fly low over Buckingham and the surrounding area. “I just hope the plane doesn’t blow up and crash,” Farage joked to the press at the airfield. Five attempts were required for the plane to pick up the banner. This quickly wrapped itself around the tail and rudder. Powerlessly, the plane began to drop from the forever English sky. “Oh, fuck!” said Farage.

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​​He should have been buried. But he was pulled out bleeding from the sorrily pretzeled fuselage, and shakily tried to smoke a fag. This was the third time in his life he’d escaped death. At this point, some Brexiteers will see the hand of God at work. Remainers will mutter about Satanic power. If Farage had died in 2010, would Brexit have happened? Crick poses the question, then refuses to play around with it.

Clearly, Farage inspired voters who felt their plain lives were being mocked, and their succulent English liberties stolen. His public persona, all ebullient disrespect for starchy insider taboos and flashy Thatcherkind good time roller, was immensely appealing when set against Cameron, Miliband, and Clegg. Unlike them, as his aide Gawain Towler said, Farage spoke “fluent human”.

​​He told voters that over two decades in Britain there had been a “shocking widening of the class system, where the rich have got a lot richer and the poor are robbed of the opportunity to attain their best”. He was right. At times he seemed to hold England’s spleen in his hands, happy to squeeze its juices at his favourite targets: Westminster and Brussels.

Anger wasn’t going to be enough. Paradoxically, the better Farage did in the years before the referendum, the more support for his core mission dropped off. He only appealed to voters who already wanted to leave the EU; he alarmed soft-eurosceptics with his hard-edged rhetoric on migration and HIV; he energised pro-Europeans who saw him as an unholy mash-up of Wat Tyler and Adolf Hitler. As Dominic Cummings put it: “Farage put off millions of (middle class in particular) voters who wanted to leave the EU but who were very clear in market research that a major obstacle to voting Leave was ‘I don’t want to vote for Farage, I’m not like that.’” He made the Brexit vote possible, but if he had played the Boris Johnson role in the referendum, Leave would have lost.

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Why Remain lost

By Fintan O'Toole

Practically every page of One Party After Another opens with the clink of bottles. Acquaintances speak to Crick about Farage with the awe accorded to people who live larger and harder than the rest of us. Ann Widecombe recollects Farage rowdily leading Brexit Party MEP’s in song. Another describes Farage picking up a small coffee table and pretending to play the bagpipes with it. “His ability to get by on a few hours’ sleep,” says Aaron Banks, “even after his usual heavy nights, never ceases to amaze.”

It sounds like fun, and sometimes it was. But there was a desperate edge to Farage’s gregariousness. The plane crash had left him in immense pain, and ended his golfing days. His personal life, a thicket of chaotic amatory escapades and unhappy marriages, was broken. Crick quotes one Brexit Party insider who was surprised to find that Farage was “not actually very confident. He’s quite a tense person really, not at all relaxed.”

Alcohol gave him fluency, and let him escape himself. The sad, casual cruelty of all those affairs was not exposed in full before the referendum. Depending on the public’s mood, it may have ruined him. Or they may have been content, as they have been with Johnson, to ignore what Farage got up to on his night shifts. As it always seemed to, his luck held.

Crick’s biography is the first; it tells us how it happened, but doesn’t tell us why. Whether he saved the club, or made a colossal wreck of it remains uncertain. One Party After Another doesn’t have the answers. Crick claims that Farage is one of the most significant politicians of the last fifty years. His reason? “Nobody can dispute that Nigel Farage achieved his goal of leaving the European Union.” Well, duh.

Yes, he rode his luck, and he won. Farage is still agitating; he’s now a two-legged media empire; a pundit, a poster, a YouTuber. Crick leaves Farage on a boat in the channel, bathetically posed, eyes and cameras scanning the choppy waters for fighting-age men in listing dinghies.

Of all the 2010s populists — Le Pen, Bolsonaro, Salvini, Bannon, Trump, Wilders, Petry — only Farage actually got what he wanted. In the process, his two contradictory impulses have resolved themselves. The libertarian beat up the conservative. The bomb-thrower exploded several British institutions. But like a pinstriped Alexander, Farage has no more worlds to conquer. His victories have handed him obsolescence.

And yet despite this growing resentment, despite the fact that a majority of voters want him to resign, there’s every chance that Johnson will cling on. Yes, if the Met Police’s soon-to-be-published report on his alleged Covid breaches reveals that he misled parliament or lied to his own backbenchers, he is probably toast. But if it gives him enough wriggle room to survive, it will take the wind out of his rivals’ sails — and the PM will live to fight another day, and another election.

On that score, things aren’t quite as a bad as they first seem for Johnson — especially when you compare his position in the polls to Keir Starmer’s: 46% of people trust neither Johnson nor Starmer to tell the truth; 26% trust Starmer more than Johnson; and 14% trust Johnson more than Starmer. Of course, there is still a gap. But even immediately after the 2019 general election, Johnson had a net-negative trustworthy rating. Nobody voted for Johnson because they thought he was an honest politician. His dishonesty is priced in.

Similarly, voters are not overwhelmingly convinced that ditching Johnson would help the Tories: 34% think the Tories would be better off without him, compared to 48% who believe they would be doing the same or worse. Among Conservative voters in 2019, those figures are 23% and 66% respectively. Nor are voters warming to Starmer — just one poll this year has given him a net-positive approval rating. IpsosMORI, who remove the “neither” option in their satisfied/dissatisfied question, find a -15% satisfied rating for Starmer.

What about the latest YouGov poll, which gives Labour a six-point lead and finds that Starmer’s party is keeping 65% of its 2019 vote, versus just 52% for the Tories? Well, it’s worth noting that 25% of 2019 Tory voters say they “don’t know” who they’d vote for, compared to just 11% of Labour voters. This is important — “don’t knows” are excluded from headline voting intention figures, so the Conservatives could be in a stronger position than we think. One pollster which does not do this is Kantar; since the North Shropshire by-election they have, on average, found the Conservatives to be 2 points higher than other pollsters (and Labour nearly 1.7 points lower).

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What's the point of Boris Johnson?

By Matthew Goodwin

So, if Boris is in a stronger position than we think, how should he use it to his advantage?

Since 2019, political scientists have largely responded to this question by wheeling out hackneyed truisms about mystical Red Wall voters. These voters, we’re told, are a unique fighting force, chomping at the bit to fight Johnson’s culture war. But that’s a myth; they are not more anti-woke than Tory voters in general, nor do they differ significantly on economics.

Indeed, the original purpose of the ‘Red Wall’ moniker was that it represented seats which, given their socio-demographic make up, should have voted Tory anyway. The question was not why these seats turned Conservative in 2019 — it was why they were not Conservative long before 2019.

If he’s to succeed, Johnson needs to remember what this Conservative voting coalition cares about. At the last election, Brexit was the most important issue for voters, leave and remain. Now, only 15% of leave voters think it is one of the top three most important issues; for Remainers, that figure is 32%. Brexit will not deliver the next election for Boris — but playing on traditional Tory strengths might.

Nowhere, for instance, is the divide between Tory and Labour voters starker than in the issue of immigration and asylum. For Tory voters it is the third most important issue (at 46%), whereas for Labour it is ninth (at 8%). You would struggle to find any voter who thinks the government is doing a good job on asylum seekers crossing the Channel — even 77% of Conservative voters thinking the government has handled it badly. So if Johnson wants to shore up his Tory base, a good place to start would be putting Home Secretary Priti Patel on notice: stop the boats or lose your job.

Then there’s the economy, which is rated one of the top three issues by 55% of Tory voters, compared to 45% of Labour voters. Johnson’s coalition is sceptical of how the economic system is structured: while they do not necessarily believe in income redistribution, they do think the system is rigged in favour of the rich, and that ordinary working people do not get their fair share. Generally speaking, Conservative voters are much more Left-wing than Conservative MPs.

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Boris is our sin-eater

By Mary Harrington

So perhaps more than anything, the most pressing concern for Johnson should be levelling up. After “getting Brexit done”, levelling up formed the core of the Conservatives’ offer to the electorate. Yet it took more than two years for the government to get around to defining exactly what it means, let alone release a white paper on the subject.

It’s hardly surprising that voters are not convinced: 44% think levelling up will lead to no change in spending in their area, while 18% think it will lead to lower levels. Just 7% think more money will flow as a result. The figures are broadly the same among Tory and Labour voters.

One reason for New Labour’s landslide victory in 1997 was that the public wanted more money spent on public services — 18 years of Thatcherism had left them in a perilous state. Cameronite austerity has done the same today: all the signs suggest that voters want to see a difference by the end of this parliament, otherwise they will lose faith in the government’s promises.

Despite this, the Government is caught up in arguments over funding between the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Michael Gove, who wants more money, and the Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, who is saying no. But levelling up — undoing decades’ worth of inequality — cannot be done on the cheap.

For Johnson, there is an obvious solution to this. If levelling up is to be his legacy, it is currently under threat from Sunak’s penny-pinching instincts. So a true government reset — one that would send a clear signal to voters about his commitment to ending the North/South divide — would see Johnson sack Sunak and replace him with a true believer in levelling up: someone like Michael Gove.

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Covid could still save Boris

By Freddie Sayers

Sunak’s much-touted popularity may make Johnson think twice about this, but support for the chancellor is overstated. It is, after all, difficult to be anything but popular when you’re paying people to stay at home, or subsidising their dinners out in the middle of summer. But since the rush of cash has disappeared, his approval rating has begun to fall — from a net 43% positive in April 2020 to just 2% in December 2021.

If Johnson survives the consequences of the Met’s report, he will probably live to fight the next election. By then Partygate will have faded and the PM will need to point to a series of policy wins that his voter coalition wants: most of which involve spending more money. Now is not the time for a self-declared fiscal conservative to sit in Number 11. If Johnson wants to win in 2024, he needs to put voters’ money where his mouth is.

Today’s sin-eater is yesterday’s cake-eater: the Prime Minister who not long ago was being castigated for not imposing lockdown rules swiftly enough, and is now being berated for never really believing the rules. Meanwhile, no one respectable wants to look at whether the rules he imposed, with overwhelming public support, were themselves worth the price.

The rules were harsh and the No. 10 breaches were numerous: “socially distanced drinks”, boozing on the eve of Prince Philip’s funeral, leaving and Christmas parties, cheese and wine. The list goes on; but the minutiae are less important than the cumulative sense that the Government, presided over by Johnson, carried right on with normal, sociable working life while the rest of the country dutifully took the lockdowns literally and endured a self-imposed state of alienation, isolation and misery.

No doubt some measure of the resulting media feeding-frenzy is powered by people who raged at Johnson’s Brexit-era political untouchability. His haute Remainer haters are hugging themselves with glee to find him now not only touchable, but downright tarnished.

This group would try to turn Boris forgetting to put the loo seat down into a resignation offence. But beyond this Greek chorus, Partygate has cut through all the way to the sensible people who take even less of an interest in Westminster court politics than I.

Some of this is about offences against the British sense of fair play. After the Great Crash, David Cameron declared that “we’re all in it together”, a slogan regularly flung back at him when (as was often the case) his policy decisions seemed to fly in the face of this high sentiment.

If Cameron’s austerity demanded a straitening of the public purse-strings, our pandemic-era leaders demanded an equally austere straitening of the public heartstrings. We were asked, in the name of social solidarity, to accept a brutally thin gruel of human contact and intimacy. And now public outrage is driven by the same feeling that we’re not ‘all in it together’, and never were.

Beyond the fury, though, lies something deeper yet, and far more uncomfortable: a need for absolution.

Richard Munslow, the last known sin-eater, died in 1906. But the work of French philosopher René Girard suggests we’re less removed from the practice of singling out one individual to carry the weight of collective wrongdoing than we might imagine.

In Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (1978), Girard argues that human societies long ago developed what he calls the “scapegoat mechanism”, as a means of keeping social rivalries in check. Where tensions threaten to boil over, he suggests, a group will instead resolve them by focusing anger and hostility on a single individual.

