There are at least two odd things about the idea of a “Trump-class battleship”. The first is that naming ships after sitting presidents isn’t really supposed to happen according to the commonly accepted naming conventions of the US Navy. More strange, however, is calling a ship in 2026 a battleship to begin with. Battleships are intimately connected with military doctrines and concepts that simply aren’t relevant to modern navies: the battleship is a descendant of the ship of the line, a concept belonging to a time when navies quite literally arranged their ships up along battle lines and fired broadsides at each other. Today, cannons are simply obsolete as premier ship-to-ship weapons: they’ve been replaced by missiles that are orders-of-magnitude superior in terms of range and accuracy. Missiles and torpedoes are also so powerful nowadays that putting heavy armor on ships no longer makes sense; modern producers of high-grade naval armor are about as common as modern blacksmiths capable of forging full suits of gothic plate armor.

The last US battleship was completed in 1944, and no other country in the world considers them to be even remotely relevant in the modern age. Yet even so, America is now supposedly gearing up to build a whopping 15 to 25 of these massive ships, essentially overnight. What explains this sudden about-face? The answer to that question is not really military in nature. Rather, it has to do with the ongoing collapse of the political process inside the American system itself. Simply put, these ships will never be built. In fact, it’s more accurate to say that they cannot be built. Above anything else, these imaginary battleships are yet another descent into an increasingly overt hyperreality, where the words and pictures coming out of the official bureaucracies have less and less to do with what is actually going on in the reality, and where the staid bureaucratic processes of the American empire are breaking apart.

So why won’t — or can’t — these ships actually be built? Well, on the most basic level of legal and bureaucratic proceedings, money hasn’t actually been appropriated for this ship program. This is a much bigger problem than it might appear at first blush. Money isn’t just necessary to build a ship; it takes a lot of time and money to produce a workable design that is detailed enough for a shipyard to use. The Navy’s previous attempts at designing new ship classes all involved some sort of bidding and planning process; this does not seem to have happened here. Given that the recent history of the US trying to launch new ship classes has been a history of constant, unceasing failure, trying to repeat that process without even appropriating money for the design process itself is all but guaranteed to end in frustration. The reason this hasn’t happened is likely to be very simple, however: if appropriating money for a Trump-class battleship was put up to a vote, it would almost certainly be voted down.

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And the White House’s prospects are unlikely to improve, for the Democrats are likely to retake control of Congress in the midterms. To add even more insult to injury, the US government looks headed for another shutdown of some kind, in the wake of the fatal shooting of Minneapolis resident Alex Pretti. After that point, no money will be available for this white elephant that, lest we forget, bears the name of the Democrats’ most hated political enemy. But even if the White House could somehow find the money, there would be nowhere to actually build the ship. The US has very few shipyards of the size necessary to build a battleship-sized hull, and the two or three that do have that capacity are already busy with carriers. Getting them to build new battleships means making them stop building carriers, which is nonsensical at a point where the Ford-class program is already many years behind schedule. The US could of course always build new shipyards, except for the slight problem that it is completely broke, borrowing completely unsustainable sums of money every year just to keep the lights on.

Finally, the Trump-class battleship is built around several weapon systems that, strictly speaking, do not actually exist. This includes a 32-megajoule railgun, as well as very high power laser weaponry for shooting down drones. Both of these concepts have a very long way to go before they can be reliably weaponized; for now they exist only as experimental research projects. In the former case, the Navy spent almost two decades trying to make this kind of railgun design work, only to finally concede that the physical challenges were just too hard. Yet suddenly, without any resumption of a Navy railgun program, the Navy is now slated to build a new ship class with a working railgun system by the mid-2030s. Has the Navy actually been given any money to help it finish the research on this wonder weapon in fifteen months, after it tried and failed for fifteen years? No, of course not.

To sum up the state of play: Trump has announced a massive, glorious new era for the Navy, promising a new ship named after himself that no one ever asked for and that lacks any funding. The design itself essentially doesn’t make any sense from a doctrinal standpoint, it can’t actually be built without seriously compromising the US Navy’s capabilities for a generation, and it sports a series of weapons that, in operational terms, don’t exist. Throughout this entire process, Navy brass have all nodded and smiled politely, talking about how we need to free ourselves from “cognitive biases in our brain” regarding the whole affair, while swearing up and down that the ships will almost certainly be “badass”, and so people should just have a little more faith in the whole process.