Today, social tensions are certainly high – and pandemic measures a central battleground. Some in our increasingly politicised debate claim Covid is a “plandemic” pushed by plutocrats, or that vaccines are unsafe, and merely an element in a “New World Order” conspiracy between government, finance and Big Pharma.

On the other side, supporting public-health measures has also become a political identity. For the most zealous, it’s no longer even really about science: I have argued that, for some, vaccination has taken on a social meaning wholly independent of the vaccine’s actual function, that’s less about public health or infection control than spiritual purity.

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Is the pandemic over?

By Freddie Sayers

But we didn’t get here all at once. On March 9, 2020 Italy imposed a lockdown, and on March 23, Britain followed suit; but the slide toward today’s bien-pensant restrictionist orthodoxy wasn’t immediate. Into April that year, it was possible to argue in the Guardian that borders should stay open and that masks don’t work.

But by then the public was already under lock and key. It felt like a moment of national crisis, and the moral pressure to “do your bit” was powerful. It also swiftly took on a censorious edge, with surveillance drones over the Peak District, a scenic lake dyed black to deter anyone in search of a pretty view, and police forces setting up easy ways for people to dob their neighbours in.

The cost of this mass collective effort at austerity of the heart was innumerable tiny moments of alienation. People tried to educate five-year-olds on Zoom, or denied them birthday parties. Large families were banned by the rules from seeing grandparents. There was the little old lady fined for sharing a socially-distanced cup of tea in her communal garden. People died alone in hospitals, or struggled, unsupported, with illness and disability.

People reported seeing their aged parents, locked away in care homes for their own safety, visibly dying of loneliness. A nurse was arrested for trying to take her 97-year-old mother out of a nursing home, so she didn’t have to wither away in isolation like that.

We all suffered, and nearly all agreed to it. Now, as even the Covid-maximalist Guardian reports that Omicron seems to be waning as rapidly as it waxed, the question rears its ugly head: was any of it worth what we suffered? Were we right to assent collectively to austerity of the heart?

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By Mary Harrington

Re-opening that question would mean revisiting every extra instant of loneliness or abandonment experienced over the last two years, in the name of public health. Every instant borne disproportionately by the members of our community oldest, youngest, poorest or the most in need of care – and that every one of us went along with.

I don’t know if it was worth what we suffered. But the behaviour of Boris Johnson suggests he was never entirely convinced. So now we’re angry with him. The Labour Party tweeted a quote from “Jenny”, an NHS nurse, who described how a man ‘begged, wept, shouted to be let in, but we said no – for the greater good of everyone else.” The man’s wife then “died unexpectedly and alone, as the Government had a party.”

A funeral worker broke down in tears on LBC, describing to James O’Brien how he felt ‘like an idiot’ for stopping weeping, bereaved people coming into funerals, to mourn their dead loved ones.

Electoral politics likes to pretend that whatever policy is being offered won’t come with any downsides. Johnson himself is famed for such “cakeism”, which he brought in spades to the Brexit campaign. But as Rafael Behr pointed out recently, the pandemic has forced us to confront the fact that sometimes there are no cost-free choices.

In Behr’s view, the cakeist error was clinging to “liberty” when we needed was swifter and more decisive restrictions. Such measures as were imposed were, for the most part, followed in good faith: the nurses turning sobbing relatives away from wards where their loved ones lay dying did so out of concern for the patients in their care, not a sadistic wish to sever the bonds of family.

But lurking in the background of all the rage now pouring out at Johnson lies the opposite possibility: that perhaps all that alienation and misery didn’t make enough difference in the end to have been worth it.

Is this true? We’ll never know. We made the choices we made. And now, thanks to Johnson’s metamorphosis from our leader to our sin-eater, we don’t even need to wonder. All of it was his fault, all along.

I remain a supporter of the use of behavioural science in public policy, and of the Behavioural Insights Team, more commonly known as the Nudge Unit. However, witnessing how the UK and other governments have responded to the pandemic, I can now appreciate the vulnerabilities of well-intentioned, democratic regimes, and the potential for behavioural science to be used inappropriately.

I was a co-founder and leading figure within the Nudge Unit. Since its inception, in 2010, the unit has been a success story for the Government. When I joined we were a team of seven within what was called the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit. In 2014, we were able to “spin out” of government. We became an independent, profit-making social purpose company, a third owned by the Cabinet Office. We could sell our services to the whole of the UK public sector and any other government or organisation seeking to improve people’s lives.

A big part of my role was to introduce behavioural science thinking to public policy challenges in other countries. In doing so, we won new contracts and opened new markets, but also helped to spread the application of behavioural science. In 2010, the Nudge Unit was the first and only government unit dedicated to behavioural science in public policy. By 2021, there were over 400 globally. Post spin-out, we grew organically to 250+ people, with offices in nine major cities across the globe, working on projects in more than 35 countries. As civil servants, we were providing policy advice to the Cabinet Office; as a company we also provided dividends, international influence and, since the company was sold in December 2021, a healthy capital gain.

In the early days, we felt as if we had discovered a secret sauce and our mission was to share it as widely as possible. We had a time-limited licence to roam around government, seeking out areas of policy to improve. A two-year sunset cause stipulated we needed to deliver a 10-fold return on the cost of the team, one of the reasons for our early focus on tax — in a now famous example, we used “social norms” to boost tax compliance by telling debtors the true proportion of other people who have paid their taxes.

It felt very different from other parts of the civil service. We cared a lot more about academic research, and seeing the world through the eyes of the citizen. We would bring over famous academics such as Daniel Kahneman, Richard Thaler and Robert Cialdini for seminars in No. 10. We had strong sponsorship from the PM and reported through a high-level steering board, chaired by the Cabinet Secretary, Gus O’Donnell. We were passionate and hard-working but also informal, personable and fun. We sought to free useful information from the over-intellectualising of academia: our policy papers drew on complex concepts and research but described findings in simple and engaging language.

Most strikingly, in the broader context of recession and austerity, we were a can-do, technically competent team — the opposite of the stereotypically politically astute but risk-averse official. Like a lean start-up, we had high motivation but few resources. If there was no budget to make an app, we would learn how to do it and build it ourselves. We would never say “we can’t do it” but “‘how else can we do it?”. Expertise brought into the civil service from outside often fails as it can’t navigate the bureaucracy. But we were home-grown: we knew how to work with the system.

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Will nudge theory survive the pandemic?

By Freddie Sayers

There has, though, always been media scepticism about us. When science journalist Ben Goldacre called for us to be sacked, I remember David Halpern, my boss, telling us that the best compliment comes from a former critic. So we invited Dr Goldacre in to see that we were, in fact, doing exactly what empiricists like him advocate — systematically running large-scale randomised controlled trials (RCTs). Dr Goldacre apologised for his article and co-published a paper with us on policy evaluation, which at one point was the most downloaded Cabinet Office paper after the Coalition Agreement.

The more successful our results, the more the media supported us. In one piece of work, my colleagues Prof Elizabeth Linos, Joanne Reinhard and I managed to eliminate the substantial and historic underperformance of ethnic minority applicants to a police force with a cost-neutral and non-discriminatory intervention: adding a line to an email that prompted candidates to reflect on their values and what success would mean to them. The impact of this incredibly simple idea astounded me, but the data was checked, rechecked and published in a peer reviewed journal, and the result still stands.

There are many examples of our successes – some of which are celebrated on the Nudge Unit’s 10th anniversary website. But to my mind, it is the legacy of our approach which will deliver the greatest impact. We advocated two new dimensions to policy making: behaviour-focused models describing what drives human decision making; and the priority of empirical research over all other sources of information. I believe this contribution has — and can — continue to serve governments well. But it must be used appropriately. For me, it means seeing the bigger picture: recognising what you can and can’t measure, and seeing the potential for unintended consequences. For example, testing ways to make it easier for parents to engage with their children’s homework, and measuring improved education and parental engagement as a result, is a great idea. But invoking different emotions to convince people to stay at home during the pandemic is less appropriate. It could have negative consequences that are missed in the typical RCT evaluation. This is because metrics will focus on proxies for behaviour, but they probably can’t capture the potential longer-term effects of these campaigns beyond what is immediately measurable — such as worse inter-societal relations and reduced trust in institutions, the consequences of which could be significant.

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Because behavioural science can be so broadly applied, it is equally broadly defined. Of these two examples, the first sticks closely to Richard Thaler’s mantra – making it easier to overcome a clearly defined barrier to achieve an uncontroversial gain; the second, however, feels more propagandistic. In my mind, the most egregious and far-reaching mistake made in responding to the pandemic has been the level of fear willingly conveyed on the public. Initially encouraged to boost public compliance, that fear seems to have subsequently driven policy decisions in a worrying feedback loop. Though I don’t think it’s fair to blame behavioural scientists for propagating fear (I suspect that this was more to do with Government communicators and the incentives of news broadcasters), it may be worth reflecting on where we need to draw the line between the choice-maximising nudges of libertarian paternalism, and the creeping acceptance among policy makers that the state should use its heft to influence our lives without the accountability of legislative and parliamentary scrutiny. Nudging made subtle state influence palatable, but mixed with a state of emergency, have we inadvertently sanctioned state propaganda?

The second principle, empiricism, can also be misused. It is an admirable intention (I have often argued for public services to draw on empirical methods to assess impact and improve outcomes), but not when pursued at the expense of other fundamental principles of good policy-making designed to help us see the bigger picture. Placing all value on data risks de-prioritising reflection, reason and debate — and obscuring the limitations of that data as a depiction of reality. The more we measure something, like Covid infections, the more prominent it becomes and so the more it matters. But what’s most feasible to measure now is not necessarily what’s most important overall. Behavioural science was conceived as a means of recognising and correcting the biases that lead humans to make non-rational decisions. But it’s not obvious to me that the trade-offs many governments are making in their responses to the pandemic are grounded in utilitarian rationality.

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Perhaps the most important attribute of empiricism is objectivity. So it has been surprising that the most ardent proponents of empiricism in policy have not been inoculated from identity politics and their own echo-chambers. In fact, it is the proponents of evidence and empiricism, our best and most educated elites, who are now often the least willing to hear information that challenges their worldview or runs contrary to their identity. Many have written about this trend on university campuses. Even at the Nudge Unit, an organisation designed to make others aware of biases, where Jonathan Haidt has lectured staff about his work unpicking the routes of cancel culture, an academic speaker was cancelled for an innocuous, historic tweet.

So where does that leave nudging?

Behavioural science in policy can help us improve people’s lives, but we shouldn’t become complacent – as I was in 2015 in Lucerne – to the potential for unintended harm. We must always look beyond the immediate policy objective and be alive to the critical roles that institutional trust, accountability and legitimacy play in successful societies. Those who commission behavioural experts to provide policy advice must themselves understand how best to use it. The former Cabinet Secretary, Sir Jeremy Heywood, knew how to use the Nudge Unit effectively, to challenge departments to think more expansively, or assess existing programmes with greater scientific rigour. But he also knew when to temper this thinking, when to nudge was less appropriate.

As we’ve learned over the past two years, focusing on “the science” is blinkered, which is why we need multidisciplinary teams, a strong culture of intellectual humility and designed-in cognitive diversity to tackle problems, especially in times of uncertainty. And this commitment to cognitive diversity needs to be deep and effective: at the Nudge Unit, we created a product to de-bias recruitment in order that we would find successful candidates from a diverse range of backgrounds. Despite this, fewer than 1% of staff supported Brexit.

Finally, accepting Kahneman’s doctrine that we are all susceptible to automatic thinking, rather than accommodating it by bending the choice architecture to lead us down the desired path perhaps there are occasions where we can try to jolt people out of their automatic stance into active consideration. I have often argued – like Richard Thaler did here on UnHerd – that there is no neutral way to present a choice. But this doesn’t mean that, in certain circumstances, we shouldn’t try.

The Conservatives can lay claim to be the world’s oldest and most successful political party precisely because, in order to hang on to power and prevent (or at least limit) any truly significant redistribution of power and wealth, they have always been prepared to mix and match policies in way that both appeals to a wide electorate and also makes pinning them down ideologically feel like trying to nail jelly to a wall.

Admittedly, at first glance, the impression of a party totally transformed is easy to run away with. After all, Cameron and Osborne, as well as insisting on balancing the books no matter what the cost to the nation’s deteriorating public services and rising poverty levels, were often portrayed as modernisers hell-bent on dragging the Tories kicking and screaming into the 21^st century. Johnson on the other hand, whatever the cosmopolitan image he worked hard to create as Mayor of London, seems happy to cosplay the authoritarian populist — the leader of a party determined to engage in a ‘war on woke’, to defend the interests of businesses big and small, and to allow nationalism to trump his party’s traditional commitment to economic rationality.

But let’s look, first, a little closer at the Conservative Party under Cameron. Sure, it brought in equal marriage after it made it into government in 2010. But it had to rely on the votes of the opposition Labour Party to do so, since so many of its own MPs rejected the change. Similarly, while Cameron in opposition began by hugging huskies, he ended his time in Number Ten by demanding his colleagues “get rid of all the green crap” — meaning it was left to his unfortunate successor Theresa May to commit the country to net zero. Meanwhile, Cameron’s Conservatives also spent a great deal of time and effort both bringing in draconian policies (accompanied by equally draconian rhetoric) to try and crack down on immigration and badmouthing the European Union — all of which helped fuel the rise of UKIP and ultimately led to Cameron’s fateful decision to call the 2016 referendum.

As for austerity, there is no doubt that it was a reality after 2010 — but far more so for some parts of the state, and some people, than others. The NHS, as it may do now, escaped the bulk of the cuts foisted on so many other public services, while folk on pensions — unlike younger people and the poor — actually did relatively well, presumably because they constituted (and continue to constitute) such an important part of the Conservatives’ voter coalition. Admittedly, policing did suffer cuts, but that didn’t stop the party under Cameron continuing to call its main opponent ‘soft on crime’, as well as framing Labour as the party of immigrants, Europhiles, students, the chattering classes and supposedly work-shy welfare claimants.

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So what about the party under Johnson? True, Sunak has raised rather than cut taxes, including corporation tax — a move which, notwithstanding reliefs on R&D and temporary cuts to high-street business rates, some pearl-clutching neoliberals will doubtless still insist on seeing as the very incarnation of Johnson’s characteristically unguarded (but also characteristically pretty meaningless) “Fuck Business!” remark. But few if any of those tax rises is remotely progressive, not least the increase in National Insurance which the party pretends will ‘fix social care’ (it won’t). Nor is there any serious suggestion of moving to tax wealth or property to anything like the extent that a serious rebalancing of the economy would require. The hike in the National Living Wage is, of course, welcome, although let’s not forget that it was George ‘austerity’ Osborne who invented the concept in the first place!

Meanwhile, Sunak rescinded his boost to welfare benefits prompted by the pandemic as soon as decently possible — a decision which, for those not in work, will not be compensated for by his eye-catching (and indeed welcome) reduction in Universal Credit’s taper rate. Nor is the Government providing anywhere near enough funding to help poorer pupils who missed so much school catch-up. The same arguably goes for climate change policy, where, especially after the Government’s policy announcements in the run up to COP26, it’s getting harder and harder to escape the feeling that the Tories under Johnson, not for the first time, seem happy to will the ends but not the means.

As for spending more generally, while capital spending and infrastructure projects have received an expected boost, day-to-day government spending (much of which filters down, or rather doesn’t filter down to local authorities) is going to be as tight as ever, making the Government’s endlessly repeated talk about ‘levelling up’ a little hard to credit — unless, of course, we’re talking about money funnelled not to those most in need but to those constituencies in the Midlands and the North which flipped to the Conservatives in 2019 and which Johnson and his colleagues are understandably desperate to hold onto.

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For all that, barring an economic meltdown in which the cost-of-living crunch really does become a crisis and the various trading frictions associated with Brexit get worse rather than better, they stand a pretty good chance of doing so.

The voter coalition that Brexit enabled Johnson to build is made up of older voters, of sometimes ethnocentric, not particularly well-educated, intensely patriotic voters living in small towns, and of more affluent voters in already well-served parts of the country who (if they are better-educated and so socially more liberal) are prepared to set aside their discomfort with the Brussels-bashing and the culture wars so long as their taxes are kept reasonably low and their precious house prices kept high. And, like Brexit — indeed precisely because Brexit continues to simmer even if it no longer boils — that voter coalition, whose geographical distribution is nicely suited to Britain’s first-past-the-post electoral system, doesn’t seem done yet.

Certainly I wouldn’t bet on those voters taking seriously against the Budget even if it doesn’t fall hook, line and sinker for Sunak’s ‘new age of optimism’ line as much as his adoring fandom in the Tory-supporting press. They know, we know, that this is the British Conservative Party — doing whatever it takes, two-and-a-half centuries and counting. Rishi or no Rishi, there is nothing new under the sun.

How so? Because she has saved her one true love: the West. The real, European West, that is, not the “West” of wild, freebooting Ayn Rand-style fantasies which burst out when Communism fell (remember those “Ulster Scots” values which Anglosphere scribes so adored in the early 1990s? Remember Steve Bannon and his “we are all Leninists” ravings?). She understood what the West really means.

How could she not, with her life story? Unlike almost everyone else in East Germany, she was there not because of bad luck and barbed wire. Her father, a pastor, moved of his own free will from Hamburg to the East shortly after her birth in 1954, becoming a senior figure in the Lutheran Church there. This is less surprising than it sounds because the Lutherans, with their strict demarcation of worldly and spiritual realms (meaning that in practice they never seriously criticise the state) have been welcome helpmeets to rulers in eastern Germany ever since the Teutonic Knights embraced Luther, broke with Rome and founded their very own new state: Prussia.

The Wall went up when she was seven. She must have grown up knowing that she could have been a West German. As a distinctly talented young scientist working within the insane ideological bounds of Marxism-Leninism, she must have felt every day, directly, the effects of Papa Merkel’s deluded utopianism. At 35, she lived the triumph of the West not only as simple, literal freedom but also as mental freedom, at last, from the structural mendacity into which millennial ideas inevitably descend.

She swiftly embraced the CDU, that quintessentially western German party, directly descended from the Catholic Centre Party which had been founded specifically to oppose Bismarck’s Prussianisation of the West. It understands, and she understood, that the historical uniqueness of “the West” is not untrammelled, individual “freedom” but the principle that deals are cut and power shared between great institutions, neither of which will ever yield total domination to the other. This paradigm — the ultimate guarantee of freedom — goes back to 754AD, when Europe was rebooted from the Dark Ages in the great bargain of St Denis: the Frankish dynasty got the sanction of Rome, while the Church got worldly lands and Germanic muscle to defend it. Ever since, call it what you will — Church and State, King and Parliament, Checks and Balances — the principle stands against every heady fantasy, Left or Right, of some perfect society.

This is the key to Merkel’s instinct for seeking out the centre ground. She realised fast and early what all sane people eventually learn: that noisy idealism is not a virtue, but a curse, and that quiet, deal-making realism is not the absence of conviction, but its pure expression. No political lesson could be more different from the dire mix of grandstanding in the moment and backstabbing in the dark which our own Big Beasts learn in the gilded testosterone snake-pits of Eton and the Oxford Union.

Yes, she has been very lucky. It is almost comical now to recall the way that under Helmut Kohl, Germany was regularly written off by triumphant Anglosphere pundits as a dead weight on the European economy and even (declared The Economist in June 1999), “the sick man of Europe”. All that was changed by the Social Democratic/Green governments of 1998-2005, who modernised things in a thoroughly Blairite way (they even called their new, and far less generous, social security offices “Job Centres”, in English, by way of blatant homage).

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And yes, she made breathtaking mistakes. Her 2011 decision to close all of Germany’s nuclear power stations in the wake of Fukushima was either a kneejerk reaction, or a cunning plan to win over Germany’s Green voters. The need to replace nuclear led her to keep filthy brown coal power stations open and to support the Nordstrom gas pipeline which feeds German industry’s maw directly from Russia. As a result, Germany is incredibly vulnerable to energy blackmail from Moscow, Putin’s regime has been mightily succoured, and the average German citizen now produces getting on for twice as much atmospheric carbon as the average Frenchman or Brit.

When she unilaterally decided in autumn 2015 to open Germany (and thereby, in practice, Europe) to mass immigration from the Middle East and elsewhere, one can only imagine that she was trying to recapture the moral high ground from the likes of Yanis Varoufakis, who had been telling the world that in the wake of the financial crash she was acting like some kind of economic Nazi (images of Merkel sporting a Hitler moustache were seen all over southern Europe and even in Ireland).

As the rest of Europe predictably failed to follow her high-minded, high-handed lead, Germany seemed for a while to be tottering on the edge of serious public discontent: just think back to 2016 and 2017, when gloomy liberals and delighted Trump-and-Brexit boosters were both intoning that the AfD was going to break out from its base in the old East Germany and tear into the CDU. Some in Merkel’s party itself were proclaiming that the only way to survive was to “close off the right flank” (die rechte Flanke schliessen) — i.e., adopt the AfD’s policies.

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History must have been in the mood to make things pretty obvious for once, since it has given us the most perfect mathematical example of how, and how not, to deal with loud-mouthed populism. In 2017, the AfD won 12.6% of the national vote. That is, of course, exactly the same as Ukip won here in 2015. And look now at the tale of these two conservative parties.

The spineless David Cameron felt besieged by the people who eminent Tory predecessors had called “bastards” (John Major) and like “some demented Marxist sect” (Douglas Hurd) — and who he himself allegedly called “swivel-eyed loons”. So he rolled over and gave them the referendum he didn’t want himself, and which was the only way they would ever be able to enact their anti-EU, Anglosphere fantasies. He was blithely sure he would win, and hence become unchallengeable.

The stout Angela Merkel thought otherwise: I have twice been told by a German insider (I can’t name him, but he is undoubtedly of the status to have been the eyewitness he says he was) that at the 2015 G7 meeting at Schloss Elmau, Merkel, Cameron’s best friend in Europe, personally begged him not to hold his utterly needless referendum and “throw away 800 years of parliamentary rule”. But what? Have patience? See things quietly through? Make a rational, cross-party deal for what the vast majority of MPs on both sides agreed was the good of the country? Not he. If Angela Merkel had been Germany’s David Cameron, God alone knows where we would now be.

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Instead, she stuck to her guns. She toughed it out. She refused point blank to trim her course in order to pick up AfD voters, or ever to countenance any form of coalition with the populist Right, even when siren voices urged it. The result is that the AfD, far from making any further advances into the old German West, is retreating even in its eastern fastnesses.

She may have made her mistakes, but when the healing sleep of time (as Goethe called it in Faust) has washed away her quotidian errors, she will be remembered as the leader who carried the CDU, not the other way around, and who saved the West in its hour of trial. And as she leaves the stage, irrespective of which coalition Germany ends up with, she will be able to say, like a German Mr Chips, “I thought I heard you — one of you — saying it was a pity Mutti never had any children … eh? … But I have, you know … I have … look, thousands of them – and all of them decent Western Centrists!”

Ave et vale, Angela Merkel, and thank God you were there when we needed you.

Now, in Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters, Pinker synthesises both aspects of his oeuvre. On the one hand, Rationality briskly introduces you to essential concepts like Bayesian reasoning and technical terms like modus ponens. But the technical, learned aspects of the book are accompanied by a polemical drive. Rationality matters — every day, everywhere. Especially at present, in a world that many think has gone mad, whipsawed irrationally by social media mobs and online conspiracy theories. Pinker argues that methods of rationality represent not an esoteric corner of cognitive science or philosophy, but an essential set of tools for individual human flourishing, maintaining our sanity and perpetuating civilisation as a collective whole. To reason and think clearly is to be modern, and even requisite in order to be moral.