It’s useful to understand how and why this is happening. It would be simple enough to conclude here that Donald Trump is becoming some sort of tyrant or dictator, and that these strange and doomed projects which he names after himself are merely the natural result of his own hubris running amok. Yet that is a very superficial explanation, and one that fundamentally misdiagnoses the root of the problem. Yes, it’s becoming clear that the American political system is experiencing a collapse of basic legal and procedural norms. The Trump-class battleship illustrates a curious paradox here: even as Trump gets increasingly more “hands on” — wielding more and more power that used to be outside of the prerogatives of the Presidency — the actual power of the United States seems to be waning. Strangely, personal rule and political weakness seem to go hand in hand.

But this isn’t actually all that strange. History is, after all, full of all manner of dictators, tyrants, and God-Kings. What usually defines these figures, however, is that their ascent to power is tied up with the creation of new bureaucracies and methods of rule. Pre-revolutionary France was a mind-boggling patchwork of competing feudal claims and rights; the revolutionaries ruthlessly burned that old system to the ground and put in new, hyper-rationalistic laws and institutions. It was this work of destruction and renewal that Napoleon leaned on to conquer almost all of Europe. The Nazis didn’t destroy the entire German bureaucracy, but they still overhauled it massively. Rather than cutting all the departments they didn’t like, they simply created new, alternative ones: inaugurating a system of constantly warring bureaucratic departments locked into a Darwinian struggle for money and influence. It was this dynamic that allowed the Nazi Party to assert a greater degree of direct control over the German state than had been possible during the Weimar era. In China, the Kuomintang and the Communists rebuilt the shattered state apparatus while fighting against the Japanese — and each other.

Donald Trump did promise something similar to a bureaucratic revolution, that much is true. But that revolution struggled to get off the ground, and it has already failed. DOGE no longer exists, and all attempts to balance the budget or prevent the US from collapsing under the weight of its growing deficits have been abandoned. Instead, Trump is busy looking for new ways to expand the American empire — including by threatening violence against his oldest allies — even at a point where many observers are talking about the rapid decline of the US empire in very honest terms. And while Trump’s political opponents constantly accuse him of engaging in various shocking and illegal power grabs, the nature of these power grabs, with the one exception of DOGE, is almost invariably just a result of the decay of the American state. They take the form of laws that exist on the books no longer being followed — the most egregious example of this is probably the Hatch Act — or unstated rules and norms of small-r republican government — such as the independence of the Federal Reserve — which are increasingly being ignored or outright violated. These accusations are often true, yet they are in some sense also unfair. Donald Trump wouldn’t have been elected if American voters did not strongly feel that the American system was broken and no longer worked for their benefit; him trying to preserve all the legal and small-r republican niceties of this broken system would in the end represent not just a betrayal of his own voters, but also a kind of a societal and political dead end. Change was coming no matter what: Trump was arguably just the man that happened to be in the right place at the right time.

Far from being a 20th-century fascist or an ancient Greek tyrant, Donald Trump is increasingly looking like America’s own Charles I. Like Charles I, Trump finds himself stuck at the head of an executive apparatus whose relationship to the legislature has, for all intents and purposes, completely collapsed. The second Trump administration has entirely failed at pushing any kind of legislative agenda even when compared to the fairly dismal record of his first term; it has by and large given up on even trying to get new laws passed. Rather, it constantly pushes new legal arguments, asserts executive powers no previous president has ever claimed, and uses its control over the Department of Justice to harry recalcitrant bureaucrats to go along with its edicts. This growth of executive power and assertiveness is actually an acute sign of weakness: the executive can no longer cajole the legislature to pass or amend the laws, and so it increasingly finds itself living outside the law entirely.