In the wake of the financial crisis of 2008, the rational actor and “homo economicus” seemed to have failed us. Nature abhors a vacuum, so there was a vogue for the field of behavioural economics, a discipline that operates in the gray zone of economic frictions and psychological irrationalities powered by faulty intuition. A crop of authors harvested these ideas: Dan Ariely, Rom Brafman, Ori Brafman, Cass Sunstein, and Richard Thaler among them. More broadly, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky’s heuristics and biases research program, to which all these authors owe a debt, entered the mainstream — Kahneman also contributed a bestseller, Thinking, Fast and Slow in 2011. Barack Obama’s administration tried to ‘nudge’ America through policy. David Cameron’s government, and the British civil service, embraced nudging too.

Rationality is part of a tacit backlash against these authors, their books, and the atmosphere they generated in public policy circles in the 2010s.

Today, Dan Ariely faces accusations of fraud at worst and scientific malpractice at best. More broadly, behavioural economics has been hit by the replication crisis. Humans respond to incentives, and for scientists, sexy and vivid results are rewarded, while negative findings can stall a career. The scientific culture of the aughts was defined at its peril by “publish or perish,” as well as sloppy experimental practices, a mechanically unthinking application of statistics, and cognitive biases in the very fields dedicated to understanding how rationality fails us. Kahneman himself began having doubts in 2012, justifiably, about some of the results reported in his 2011 book.

Pinker’s good news in Rationality is that with deliberate effort, humans can think clearly and move beyond their biases. Where much of cognitive psychology focuses on illusions and mental misfires, Rationality instead argues that our faculties are up to the task, and that this is all a natural consequence of our evolution. Evolutionary psychology leans heavily on the idea that humans are only equipped with “stone-age minds” in a technologically advanced present. Pinker seems a bit chagrined at this angle being so overplayed, and in Rationality he attempts to redress the balance, making the case that humans are naturally equipped to reason and that reason is not a dark art or the province of philosophers and mathematicians alone.

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If you are a consumer of anthropology and ethnography or even have simply watched The Gods Must Be Crazy, you are aware of the preternatural skills of the San hunters of the Kalahari desert. Pinker shows this is not due to inborn traits, but the ability of the San to take in the information around them, the time of the year, the season, the species of antelope, and make inferences in alignment with their overall goals. The San, like all humans, engage in a rough and ready form of syllogistic reasoning. They start with axioms, premises informed by their experiences, and deduce logical consequences from their assumptions. Things don’t just “happen” in the Kalahari, there is a rhythm and rhyme the hunters exploit, a pattern and sense of the world that allows them to survive and flourish. Steenbok antelope are hunted during the rainy season while eland are stalked during the dry season. You might think this is due to custom and tradition, but the San are aware that steenbok has stiff joints during the rainy season while eland hooves are ill-equipped to navigate sandy soil. They hunt animals in the season that loads the dice for a success hunt. The alternative, simply, is a higher risk of starvation. The San have goals, and they naturally use the tools of rationality to achieve them.

But what if the San did not rationally know the reasons for their actions?

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One of the essential points in Rationality is that reasoning and understanding the world are collective enterprises. We know that socially-generated knowledge and rationality can be embedded enduringly through rules and taboos. Yes, those executing a cultural script may not be aware of the ultimate reasons, but a deeper investigation by anthropologists can reveal that mindless traditions actually serve functional purposes.

Joe Henrich in 2015’s The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter reports how traditional societies across the world have a system of preparing cassava that prevents them from getting cyanide poisoning. Those following the methods do not know what cyanide is, nor do they even know that consuming unprepared cassava will lead to death, but their culture comes preloaded with the fruits of adaptive learning that are highly rational.

The deepest insight then is that our ability to reason through complex problems depends on our willingness to stand on the shoulders of giants. Though we can all reason, Pinker does not shy away from conventional pitfalls of human analysis such as the Monty Hall problem, the gambler’s fallacy and the base rate fallacy. He recounts that Paul Erdos, author of 1,500 mathematical papers, was as mystified by the Monty Hall problem as most people who encounter it. He refused to believe he was wrong, relying on his native intuitions, despite his prodigious ability to work through formal mathematics.

The point is that the most brilliant individual mind can fail at reasoning unless it approaches the enterprise with humility and the willingness to update beliefs and understanding. The scholarship reviewed in Rationality, from Aristotle to machine learning, is not just the product of singularly brilliant minds, but the collective efforts of whole scientific traditions. The replication crisis shows that groups of scholars can blunder into traps and dead ends en masse. But advances in fields like statistical decision theory would be impossible without the collective efforts of disparate research groups across numerous domains. Pinker’s treatment of deep learning neural networks also makes it clear that some of these tools for rationality are approaching the dark edge of Arthur C. Clarke’s formulation that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” And, like magic, they often fail without the guiding hand of human reasoning faculties.

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Rationality, Pinker says, was partly in response to students at Harvard finding the world puzzling, especially with much of psychology focused on how human rationality fails. If Pinker makes the case for thinking clearly, with the most powerful tools we have, whether it be 21st-century computational methods in machine learning or sharper formal analysis that draws upon mid-20th-century economic game theory, he still remains fully aware that he lives in an empirical world of irrationality.

Pinker was not one of the ‘Four Horsemen’ of New Atheism: Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris. But he is, and long has been, a fellow traveller of the group (he is also personally close to Dawkins). In the early 2000’s he took equal-opportunity aim at the Right’s attachment to traditional religion in The Blank Slate while taking the Left to task for its denial of human nature. Twenty years later, he made an extended call for a revival of the cult of rationality in Enlightenment Now. Pinker’s enthusiasm for applying rationality and empiricism to the world reflects the intellectual culture of the mid-2000’s when Dawkins was riding high with his critiques of evangelical Christianity and public intellectuals were gathering to celebrate the Enlightenment in conferences like Beyond Belief. The familiar flame of this hopeful past burns bright throughout Rationality.

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But ours today is a world of cancel culture and QAnon. Ideological polarisation that has turned the pandemic into the object of a culture war in the United States. Pinker does address the reality that the world today is not the world he might have imagined it would be a generation ago, as irrationalities and superstitions spread like ideological pandemics on social media.

The vision of the aughts was one of a reason-ruled future, but Rationality was written in the wake of Donald Trump, whose rise and popularity as an emotive demagogue triggered a reactionary flare-up of identity politics on the cultural Left. This is the world where David Hume observed that “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions”. To a great extent, the project of making Bayesian reasoning, game theory and machine learning accessible and palatable to the public seems born of the disappointments of the past generation. If you are a deep reader of Scott Alexander’s Slate Star Codex, Rationality may not offer you much new food for thought. But if you are terrified by the insanities of the present, and wish to replenish your intellectual armoury in the fight for progress and reason in the 21st century, then Rationality is what you will want to bring to the battlefield.

Far from the economic uplands promised by those who campaigned to remain, British industry was “bruised, lacerated, and bleeding to death because of the Common Market”. EEC membership meant British taxpayers were subsidising “fat cows” in Germany. “In future, all harvest festivals will be held in hangers at Heathrow”, he joked to thunderous applause. In even more vivid language, the Shadow Foreign Secretary, Peter Shore, told delegates that EEC membership constituted “a rape of the British people and British power and the constitution”.

When the time came to vote on whether to leave or remain in the EEC, 71% of Labour delegates voted to leave. Brexit, as we now call it, was Labour Party policy.

The 1980 conference vote would have come as no surprise to anyone familiar with British Labour history. Two special party conferences on Europe had already voted against membership: one in 1971 against joining and one in 1975 against remaining. Indeed, Euroscepticism had been the mainstream view of the British Labour movement ever since Clement Attlee rejected French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman’s plan for European unity in 1950.

The Labour Party National Executive Committee (NEC), with Attlee’s full support, declared: “No Socialist Party with the prospect of forming a government could accept a system by which important fields of national policy were surrendered to a supranational European representative authority.” It was intuitively understood by a vast majority in the Labour Party that entanglement in the European Economic Community ran contrary to three of the party’s core principles: democracy, socialism and internationalism.

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Following the 1980 conference vote, the Labour NEC began serious discussions to flesh out Labour’s Brexit policy. Labour’s MEPs were invited to London to help; it may seem rather unlikely now, but in the Eighties they were overwhelmingly Eurosceptic.

Then, at the 1981 Labour Party conference in Brighton, the NEC endorsed “withdrawal” as official Labour Party policy. By an even larger margin than the year before, 84% of delegates voted in favour of leaving the EEC. Hardly any activists could be described as “Remainers”.

In the following months, the NEC set about drawing up a “blueprint” for withdrawal. Unlike David Cameron, who blocked efforts to prepare for Brexit before the 2016 EU referendum, the Labour Party considered it vitally important to assess the future relationship between the UK and EEC before the withdrawal process began.

So in December, a delegation of Labour MPs went to Brussels to discuss Labour’s plan for withdrawal with the European Commission. A confidential memorandum of the meeting, prepared for the NEC and held in the Labour History Archive at the People’s History Museum, details how the Labour delegation was led by Judith Hart, a Left-wing Labour MP who had served in the Wilson government as Overseas Development Minister.

Hart and fellow Eurosceptic Barbara Castle, the leader of Labour’s MEPs, were the only two women in Wilson’s first cabinet. Undeterred by the sexism of the age — one Cabinet colleague dismissed her as “a prattling woman” — Hart was a passionate advocate for anti-colonial causes. She regarded the EEC as a “neo-colonial” project where the “white tribes of Europe” were teaming up together to create a circle of privilege. In Brussels, Hart was joined by three other Eurosceptic Labour MPs: Gwyneth Dunwoody, Denzil Davies and Doug Hoyle, father of the current Speaker of the House of Commons.

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Their initial reception from the EEC Commissioners was not encouraging. The notes record: “the original shape of the programme gave the impression that the delegation was to be taken on a ‘Cook’s tour’ of the Commission with much time to be spent on officials expounding the virtues of the EEC”. However, after a few phone calls and the intervention of British Labour MEPs, led by Barbara Castle, “the nature of the meetings changed completely and we were able to fulfil our original intentions” — namely, the technicalities of a Labour Brexit.

The Labour negotiators met with a dozen members of the Commission, including British Commissioner Christopher Tugendhat, a former Conservative MP and uncle of the current Conservative MP Tom Tugendhat. Curiously, the meetings went smoothly, with the exception of those with the British officials. “On the whole the discussions were both serious and fruitful and conducted in an atmosphere of considerable friendliness,” the Labour internal report reflected. “It was quite noticeable”, however, that the only “hostility that was shown came from the British officials”.

Predictably, many of Labour’s discussions with the EEC Commission — whether on trade, agriculture, Ireland or employment — presaged the kinds of wrangling which occurred after the 2016 referendum.

The Commission, for example, told the Labour negotiators that there were only two options available for a post-Brexit trade deal. The UK would either need to join the European Free Trade Area (EFTA), or it would have to trade with the EEC on GATT (WTO) rules – a “no deal” Brexit in post-2016 parlance. The Commissioners stated: “it would not be possible for the Community, if only for political reasons, to negotiate a better deal with the UK”.

Already, the EEC was playing hardball. A bespoke trade deal between the EEC and UK was ruled out before the starting gun had even fired. “The officials were keen to point out that we could expect no special considerations from the Community once we had withdrawn.” the Labour report reflected.

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Why Labour won't win back Britain

By Will Lloyd

The Labour team’s response equally mirrored the concerns of many Brexiteers in recent years. They ruled out joining EFTA because it would continue to subject the UK to EEC rules without having political influence to shape them. It meant that the only option before Labour was no deal. “The effect on the UK would,” said Labour’s negotiators, “be at worst highly marginal”; it would spur British manufacturing, while freeing the UK to form trade agreements with non-EEC countries on more favourable terms.

Ireland also proved a thorny topic. The Labour negotiators were comfortable with having an open border, but “Commission officials saw the problems in terms of the UK having to stop the ‘leakage’”. The Commission argued “certain controls on cross border commercial activity” would be necessary. A briefing note sent back to the Labour leader Michael Foot about the visit concluded: “It was agreed that the border with Ireland might create some problems and need further investigation.”

Finally, the two sides discussed the timeline for withdrawal. At that time, there was no provision similar to Article 50 that spelt out the specific way a member state could leave the EEC. It was agreed that 18 months to two years would be sufficient to draw up a withdrawal agreement initiating the formal process of leaving.

But there was a catch. The EEC negotiators said the agreement of all member states would be required for Britain to leave the organisation; the UK Labour representatives were not convinced. What would happen if a Labour government just unilaterally left the EEC without an agreement, they asked?

Thirty years on, the EEC’s response sounds eerily familiar. According to Labour’s internal report: “The officials stated at this point that ‘there had to be an agreement otherwise it would be terrible!’. They declined to speculate further.”

For Cameron, it was an important symbolic victory, showing that Britain had a “special status inside the EU”. For his fellow EU premiers, it was a bewildering demand, especially when the man making it had assured them that he was desperate for the UK to remain inside the EU. It proved to be more revealing than either side realised, for its logic pointed to Brexit. Yet five months later, when the British electorate did collectively decide that the UK should exit the EU, the idea that the UK could do such thing was treated as an outcome that those involved in the negotiations could scarcely have envisaged.

When Cameron began his round of travels to European capitals in the middle of 2015 to try to win friends prior to the renegotiations, he wasn’t taken particularly seriously. Perhaps, paying too much attention to British political punditry, his fellow EU leaders had not expected the Conservatives to win a parliamentary majority at the general election that May. Perhaps they had not noticed that Cameron had included in the Conservative manifesto an assurance that any government he headed would not enter another coalition without first securing a commitment to a referendum on EU membership. Or perhaps, since they wouldn’t have contemplated doing such a thing themselves, they did not take Cameron to mean what he said — that if the British people voted for Brexit, Brexit is what would then happen.

Most EU governments, not least the German one, were also preoccupied with other matters and would remain so throughout Cameron’s ill-fated renegotiations. By the early summer, the risk for Angela Merkel was not whether British voters would choose to leave the EU but whether her Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble’s attempt to expel Greece from the Euro would succeed. Only weeks after it failed — in part because Merkel made some small concessions to the Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras — the German Chancellor threw Europe into tumult by upending the EU’s common asylum rules to cope with the numbers of refugees and migrants travelling from Turkey into southern Europe. By the time, in February 2016, Cameron sought to finalise his agreement, Merkel’s focus had shifted to procuring a definitive agreement with Recep Tayyip Erdogan to return migrants without strong asylum claims back to Turkey in exchange for reactivating accession talks for Ankara.

The fallout of these events seems to have blindsided Cameron. There could have scarcely been a less propitious time for any British government to have been demanding concessions from other EU states than a moment when opt-outs from the Euro, the EU’s asylum policy and Schengen – the borderless travel area that covers most of the EU – protected the UK from the crises with which most other member states were grappling.

But Cameron did not help himself. If he had acted like someone who really believed that the Eurozone crisis had so destabilised the UK’s membership of the EU that exit had to be a serious option, he might have secured his fellow leaders’ attention. Instead, he plunged into negotiations in Brussels according to a timetable in part constructed to help George Osborne become the next Conservative leader with a Remain campaign organisation already assembled and ready to go in London.

With no currency in the EU’s present-tense difficulties with which to bargain and unable to instil fear about the future, he all too predictably ended up with very little beyond the promise that the UK did not have to pretend it believed in the EU’s stated purpose. When he returned home, he had to ask British voters to Remain, having just put on an overt demonstration of how little influence the UK could exercise in a Union whose founding text he had disowned.

But the possibility that Cameron’s lack of guile and their inattention to British problems would lead to the UK leaving the EU eluded many in the EU too. (Whether it did Merkel must remain an open question.) In part, this complacency rendered the referendum result a psychic blow. If some teleological historical force is supposed to be the ultimate agent of ever-closer Union in Europe, then, the EU is not supposed to shrink, however “cold” — a word Merkel once used to describe Cameron’s view of the Union ­— the vision of passing leaders of individual member states.

Brexit would also prove a colossal practical distraction: as Emmanuel Macron later complained, it created “thousands of hours of work for European leaders”. Believing that there was a reasonable likelihood that those Remainers at Westminster who wanted to prevent Brexit would eventually prevail was easier than working out how the EU could reconstruct a different kind of relationship with the UK as a simultaneous competitor and partner.

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The EU is flunking its Brexit opportunity

By Helen Thompson

That Brexit would bequeath Ireland a serious problem, allied to the obvious difficulties Northern Ireland would pose to any government actually procuring parliamentary assent for a withdrawal treaty, only reinforced this impulse. Now that Brexit has occurred, Northern Ireland has become instead the most fraught component of the EU’s relations with the UK. This is in part because Northern Ireland remains the UK’s primary Brexit weakness. As a matter of legal principle, the Northern Ireland Protocol weakens the UK Union, and its practical operation destabilises Northern Irish politics. So long as Joe Biden is President, it is a serious complication to the UK’s Atlantic relations, too.

But the Northern Ireland Protocol is also the EU’s burden. Brussels must now reconcile its expressed commitment to the Good Friday Agreement and its need to defend the borders of the Single Market,  in a situation where over the next decade or so there could be a border poll resulting in Northern Ireland becoming an inherent part of the EU’s legal order. Whether this is a prospect that EU governments can contemplate with any sanguineness remains to be seen.

Only the French government, after Macron came to power in May 2017, consequentially dissented from the effort to keep open the possibility of the UK staying in the EU, without which a different outcome in Northern Ireland might have materialised. Twice in 2019, Macron threatened to veto the extensions to the Article 50 deadline that first Theresa May and then Boris Johnson had to request. As Macron showed that October when he vetoed the start of accession talks for North Macedonia and Albania, the French President doesn’t believe that the EU is strengthened by sheer size. He thinks the Union needs to look like it is exercising power. For him, Brexit didn’t have to be stopped; rather, it had to be self-evident that it has deleterious consequences for Britain.

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Why Europe can't cope

By Helen Thompson

From the start, Macron also conceived the UK’s impending departure from the EU as an opportunity to reform the Eurozone by making it a debt-bearing Union, and delineating a more hierarchical EU with a Franco-German core and a ring of outer members retaining national monetary sovereignty. His opening bid, articulated in his big “Initiative for Europe” speech at the Sorbonne in September 2017, met much more British-style resistance than he envisaged.

His subsequent success during the first months of the pandemic in persuading Merkel to accept some shared debt may well prove only a temporary victory; since NextGenerationEU is for the EU and not just the Eurozone, it has also only deepened the tangle between the EU’s legal order and the Eurozone. But the chances that last year’s agreement to issue EU sovereign debt would have been realised had the UK still been inside the EU are slim, as indeed they would have been if the 2019 British General Election had led to a second referendum.

Macron is the heir of a long line of Pan-Europeanists who have believed, for geopolitical reasons, that the UK can have no part in a European economic and political union. But, like Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi who founded the Paneuropean movement in the 1920s, Macron strongly believes that the UK needs to be absorbed into a well-defined European security system. For Macron, there has never been a reason why Brexit should disrupt the bilateral Franco-British military relationship entrenched in the 2010 Lancaster House Treaties. Nor does he think that the EU’s own security architecture should constrain how the UK participates in collective European security matters, hence his push in 2018 to establish a structure for military action around the EU’s border in the European Intervention Initiative — which includes the UK.

As, in late 2019, it became clear that Johnson was likely to prevail over the parliamentary Remainers, Merkel joined Macron in calling for a post-Brexit European Security Council. But, emboldened by the Conservatives’ substantial parliamentary majority, Johnson has proved less pliable to Macron’s strategic ambitions than May. Contrary to the French President’s hopes, Johnson’s post-election government decided that foreign and security policy should not be any part of the negotiations on the future UK-EU relationship.

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The fate of the 'Anywhere' people

By Robert Tombs

In the absence of any confederal European architecture to ground broad foreign policy co-ordination, there has been little to constrain the divergent paths the UK and the EU have taken towards China since the middle of last year. To some degree, the weight of the UK’s historical relationship with Hong Kong and the nature of Germany’s deep economic relationship with China has made this separation near inevitable. But the British and French governments have pretty similar objectives in the Indo-Pacific. It is the absence of something akin to a European Security Council that ensures there will be less internal European pressure on Berlin to lead an EU policy that extends beyond economic and climate matters, and begins to engage with the probable future pressure points on access in the South China Sea.

Whether it is China or Northern Ireland, Britain’s relationship with the EU is beset with uncertainty. On Northern Ireland, Macron insists that the UK must stick to what it negotiated. But the Johnson government won’t take responsibility for protecting the Single Market any more than the EU will treat the Democratic Unionists as their problem. The present impasse has arisen from a series of misjudgements in the UK and continental capitals about the likely outcomes arising from the political constraints at work, played out against a backdrop of a world being transformed by Sino-American strategic rivalry. This is a fracture in European geopolitics for which neither the UK government nor the EU prepared. Now it is all too evident, the question is whether there is the political space for a grand bargain to repair it.

If you knew nothing else, and you were told that there was a public mood of discontent with the status quo, this line-up of speakers would give you a strong hint about who won the vote two days later. The middle-aged, establishment figures would surely have lost.

Except they didn’t. The three white, middle-aged MPs were Gisela Stuart, Andrea Leadsom and Boris Johnson. Their opponents were Ruth Davidson, Sadiq Khan and the TUC general secretary Frances O’Grady.

It is easy to imagine how pleased the Remain campaign must have been with the composition of their trio: a Scot who is also a lesbian, a military vet and a Tory; a working class Londoner from a British-Pakistani background; and the first woman ever to get to the top of the organised labour movement. The collective image they projected could hardly have been more inclusive or well calibrated to the complex realities of Britain in 2016.

It was also, of course, quite useless. Complexity and variousness did not carry Remain to victory in 2016. These qualities also proved, in the struggle to prevent a very hard Brexit, not only ineffective but arguably counterproductive.

All things being equal, it seems obvious that, in a democracy, a broad alliance is always better than a narrow movement. The problem for Remain is that all things were not equal. When national identity becomes the dominant issue, it rips up the familiar score. Harping on one note becomes much easier than trying to conduct an orchestra with too many instruments.

It is hard to avoid the old (and admittedly cliched) Greek image of the fox that knows many things and the hedgehog that knows one big thing. Remainers were animated by many different things. Leavers were defined by one big thing.

To leave the European Union was to be out. To remain was to be in. But in what exactly? There were far too many answers to that question and most of them were in conflict with each other.

What polity, what place, what imagined community could Nicola Sturgeon and Keir Starmer, Gerry Adams and Dominic Grieve, Caroline Lucas and David Cameron collectively conjure? There was none because there could not be. On almost everything except the desirability of not leaving the EU, Remainers had profoundly different visions of what the UK should be, and indeed sharply conflicting views on whether it should exist at all.

Suggested reading

Is the EU about to crumble?

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Embodying a persuasive idea of contemporary Britain is actually a very hard thing to do. Is Ruth Davidson the kind of Tory with whom most English conservatives would identify? Do Sadiq Khan’s working-class credentials evoke a sense of solidarity among working class voters in the Midlands? What political weight does the organised labour movement represented by Frances O’Grady really carry any more?

Defining a collective identity is difficult in any country, but much more so in a multi-national kingdom with shifting and uncertain notions of its own past, of its place in the world, of the relationships between its constituent parts, of the politics of social class, and of attitudes to migration and globalisation.

The great irony of Brexit is that it did in fact generate a kind of collective identity for Remainers. But it did so only in reaction to defeat. Remain lost because its only real binding agent was a sense of loss. It had to be beaten before it could discover a collective self. By definition, that was too late.