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When Charles I could not or did not want to face Parliament, he revived various long-dead and quaint institutions, and twisted others far beyond what they were ever intended to do. He made the failure to attend his coronation a finable offense for any man who earned £40 or more; he began demanding ship money — originally a feudal levy imposed on seaside communities to pay for the Navy — from all of England, even without an actual wartime emergency. When Trump imposed tariffs against the entire world on 2 April, he claimed extremely broad powers of taxation for himself, citing a narrow legal authority that delegated some congressional authority in cases of emergency. Just as with Charles I during his 11 years of personal rule, every day was now redefined by Trump as an emergency, and the only person who got to decide what was and wasn’t an appropriate use of emergency powers was Donald Trump himself. Many of Trump’s more shocking actions during his second term in office follow this basic pattern: some half-forgotten legal doctrine or executive power is dug up and used to justify things that haven’t really been done before. DOGE was originally created by President Obama, as the US Digital Service, but it was Trump that transformed it into a tool of bureaucratic warfare. ICE was born during the tenure of George W. Bush, but Trump has expanded its budget more than tenfold and changed what was once a low profile, mostly plains-clothes agency into an army of heavily armed, masked gunmen driving down American streets like the Marines once did in Fallujah.

Of course, things didn’t turn out all that well for Charles. His constant expansion of executive power was at first tolerated, then chafed against, and then violently opposed. When he was finally forced to call another Parliament, it immediately began passing laws constraining his powers. Emboldened and nursing a slew of grudges built up over a decade of personal rule, Parliament soon began prosecuting Charles’ friends and allies: sentencing the Earl of Strafford to death for the crime of high treason. From there, the situation deteriorated further, and England soon found itself in the midst of civil war.

Is it possible to imagine that Congress, after a period of being ignored by the American executive while nursing various political grudges, might begin to act to constrain Trump’s powers? That it will act to limit, hinder, or even impeach the people around Donald Trump, triggering an increasingly acrimonious divorce between the different parts of the American state? The answer to that question is that imagination isn’t even necessary: the proceedings have, for all intents and purposes, already begun. The Trump administration is already trying to prosecute the head of the Federal Reserve to get that institution under control, and it’s only a matter of time — and a Republican defeat in the midterms — until the people doing the prosecuting find themselves the targets of a fresh round of political persecution. Meanwhile, the chronic inability to actually settle on a budget, which recently culminated in the longest government shutdown on record, is set to get worse. As in the run-up to the English Civil War, the basic ability to pass legislation and fund expenditures is rapidly degrading. Yet the worse things get in that regard, the more Donald Trump will be tempted to dig into obscure, quasi-legal prerogatives. The more those prerogatives are exercised, the stronger resistance will become.

When suns run out of fuel, they begin to physically balloon in size. When a president or a king loses strength, when the political system they sit at the top of begins to crumble, they tend to respond by claiming more and more power. Trump’s science-fiction battleship — like his grand ambitions towards Greenland — does not herald a new era of unlimited American power. It is, like the personal rule of Charles I, merely a swansong: a final farewell to a system ready to come apart.

These always include Guy Fawkes and Pope Paul V, in recognition of the foiled 1605 Gunpowder Plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament. Fawkes and Paul V are joined every year by “Enemies of Bonfire”, usually topical figures from contemporary politics. Or, more precisely, from a roster of those perceived as villains by one particular “side” of contemporary politics.

Lewes is a prosperous, low-crime, not particularly diverse market town in the South-East, recently voted “one of the happiest” in Britain. It is commuting distance from both Brighton and London. Its residents skew older, and voted Liberal Democrat at the last election. So it’s perhaps to be expected that the “Enemies of Bonfire” often look like a Who’s Who of Guardian hate-figures: recent years have included Nigel Farage, Rishi Sunak, Suella Braverman, Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump and Boris Johnson. But if there’s a distinctive political flavor to Lewes’ “Enemies of Bonfire”, perhaps this fits with what the festival always marked: a temporary victory for one side in a bitter culture war where — for a long time — compromise was simply impossible.

If we’ve since largely forgotten the details, this is for the happy reason that eventually the politics became (for the most part) less bitter. But perhaps we shouldn’t be so complacent. Many of the underlying drivers of 17th-century England’s political turbulence have echoes in the world around us today. Then, as now, the atmosphere was febrile. An information revolution was transforming the country’s economy, culture and ideology. Some were looking toward opportunities in the New World, while others argued over how close England’s bonds to the Continent ought to be.

Back then, all these disparate issues snowballed into two increasingly irreconcilable ideological poles — and, eventually, into the open conflict of the Civil War — before one side eventually emerged victorious. And today, as I consider the angry, fractious place my country has become, I can’t help wondering: how much longer will the attempted murder of an entire government go on feeling sufficiently remote, as a prospect, to make a safe, fun theme for an autumn party?

It might be tempting, at this juncture, to make a facile point about bombs and Islam. But while Islamist attacks pose a genuine threat today, comprising the lion’s share of contemporary counterterrorism work in the UK, it would be anachronistic to call the Gunpowder Plot terrorism in this sense. As Jean Baudrillard has argued, modern terrorism is as much a phenomenon of mass media as of violence: its impact lies not just in the violence, but also in its media reproduction as spectacle. Guy Fawkes had a much blunter and more straightforward aim, which was to assassinate James I and his entire government, before (as most believe) replacing James, a Protestant, with his daughter, Princess Elizabeth, so as to use her as a puppet to restore Catholic rule to England.

As for today, I don’t think anyone is literally plotting to blow up Britain’s government. But I do think it’s telling that a poll conducted last year revealed Reform voters are more sympathetic than any other group to Guy Fawkes. Among this group, 55% were favorable to Fawkes and only 22% unfavorable, while supporters of other parties were much more evenly divided. And if we take “blowing up Parliament” figuratively, rather than literally, this makes perfect sense.

It’s hardly original to note that British politics has been in a state of increasingly bitter deadlock for at least a decade, as trench warfare grinds on between those who believe nations should be sovereign and democratically self-governing, and those who believe in a post-political, post-national “rule of law”. And there’s a precedent: if Brexit brought this wrangling into the open in 2016, the polarization that impelled Fawkes’ Gunpowder Plot in 1605 also began with a Brexit of sorts, when Henry VIII broke with the Roman Catholic Church in 1534.

At the time, the Reformation was spreading across Europe, and technological and economic changes were beginning to cascade. All was enabled, and intensified, by an information revolution: the printing press. But it wasn’t that Henry VIII was a religious radical. He never stopped viewing himself as Catholic, and these moves were more about political expediency than conviction. But others felt more strongly. Religious and political tensions soon became difficult to disentangle, especially when amplified by the politics of national interest.

By the time Henry’s daughter Elizabeth I died in 1603, bringing James I to the throne, printed maps had revolutionized international exploration, and the European scramble for empires was well under way. During Elizabeth’s reign, imperial rivalry between England and Catholic Spain was fierce. For many, Catholics looked perilously like foreign fifth columnists; meanwhile, among more ordinary English folk, spreading literacy meant intensifying religious sectarianism. Taken all together, set against new demands for political power from an expanding mercantile elite, these pressures contributed to an intensifying sense of crisis in the model of governance itself, that we could perhaps summarize with two questions: who rules, and on whose moral authority?

For Henry VIII, the answer to those questions had been “Me, and mine”. But by Guy Fawkes’ era, the answer was increasingly contested. Seen in this context, his plot seems less revolutionary than mournfully reactionary. He wanted to return, perhaps even retvrn, to a Catholic monarchy: in effect, to reset England to the religious and political order that preceded Henry VIII’s religious and constitutional upheavals.

We can perhaps understand Reform’s recent restorationist policy proposals as a similar (in this case, we must hope, only figuratively incendiary) attempt at reset. For if there is something familiar about the early 17th-century landscape of information revolution, competing elite factions, ideological polarization, and metapolitical wrangling, that’s because we’re there again. Just this time, the information revolution is digital. And if 55% of Reform supporters approve of Guy Fawkes, and perhaps dream of (metaphorically) blowing up Parliament, this expresses a now explosively pent-up public frustration resulting from the first modern attempt to respond to this new revolution: Tony Blair’s constitutional changes.

New Labour was nothing if not prescient. As early as 1998, Peter Mandelson was predicting the end of “pure representative democracy” in favor of new, perhaps digitally-mediated forms of political participation. So even if Blair’s constitutional fiddling is viewed today as a factor in our current political paralysis, perhaps the most charitable read of its intent is as a sincere if wrong-headed effort to “modernize” an order Blair accurately assessed as hopelessly ill-equipped for the information age. The problem, as it turned out, was that his solution made everything worse, replacing a sclerotic and unresponsive democracy with even more sclerotic and unresponsive managerialism.