It is true of course that Leavers didn’t agree with each other about what Brexit really meant. But the crucial difference is that they didn’t have to. For the one big thing that nationalist movements know is not who “we” are. It is who we are not. Leavers had a deep-rooted sense of their Other, their dislike and distrust of the EU. For Remainers, the Other was merely the Leavers. If, as W.B. Yeats claimed, there is “More substance in our enmities / Than in our love”, the Leavers had the great benefit of enmities whose substance had been formed over centuries rather than mere years.

Suggested reading

Can the EU survive the death of liberalism?

By Larry Siedentop

If, like me, you’re Irish, it seemed very funny that Brexiteers were casting England (and it was very much England) as an oppressed nation, a colonised country being given the chance to overthrow its imperial overlords. (The picture on the door of Nigel Farage’s office at the European Parliament was not of himself but of the 19th century Irish nationalist leader Charles Stewart Parnell.)

I remember laughing out loud when Johnson, in his summing up at the end of that Great Debate, said that “Thursday can be our country’s independence day” — a claim that Farage indeed repeated when the result of the referendum came in. This notion of England as Kenya or Ireland or India at the end of empire seemed too over the top as a performance of victimhood to have much purchase on the minds of voters.

I was wrong. The idea of Brexit as the rising up of a subjugated nation clearly did seem real to many voters. And once that is the case, you are in very different game. Because if you’re Irish you also know that national insurgencies have a great advantage. They capture the idea of freedom as an end in itself — they do not have to say what you will be free to do.

Once you generate the belief that you are in a movement towards independence, you establish a temporal order. First, we become independent. Then we decide what to do with our freedom. There may be various promises about what we aspire to when we have broken away from our oppressor, but they exist in a different time zone, the one that only becomes real after we’ve broken our chains.

Remainers, confused by the innate absurdity of the idea of enslaved Britannia, never quite understood this. They stuck with two assumptions that had ceased to apply once the Leavers had successfully generated the idea of Brexit as a nationalist revolution. One is that it surely must matter deeply that the Brexiteers betrayed their promises. The other is that it also mattered that the Brexiteers had no agreed idea of what form Brexit should take.

Suggested reading

Brexit is a betrayal of Britain's farmers

By James Rebanks

Thus, when the Brexiteers very quickly disowned the infamous pledge from the side of the bus — £350 million a week for the NHS — Remainers expected outrage from voters who had been so cynically misled. There was none because the promise was about the afterlife, the time that lies on the far side of the great defining moment of independence. It was always in a different category of reality.

The same, incidentally, goes for all the threats made by the Remain side, even the ones that were (unlike the Project Fear vision of an immediate one-way trip to Hell in a handcart) well founded. They existed, for Leavers, in that nebulous never-never land of the future, another country where they do things differently.

Nor was the Brexit project really weakened by what, in a different kind of political discourse, ought to have doomed it. The deep internal divisions about whether the UK should remain within, or at least be closely aligned with, the EU’s single market, made it look like the Leave cause would implode under the pressure of its own contradictions. It did not seem foolish to believe this as Theresa May’s haplessness turned to a paralysis that shaded into anarchy.

But in fact even this disarray was a kind of strength for the Leave cause. The profound uncertainty about what Brexit would mean in reality allowed it to sustain its character as a gesture, a notion, a one-off act of liberation. It kept it on the plane where it was most inviolable, unsullied by mere detail: reclaimed sovereignty, golden age, sunlit uplands.

Think, by way of contrast, of why the SNP lost the referendum on Scottish independence in 2014. It provided the details: 900 pages on what an independent Scotland would look like. This was a target-rich environment and unionists could see all the weak points at which to aim their fire. The very vagueness of Brexit saved it from this fate. Remainers never knew, until the endgame, what the deal was going to be. They were always chasing a shadow.

What could Remainers have done differently? Well, as we say in Ireland, you wouldn’t start from here. If there was going to be an epic debate about how the peoples of the UK see themselves, you would not start with David Cameron’s glib promise of a referendum on Europe to appease his internal malcontents. You would not begin with a smug assumption that questions of identity could be shooed away with dire warnings about trade.

You would have started with a recognition that, in the wake of the Belfast Agreement of 1998 and the establishment of the devolved governments in Scotland and Wales the following year, ideas of belonging have become deeply unsettled within the UK. You would have engaged in particular with the growing evidence from the turn of the century onwards of an emergent but unformed English nationalism and thought about how it could be expressed, not just as a “not them” but as a positive “us”.

The Leavers were talking, though usually in reactionary and often in absurd ways, about identity. Remainers largely disdained such talk as innately reprehensible. But an identity crisis doesn’t go away if you ignore it. Leave offered some kind of an answer — albeit a very bad one. Remain barely recognised the question.

1. Mobutu Sese Seko, African dictator, who embezzled at least $4 billion while leading one of the poorest countries on the planet?
2. Héshēn, the most corrupt official in Chinese imperial history, who amassed a vast fortune including 20 solid gold bedsteads and 600 concubines?
3. Benedict IX, who stands out among dodgy medieval popes as the only one who sold his position to his successor?
4. Boris Johnson, who tried to get some private donors to pay for improvements to a public building, before giving up on that idea and paying for the work himself?

Not for the first time in his life, Mr Johnson appears to be the exception. Clearly, sleaze ain’t what it used to be. Even by boring British standards, the current “scandal” — if that’s what you can call it — is underwhelming. There’s no comparison to, say, David Lloyd George who flogged-off peerages to the highest bidder or John Stonehouse who faked his own death.

And yet over the last week, we’ve had day-after-day of screaming front-page headlines — depicting Downing Street as a latter-day court of Caligula.

It’s absurd. Everyone knows it’s absurd. And yet “we” — by which I mean those in the media — pretend that this nonsense matters.

Take the allegation that the PM remarked that he’d rather see “bodies pile high” than take the country into another lockdown. I don’t care whether he said it or not. I do care if our leaders can’t use intemperate language or gallows humour to let off steam in private.

What next? Perhaps we could force our politicians to wear body-cams and microphones at all times in case they do or say something offensive. What was that, Prime Minister? An inappropriate smile? A muttered expletive? Will you apologise to the British people and resign immediately?

What is genuinely offensive is that while the media are engaged in fevered speculation as to what Boris Johnson did or didn’t say, actual bodies are piling up — in India. If you haven’t done so already, I’d urge you to read Tom Chivers’s sobering article on the issue. It’s not just the scale of tragedy that stands out, but the fact that the West could be helping with its supply of desperately needed vaccines.

Suggested reading

The Lefties at the heart of government

By Peter Franklin

Britain — with its close ties to India and its influence on vaccine policy — could be playing a leading role in mobilising a global effort. But with Covid spiralling out of control in the world’s second most populous country, we’ve been arguing about interior decor instead. This twisted sense of priorities is the real scandal, but as it involves the journalistic establishment as well as the political one, don’t expect the mainstream media to complain.

Indeed, far from heralding the fall of the House of Boris, the story behind the non-stories of last week is in fact a reassertion of control. When the Covid pandemic washed over our shores last year, it disrupted the established order of Westminster politics. As the full gravity of situation became unignorable, things that had been seen as important — including things that actually were important, like Brexit — were suddenly overshadowed. That meant that the people who dealt in the normal currency of Westminster politics were overshadowed too. They could only look on helplessly from the wings as the likes of Chris Whitty, Patrick Vallance and Jonathan Van-Tam took centre stage.

In newsrooms, science and medical reporters had their stories promoted to the front page. Indeed, just about anyone with a basic grasp of statistics found themselves in demand — and a lot more relevant than the previously dominant Westminster gossipmongers.

Of course, the latter took every opportunity to claw their way back into the limelight. A prime example was last summer’s press conference with Dominic Cummings in the Downing Street garden. One after another, the big names of British political journalism puffed themselves up to express their moral indignation. But in doing so they only exposed their own powerlessness — Cummings lived to fight another day.

Suggested reading

The hypocrisy of David Cameron

By Peter Franklin

More serious was what followed, which was a free pass for actual government policy. Decisions on which ministers should have found themselves under serious pressure — such as the reckless encouragement of international travel — were more celebrated than scrutinised. The trouble we were brewing for ourselves later in the year went largely unanticipated.

Luckily, the vaccine cavalry was on its way to rescue us. But don’t forget that last autumn, the media were more interested in attacking Kate Bingham for who she’s married to and who she went to school with, than understanding her vital work with the Vaccine Taskforce. Had politics-as-usual been in full force, the media witch-hunt may well have forced her out. Fortunately, the grown-ups were in charge and she was able to finish her job.

The irony is that it’s the success of the Vaccine Taskforce that’s allowing politics-as-usual to reassert itself. Half the population has been vaccinated, Covid deaths are heading down to zero and lockdown is lifting.

In celebrating with a festival of gossip our political journalists are signalling that nature has healed and they are back in charge of the news agenda. Indeed, no titbit from the last 12 months is too trivial not rake-up and present again to the public; for example, the alleged animosity between Dominic Cummings and, er, Dilyn — the Prime Minister’s canine companion.

The mystery is why our leaders are so keen to feed the beast, by which I don’t mean the dog. Even if they didn’t have events of world-historical importance to concentrate on, like India, ministers have enough to worry about at home. For instance, it’s just over a week to the Scottish Parliament elections, on which the fate of the Union hangs. There’s also the Welsh Senedd elections and a double set of local elections. And let’s not forget the crucial Hartlepool by-election — which could cement Tory control of the North or provide the first sign of a Labour comeback.

Suggested reading

The politicians we didn't deserve

By Douglas Murray

It therefore seems an extraordinary time for Downing Street to start a briefing war with Dominic Cummings.

But then one has remember that No 10 isn’t just the victim of the Westminster gossip machine, but an active participant. From the Prime Minister downwards, they’re all devotees of a political culture which is all about mastery of the unimportant.

In his novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera explores whether it is better to live one’s life “heavily” — that is to deeply care about the situations one finds oneself living in and the people we share them with; or to live life “lightly” — without being weighed-down by any great burden of responsibility for anyone or anything.

Through the characters, he ultimately comes down on the side of heaviness — and, as such, he is writing against the philosophy of Friederich Nietzsche. It may seem strange to associate Nietzsche with lightness or levity, but that is the ultimate meaning of his ideal of the Übermensch. It isn’t actually any concept of racial superiority that makes the Nietzsche’s “super-man” über, but the fact that he rises above the things that weigh down ordinary people — especially Christian notions of morality and the distinction between right and wrong.

In its own shallow kind of way, there’s something distinctly Nietzchean about the British culture of politics. It too refuses to be weighed down. It is ruled by super-persons who consider themselves above the details of governance and are much more interested in fleeting moods and shifting narratives then anything concrete.

Covid, however, made politics heavy again. Suddenly it became impossible to prevail through rhetorical means alone. The politicians who tried, such as Donald Trump or Ursula von der Leyen, came badly unstuck. For the first time in years, politics fell into the hands of people who really know and care about things that actually matter.

In this country we now have a choice. It is whether to stay grounded in the real or to return full control to the PR spivs. I’ve got a horrible feeling that it going to be the latter – and that really is unbearable.

His is a murky affair. After leaving office earlier than expected, Cameron scooped up a number of lucrative jobs. As well as accepting a role in a new $1 billion Chinese investment fund, he was signed up in 2018 by Greensill Capital. The finance firm was run by the Australian financier Lex Greensill, who had worked for Cameron during the time he was at No 10.

Last year, according to the Sunday Times investigation, Cameron attempted to lobby members of the current government to give Greensill access to state-backed pandemic loans. This included texting the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak, arranging a private drink with Greensill and Health Secretary Matt Hancock to discuss a new payment scheme, and contacting a number of ministers at the Treasury about Greensill’s business.

Cameron’s lobbying was a spectacular failure: Sunak and others remained unmoved by Cameron’s pleas; Greensill was denied the government-backed loans and the company ultimately collapsed. The whole sorry saga appeared to be another demonstration of the former prime minister’s negotiation skills.

It is hard not to conclude that, while the fall-out of Greensill’s collapse will no doubt affect thousands of investors, Cameron is the biggest loser. For although it seems he neglected to inform his former colleagues, Cameron held significant share options in Greensill. And he reportedly boasted to friends that he stood to gain up to $60 million from his share-options, a figure he has since disputed.

But whatever the rough number, it seems Cameron expected to become very rich off the back of his involvement with the firm. Today that investment is worthless — and the former PM has proved himself not just incompetent, but also greedy, lazy and somewhat entitled: someone used to the idea that he can somehow make money easily without having to do much more than lift a finger and dial.

Yet as so often with scandals of this type, it is what it reveals about an underlying culture that is of more importance than simply one person’s behaviour. And that picture is even uglier.

In recent days, a number of Cameron’s predecessors have been careful to come out and highlight the importance of “integrity” in public life, particularly when it comes to former prime ministers cashing in on their connections. John Major, for instance, seems to be revelling in Cameron’s downfall, publicly calling for an overhaul of the ethics rules that bind former prime ministers.

Further reading

What's David Cameron hiding?

By James Hanning

It’s not clear why we should pay the slightest attention to what John Major thinks when it comes to post-prime ministerial ethics. He may have been one of post-war Britain’s worst and weakest prime ministers, but he has still managed to spend the recent decades quietly going about the business of self-enrichment.

It is surely undeniable that this enrichment has come as a result of the office that he held. If Major had not been able to make use of contacts that he made while in Downing Street, why, for instance, would he have ever been made European Chairman of the Carlyle Group, a global investment firm? For Major, as for others, his market-value after leaving No 10 came not just from his judicious insights but from the fruitful introductions and door-openings he could offer.

It is the same with Major’s successor, Tony Blair, who blighted his own legacy after leaving office by deciding to become as rich as his high-flying circle of friends. Like Major, Blair took up numerous lucrative roles after leaving politics. From the US to the Middle East and Kazakhstan, Blair and his entourage have made considerable fortunes from his Downing Street “expertise”.

And now Cameron. The cronyism and corruption of public life are obviously worrying aspects to this sorry saga. But there are other fears which are less often noted. The concern, for instance, that those who have held high public office in our country think that they are somehow “owed” for the service they have done. This may seem like an understandable instinct. But it is also an ignoble one — for the simple reason that it suggests that public service at the highest level in the land is not an honour or a duty, but rather some sort of burden. That after holding such an onerous position there is something not only right but justified in senior politicians finally being rewarded for their sufferings.

Further reading

The hypocrisy of David Cameron

By Peter Franklin

And then there is another, deeper, fear; one which is rarely spoken about. It is the fear that when former prime ministers behave as Cameron appears to have done, it is because they know something that the rest of us do not.

The prime ministerial salary is not small, and while it is true that the heads of many companies earn more than £150,000 a year, most British families can only imagine earning that kind of money. It is the same with the lucrative book deals that Cameron, Blair and others have received once they left office. Most people could be forgiven for thinking that after receiving a nest-egg of a few million for writing your memoirs, it should be possible to sit back for a bit, stretch your legs and retire.

Of course, one of the reasons that these scandals seem to descend on our recent political leaders is that in recent decades Britain has been subjected to a spate of youngish senior politicians, thrown out of office relatively early when they still have another act left in them. Nick Clegg, for example, chose to sell out by going to enrich himself at Facebook.

Further reading

Who's paying our politicians?

By Oliver Bullough

But a deeper, more disconcerting problem looms over a question about why, given there are so many ex-leaders knocking about, our recently departed politicians feel the need to be so rich. After all, David Cameron comes from a particularly well-off family, while the others were certainly never going to struggle. So why do they need so much money? What exactly is it that these ex-politicians think that they are escaping from?

Certainly these are turbulent times; the global economy, ravaged by a pandemic, has never looked so vulnerable. If a financial crisis were to occur, it hardly needs saying that one way to avoid it would be to pole-vault into a stratosphere of extraordinary wealth. There, one’s standard of living isn’t so dependent on day-to-day trivialities like the survival of Britain’s high-street banks and the introduction of negative interest rates.

Obviously we ordinary voters can never know Cameron’s true motivation. But either way, the Greensill affair seems to confirm a suspicion held by many: that a disturbing number of our former political leaders are willing to destroy their reputations simply in order to escape the rest of us.

So while Brexit may be done, only the dead have seen the end of Brexit books, which include Britain Alone by Philip Stephens, This Sovereign Isle by Robert Tombs and Gavin Esler’s How Britain Ends . None of them is terrible but all are sadly limited, and those limits say something interesting about Brexit and how its huge weight presses down on people who think about it too much, leaving some to buckle.

Stephens’s book is both the most accomplished and least interesting. As a long-standing columnist (and previously political editor) at the Financial Times, Stephens has extensive access to some of the key participants in Britain’s exit from the EU, and the subsequent search for an idea of what it should mean for UK foreign policy. He uses that access to good effect, painting a coherent picture of the thinking and feelings of those actors: the amateurism and arrogance of David Cameron is nicely captured, as is the bemusement of German officials who can’t quite believe that a British PM seriously believes he can charm Angela Merkel into overturning decades of German European policy for him.

Of the three books at hand, I suspect only Stephens’s will register with future historians of Brexit, because it encapsulates so neatly the views and voices of the foreign policy elites whose world was shattered by the 2016 referendum result. But for those of us alive and interested in Brexit today, the book is almost useless, since it’s all been said before. No one who regularly reads the FT or Economist will learn anything new from Stephens’s account of the FCO’s despair and European diplomats’ horror at the victory of the Brexiteers.

They certainly won’t learn anything about how that victory came about. Stephens makes no visible effort to understand the reasons the Brexiteers wanted to leave, or why 17.4 million voters backed them. Sometimes, he cannot hide his contempt. When Cameron’s somewhat accidental rejection of an EU eurozone bailout treaty in 2011 is received by Conservative MPs and voters as a triumph, this response is dismissed as “pathetic” without any attempt at analysis.  Likewise, Leavers are “elderly voters looking to reclaim the past” and the “left behind”; Remainers are “affluent and well-educated” and ensure that at least the “great cities” vote against Brexit.

A better book would wonder why, say, 1.5 million Londoners (40%) voted Leave, or why a similar proportion of voters aged 25-34 did so. But all Stephens can offer is that Boris Johnson is a good liar and Vote Leave successfully exploited voters’s grievances. Given that this book is published almost five years after the vote, during which time a lot of good research has been done into the motivations of Leavers and the Brexit campaign, it’s more than a little disappointing to see a leading political journalist show so little interest in the fundamentals of the biggest political event of his lifetime.

Here, Robert Tombs’s book beats Stephens handsomely, even though it’s half the length and based almost entirely on secondary sources. Tombs, emeritus professor of French history at Cambridge, is a rare thing, a Brexit-voting academic. By his account, he was largely pushed to this position by irritation at fellow guests at Cambridge dinners and their unthinking support for EU membership. If that sounds shallow, the results are actually quite positive.

Because Tombs is not implacably committed to his “side”, he is sometimes able to catch glimpses of it in proper perspective. He notes that Leavers’s economic claims about the effects of Brexit were often as “extravagantly” overstated as those of Remain’s “Project Fear.” He doesn’t buy the narrative that the Brexit vote was some sort of grumbling revolt by a marginalised majority; he can see the many things that most Leavers and Remainers had in common, at least before the vote, and predicts, persuasively, that cultural divides between the two will not be long-lasting.

Nor does he attempt to argue that Brexit was somehow an inevitable result of Britain’s historical relationship with “Europe”, even if he does sometimes lapse into trite exceptionalism. (Apparently Britain is unique in Europe in its ties to the world beyond the continent and its bigger sense of “abroad” than others. This might surprise the former colonial trading powers such as the French, Dutch and Portuguese.)

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Such triteness is surprising from a serious scholar, but This Sovereign Isle isn’t so much scholarship as the cheery musings of a man with time and scope to read a bit about something that interests him. The breezy tone is often welcome, though. Tombs confides that he is happily married to a committed Remainer, which might explain why he makes a decent attempt to understand the motivations of Remain voters, and does not assume they acted out of bad faith or stupidity, or because they’d been lied to.

Sadly, Tombs falls off the wagon of sober analysis when it comes to the years after the referendum. With unconvincing haste, he constructs a novel interpretation of the sovereign power of the referendum result that means no one and no institution has any role in determining how Brexit should be “done”. Pretty much everyone who attempted to have a say on that question, or who argued that Parliament might express a view, is dismissed as a wicked schemer plotting to thwart the will of the people. While that might well be true of at least some of the People’s Vote crew, Tombs is reaching too far when he tries to frame the Supreme Court and Parliament as illegitimate institutions with no standing in the vast process of Brexit.

The best and worst of the three books is Esler’s. Best because it at least asks some big questions about Brexit and Britain’s future that haven’t had enough attention even among the billions of words spilled since the referendum. Worst because it shares the same lack of perspective as the other two, but adds shoddy research and a fixation on trivial ephemera.

How Britain Ends is subtitled “English Nationalism and the Rebirth of the Four Nations”. Esler’s thesis is that the Brexit vote was essentially an expression of emergent Englishness as a political force. He thinks this is a bad thing, and one that will in due course force the Scots to flee the Union, Northern Ireland to accept Irish unification and the Welsh to… actually I’m not sure, and neither is Esler, who doesn’t devote much time to the Principality.

He certainly doesn’t try to explain how his central thesis (Brexit as English thuggery) fits with a Welsh majority for Brexit. Nor does he have any words for the 1 million Scots who voted to Leave, but then 38% of that country subscribing to a project of English jingoism is hard to square with Esler’s portrait of Scotland as pro-European nation where simply everyone is horrified by the prospect of leaving.

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Well, everyone Esler talks to, anyway. Far, far too many of the assertions in this book are based on conversations Esler has had with “a friend” of one sort or another, all of whom coincidentally share his conviction that Brexit is bad, the Union is doomed and Englishness is nasty and harmful. As for those who think Englishness isn’t all bad, they’re clearly weirdos and racists. We know this because Esler remembers a row with a London taxi driver who insists that the English are an ethnically exclusive group to which foreigners cannot be admitted. I used to work on a newspaper foreign desk, and know that any decent correspondent would die of shame rather than resort to the cliché of quoting a taxi-driver in copy. Esler, once a celebrated foreign reporter, is apparently beyond such embarrassment, proudly telling us how he had the last word in his dialogue with his driver.

This isn’t even the most embarrassing moment in the book. That’s probably a pointless story of Esler visiting a bar in Washington DC and hearing US Marines singing a Bruce Springsteen song without knowing — as Esler does — what the lyrics really meant. The idiots.

That taxi journey is about as close as Esler gets to trying to understand the people and the ideas that are supposedly the centrepiece of his book. Many of his observations about Englishness and the English are cribbed from Kate Fox’s Watching the English (published in 2004) and Jeremy Paxman’s The English (1998). Still, at least those are actual books. The most maddening thing about How Britain Ends is Esler’s constant references to Twitter. Barely a page goes by without him basing some claim or observation about the fate of nations on a few characters sprayed onto a screen by someone noisy but unimportant.

This isn’t just the stylistic grumbling of an old-fashioned reviewer. Esler’s regard for tweets as a primary source of evidence shows how social media can be the ruin of good journalists and journalism. If he’d spent less time staring at Twitter and more time trying to talk to people about the Englishness to which he imputes so much, he’d have written a much better book.

There are other flaws too, some sloppy (Norman Lamont, born in Shetland and educated in Edinburgh, is not “English”) and some disingenuous. Esler claims that “an attempt was made” to have Church of England church bells ring to celebrate Brexit, something he offers as proof that the UK is run by ignorant English Leavers uncaring of propriety or the other UK nations. He doesn’t say that the “attempt” amounted to one tweet by the Brexit self-publicist Arron Banks, and as such was taken seriously by no one except #FBPE types on Twitter.