In response, Farage promises we can retvrn. Back in August, for example, he announced a range of measures to tackle illegal immigration into Britain, so many of which are impossible under the Blairite regime that even attempting them presupposes retooling the engine of government. Accordingly, Reform recently followed up with a still more comprehensive program for doing so: Danny Kruger MP laid out plans for reforming Whitehall and restoring parliamentary sovereignty: in effect, a controlled demolition of the Blairite revolution.

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Will it work? If we take the Guy Fawkes analogy literally, the signs are not good. Those who celebrate tonight with bonfires and fireworks do so, after all, because Fawkes failed. On the evening of 4 November, based on an anonymous tip-off, officials searched the vaults under Parliament, and discovered 36 barrels of gunpowder. Fawkes and his co-conspirators were hanged, drawn, and quartered.

But that was far from an end to the era’s upheavals. In fact, it was more like the beginning. Over the reigns of James and then his son Charles, the question of who rules, and on whose authority, grew so conflicted that by 1642 the country dissolved into chaotic civil conflict. This was followed by a decade of military dictatorship, and finally the restoration of Charles II — but even then it wasn’t over. There were further plots and upheavals, including at one point an attempt by a faction in Parliament to legislate the Catholic heir apparent out of the line of succession.

All was only settled when the Jacobite line was deposed, in favor of William of Orange. As well as being a Protestant, William was also happy to enjoy a regency that was largely defanged and symbolic rather than absolute. And with this, the question “who rules, and on whose authority?” was resolved as, respectively, “the House of Commons” and “a constitutional monarch who is Supreme Governor of the Church”. England, and later the United Kingdom, and thereafter the British Empire, thrived under some version or other of this settlement from 1688 until the 20th century.

If things feel grim and chaotic today, it’s because that settlement is now exhausted and ineffective — surely, in part, as Mandelson anticipated, thanks to the digital revolution. New Labour tried to get ahead of this by “modernizing” us into a post-democratic managerial age governed by human rights, judicial reviews, and all the extra-democratic rest of it. In other words, to answer those two questions respectively as “technocrats” and “universal human rights”. And it worked well enough, for some, for a while. Its beneficiaries cluster, for example, in prosperous towns such as Lewes, where they can symbolically burn the enemies of managerialism undisturbed by dissenting perspectives.

But while I commend Reform’s impulse to end our managerial paralysis, it’s an open question whether Parliamentary sovereignty will be the hoped-for solution. Even among those who hate the Blairite order, who still believes the old one can save us? Who can look at Charles III, let alone his crapulent younger brother, and see a flourishing constitutional monarchy? As TikTok nibbles at our attention spans and capacity to read, and MPs are accused of getting ChatGPT to write their speeches, who can believe unquestioningly that restoring Parliamentary sovereignty will on its own deliver improved public trust, or indeed functioning governance?

If the 17th century is any guide, we’ll just have to keep grinding through the options until we find a resolution everyone can live with. I hope this time it doesn’t take a whole century, or produce (as some pessimistically predict) civil war. For what it’s worth, my hunch is that resetting the Blairite revolution will ultimately fail, just as the Catholic restorationists failed. But also that, when the dust finally settles, we will find, as we did previously, that a revolution has in fact occurred. I think it at least possible that the resulting order will more closely resemble the England that ended in 1688 than the “Modern Britain” bestowed upon us by Tony Blair.

Each conversion has been accompanied by a heartfelt dedication to the integrity of the new cause. Having campaigned for Remain in 2016, Truss later affirmed the ardour of her devotion to the Brexit agenda. She now shares with prominent members of her Cabinet a zealous belief in the benefits of economic independence. But plain Brexit is clearly not enough. By now, only the most radical forms of separation count.

The problem here is not a show of allegiance to principle, but the stubborn adherence to principle come what may. This trait is not a feature of the Prime Minister’s personality alone. It also characterises the behaviour of Kwasi Kwarteng, her current Chancellor, as well as the mindset of senior members of the front bench — including ministers like Suella Braverman, Brandon Lewis and Jacob Rees-Mogg. As the conduct of these stalwarts of the Brexit debate makes clear, intransigence has become a mark of virtue.