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All this is deeply frustrating, because Esler’s book is founded on some good ideas and useful inquiries. The relationship between Englishness and Britishness in a UK outside the EU really should be carefully considered, and better reflected in constitutional arrangements, as Esler suggests. He’s very good on Ireland too, and absolutely right to note the Conservative Party’s shocking indifference to the fate of Northern Ireland in the Brexit process and beyond. He’s also right to link that abandonment of Unionism to the growing lack of interest in (and understanding of) other parts of the UK among voters in each of its member-countries. Few English voters care much about keeping Northern Ireland in the UK; Scotland’s political discourse feels more and more distant from “British” debates in London.

If Stephens’s book is the only one of these three that is likely to be read in ten years’s time, Esler’s is the one that focuses most closely on the issues that will still be relevant then, and quite likely more relevant than they are now. Sadly, he too cannot achieve enough distance or perspective to offer truly useful thoughts on those issues.

The common theme of these books is that Brexit is simply too big a thing for an author today to put into that broader historical perspective. So authors who try, even very smart and accomplished authors such as these, end up falling back on their own prior convictions, using Brexit analysis as an exercise in confirmation bias. As befits a proper historian, Tombs comes closest of the three to admitting the limitations of writing the history of something that is still in motion. “Brexit is undoubtedly a gamble on the democratic nation state, its viability and its future,” he concedes. And while he thinks that gamble will pay off, he doesn’t claim total certainty. Stephens and Esler, by contrast, are more sure that Britain will slide into decline and nationalist division.

Brexit is done, but what does Brexit mean? Better to take some more time on that and get it right than rush to judgement.

Last year, for instance, we had the diaries of Sasha Swire. She was the first member of the Cameron circle — her husband being former MP and Cameron chum Hugo Swire — to spill its secrets. The serial rights for her diaries were bought by the Sunday Times, and inevitably the newspaper was eager to make comparisons with leading diarists of the past. Indeed, the paper’s publicity shot for the first serial — printed on the cover of its magazine — showed Swire sitting in bed, surrounded by the day’s newspapers, pen in hand, glasses and diary at the ready, with a volume of Alan Clark’s memoirs on the bedside table.

Yet the comparison harmed more than it helped; it merely made the thinness of the material on offer look  thinner still. Swire’s revelations changed nothing and illuminated nothing. They showed the Cameron circle to be exactly what we thought they were: fairly entitled, noticeably cliquey and slightly lazy. Apart from a throw-away sexual reference that Cameron once made to Sasha Swire, all that was on offer was the startling revelation that Conservative party politics is replete with jostling, resentment and failure. Swire distinguished herself only in being the first of her tribe to betray the pack-leader.

Now, less than a year on, we have another contender for “great diarist of the decade”: Sir Alan Duncan. In a similar format to Swire’s, Duncan’s new book was bought for serialisation by the Daily Mail, which grandly described Duncan’s efforts as “the most explosive political diaries ever”. Inevitably, they also ran with “Alan Clark, eat your heart out”.

Poor Alan Clark. If anything, Duncan’s efforts are even more tedious and less revelatory than Sasha Swire’s. He “reveals”, for instance, that his old Oxford contemporary Theresa May was not a very good people-person; that the special advisors around her had rather too much influence and power. He also “reveals” that he has a great dislike for Boris Johnson, describing him as a “buffoon” and as a “selfish, ill-disciplined, shambolic, shameless clot”. Yes, it was quite the scoop.

Perhaps the situation would have been different had the shots come from someone who had hitherto displayed the discipline and restraint of a Trappist monk. But Duncan has never been quiet about his dislike of the Prime Minister: just two years ago, he could be found in every newspaper criticising Johnson for his “fly by the seats of his pants, haphazard” style. To be fair to Duncan, back then he could also be found telling the BBC that he felt no personal animosity towards Johnson, and indeed “wanted him to succeed”.

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But as his diaries make clear, Duncan never wanted Johnson — or, for that matter, any of his colleagues — to “succeed”. Indeed, it is hard to find a single politician who Duncan admires: Priti Patel is a “witch”, Andrea Leadsom “despicable”, Andrea Jenkyns “ghastly”, Steve Baker “useless” and so on.

But tedious as they are, his witless insults shed some valuable light on why diaries such as Duncan’s often fail. For in order for a diary to be great, it must first give the reader a window on to a world we would otherwise never have seen. Second, the diarist must be able to write with some degree of self-analysis or self-knowledge. Alan Clark, for instance, was extremely aware of his flaws: as a womaniser, a snob and an otherwise often unlikeable figure.

Duncan, like Swire before him, illuminates nothing, while his vanity makes self-reflection impossible. For example, in his book he is dismissive of those who he believes supported Brexit for opportunistic reasons — without any reference to his own opportunism. There is, for instance, no mention of reports that, at an early stage in the EU referendum, Duncan met with the heads of Vote Leave to discuss taking a leading role in the campaign. When it became clear that Vote Leave might have more senior politicians than Duncan to call upon, he went to the other side. What can be said of such behaviour? Is it principled or opportunistic? Duncan — unlike Clark — is unwilling to say.

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It is the same whenever Duncan seeks to find explanations for jobs he wanted but was not offered. During the 2016 reshuffle, he hoped to not only get the junior portfolio at the Foreign Office, which he was given, but also the job of Minister for the Middle East. His explanation? That the Conservative Friends of Israel went ”ballistic”; that people didn’t want him because “I believe in the rights of Palestinians and it’s quite clear that they don’t. They just want to belittle and subjugate the Palestinians.”

What Duncan does not seem to understand is that it is precisely for statements like that one that he was so unfit for the role he so desired. Put to one side the fact that he made his money in oil deals in the Middle East before entering politics. Or that his analysis of the landscape was even more unsubtle and unnuanced that his diaries portray them to be.

The main reason Duncan could never have been made Minister for the Middle East is that he had a history of sounding-off in unusually partisan terms against a country which is a major ally of the United Kingdom. It is because he spent years saying things that were undiplomatic that Duncan was never made the UK’s top diplomat. Not a surprise, really.

Somehow, the more we learn of the generation of politicians that has just left us, the less you want to know. At one point in his diaries, dated May 2019, Duncan confides that he has just had breakfast with David Cameron: “He is so glad not to be in the middle of everything that is going on at the moment.”

They are just as we thought: shallow, vainglorious, entitled and unremarkable. If they are glad not to be in the middle of “everything that is going on at the moment”, suffice it to say that the feeling is very much mutual.

I used to work in the House of Commons — occasionally late into the evening. The empty, darkened corridors gave me the creeps, but I never saw anything too unusual. Metaphorically though, the place is full of ghosts. You try not to look, but they’re always there. Waiting. Whispering. Reaching out.

Like the unquiet spirit of Cathy Earnshaw, they’re forever tapping at the window. Worst of all is when they bear the faces of the departed: former colleagues, ex-MPs, past Prime Ministers, even. They’re not actually dead, of course, but they have gone over to the “other side”, from politics to  — shudder — public affairs.

The latest spectre to haunt the corridors of power is a very familiar face: David Cameron. I almost feel sorry for the guy. For the second time in his career, he’s become the symbol of a systemic failure.

The first time was Brexit, of course — but now there’s something else that won’t go away: a lobbying scandal.

To blame one individual for these outcomes is to ignore the guilt of the entire political establishment. And yet, on both occasions, Cameron has practically demanded the role of bogeyman.

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In respect to Brexit, he was the one who called the referendum. In respect to lobbying, no contemporary politician has done more to define it as an issue of concern. He didn’t just give a speech on the subject, but the speech. It was in 2010, shortly before he became Prime Minister, when he condemned the “far-too-cosy relationship between politics, government, business and money”. He was crystal clear as to what he meant by this:

“I’m talking about lobbying – and we all know how it works. The lunches, the hospitality, the quiet word in your ear, the ex-ministers and ex-advisors for hire, helping big business find the right way to get its way. In this party, we believe in competition, not cronyism. We believe in market economics, not crony capitalism.”

Having spent several years as a speechwriter, I can tell you that politicians don’t always write their own speeches; but you’d think that Cameron might have noticed what he was saying when he said it. To warn about the “next big scandal waiting to happen” and then become that scandal takes a special kind of insouciance.

To be clear, there’s no evidence that he’s broken any law. However, his speech wasn’t about what’s legally wrong with lobbying, but what’s morally wrong about it. Cronyism doesn’t just endanger free and fair competition, but also public faith in the democratic process. Or as he said back in 2010: “It arouses people’s worst fears and suspicions about how our political system works, with money buying power, power fishing for money and a cosy club at the top making decisions in their own interest.”

In his defence, his government did introduce legislation on the issue — the Transparency of Lobbying, Non-party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Act 2014. Unfortunately, it didn’t go nearly far enough.

The Act’s key weakness is that it only really deals with one kind of lobbying — “consultant lobbying”. Any lobbying outfit that meets the legal definition must join the Register of Consultant Lobbyists — which is regulated by the Office of the Registrar of Consultant Lobbyists.

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Ironically, it is Cameron himself who demonstrates the narrowness of the legislation. He was accused of acting as an unregistered consultant lobbyist, but the regulator investigated and concluded that he had not. His dealings with Australian financier Lex Greensill clearly do not break his own law.

There’s also a voluntary Lobbying Register, managed by the Chartered Institute of Public Relations, which “individual lobbyists and organisations” are encouraged to join. You can explore it here. For instance, if you run a search on Mark Oaten — the former Lib Dem MP — you get this entry. Try searching for David Cameron, however, and you get zero results.

Neither the legislation nor self-regulation is achieving the transparency that the former Prime Minister promised in the 2010 speech, when he pledged to make “sure that ex-ministers are not allowed to use their contacts and knowledge — gained while being paid by the public to serve the public — for their own private gain.”

It’s not just ex-ministers, of course. At any one time there are thousands of lobbyists at work in and around the Palace of Westminster, many of whom used to work there in a non-lobbying capacity. They’re drawn from all ranks — from ex-researchers right up to ex-premiers.

Some are a nuisance. Others are useful. A few are brilliant — a genuine loss to proper politics. But all are tolerated. That’s not just out of respect to fallen comrades, but self-interest too.

That’s partly because there’s no career structure in politics. At every turn, one’s path is strewn with sudden exits. Most professions have more room at the bottom than the top, but it’s hard to think of any other career that’s more likely to chew you up and spit you out at every stage. The music industry might be the best comparison. There’s more than one reason why “politics is show business for ugly people”.

It’s even worse for those who exit politics in middle age. I’m not sure who said it first, but there’s nothing as “ex” as an ex-MP.

And that’s why the public affairs industry plays such an indispensable role in our political system. Unlike most other employers, it rewards public service. Indeed, the longer and more senior that service, the greater the reward. As annoying as some lobbyists might be, their presence is also reassuring. Those in Westminster’s land-of-the-living know that, one day, they too might need a place in the political afterlife.

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It’s therefore vital that we establish a clearer boundary between the two worlds. As in Christian theology, the living must stay on one side of the great divide and the dead on the other.

That means providing long-lasting careers for politicians — not so much for their sakes, but for ours. We’ve had a professional permanent government — i.e. the civil service — for more than a century. It’s high time that we ended amateur hour on the political side of public administration too. After all, our MPs are responsible for the scrutiny of legislation, the stewardship of hundreds of billions of pounds and for life-and-death decisions affecting millions of people.

If — like other countries — we had local governments that could truly shape the development of their communities, parliamentary committees that could propose and pass legislation, and think tanks with the permanence and heft of academic institutions; then there might be more to politics than the greasy pole of ministerial preferment. We’d be able to reward public service with the purpose and respect it deserves.

In any comparable field, we’d demand decades of experience from those at the top. Not politics though. An individual like David Cameron went from a job in PR to become an MP in 2001. Within four years he was Leader of the Opposition. And within nine, Prime Minister. Six years later he was out of politics altogether, with half his adult life still ahead of him. How can that possibly end well?