In this climate, unflinching rectitude is perceived as an asset in British politics. But this stance has not been cultivated out of deference to the national good. Rather, it is a product of the Government’s antipathy towards its opponents. Along with the culture of ideological purity, a spirit of factionalism has taken hold. This state of affairs is hardly without historical precedent. It is often the case that self-belief is driven by contempt for real or imagined adversaries. According to a familiar trajectory, conflict breeds righteousness, righteousness fosters confidence, and confidence increases animosity. Take the worsening relations during the English Civil War, for instance, when what began as an attempt to impose limitations on the crown soon descended into a full-blown constitutional crisis.

Looking back on the disturbances of the 17th century, the great Scottish philosopher and historian David Hume argued that the bitter contests of the period had sacrificed both “the repose and safety of the people”. From the reign of Charles I to the restoration of Charles II, politics had repeatedly been unhinged. Correspondingly, public opinion grew progressively deranged. However, Hume’s purpose was not to question the legitimacy of a particular party, but to observe the deterioration that came with seismic shocks to the body politic.

First, in the 1630s, the monarchy had sought to overawe parliament and tamper with the religious establishment. Then, in the 1640s, the House of Commons battled with the ailing fortunes of Charles I, and religious fundamentalism thrived. With the execution of the king in 1649, a republic was proclaimed as a solution to the prevailing mayhem, but tranquillity was scarcely restored. While crisis enveloped proceedings at Westminster, volatility beset affairs in Scotland and Ireland. Each new emergency sparked yet another. Over time, parliament was purged, an “assembly of saints” appointed, and a protectorate instituted to manage the state and the Empire.

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As events progressed, successive governments declared the purity of their virtue. At the same time, incumbents strained to outbid the principles of their predecessors. As the search for accommodation was abandoned, compromise became a sign of weakness. The Restoration of 1660 failed to resolve outstanding quarrels. Even the Revolution of 1688 proved controversial for a generation. Viewing these changes in the round, it was again Hume who challenged the wisdom of sudden experimentation in the unpredictable medium of politics. Under conditions of upheaval, he contended, even an honest bid for improvement risked proving counterproductive: with routine shattered, extremes prospered. At that point, there was no route back to a moderate course of action.

There is nothing peculiar about British politics that disposes radical shifts in policy to lead to disruptive outcomes. The same inclination toward divisive partisanship overwhelmed the course of the French Revolution. Between 1789 and 1793, angry factions rapidly succeeded one another — the Monarchiens, the Feuillants, the Girondins, and the Jacobins. As divisions deepened, caution was discarded, institutional restraints were dismantled, and fundamentalist programmes succeeded one another.

Of course, historical analogies are of limited utility. To begin with, British politics is not facing imminent implosion. Nonetheless, there are medium-term threats to the equilibrium of the state. Most obviously, the Union is under increasing strain in Scotland and Northern Ireland. Yet, despite the existential danger, successive governments since 2016 have been haplessly careering towards a dissolution of the United Kingdom.

The explanation for this anomalous course is not difficult to find: a radical brand of conservatism is now prepared to gamble with the future. This reckless spirit has been sustained by a libertarian vision of Brexit. For the champions of this outlook, Britain’s departure from the European Union was never an end in itself. The goal has been securing the “opportunities” of Brexit. With that end in view, circumspection and moderation have been systematically discounted. In relentless pursuit of a low-tax, low-regulation economy, the costs of this journey have rarely been computed. This has long been a feature of self-appointed national liberation movements. Freedom from an unloved structure of authority is sought at any price.

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For instance, while Irish opinion has stood flabbergasted at the recent course of British affairs, the truth is that Ireland itself followed a similar path. The British Union from which it struggled to escape was hardly the apotheosis of tyranny, although subjection to unaccountable power obviously rankled. At the beginning of the 20th century, a measure of autonomy, packaged as “Home Rule”, seemed attractive to most citizens. But soon partisans of a more robust version of independence appeared. First, dominion status was pursued; then a free state; and, finally, a republic. In the meantime, British and Irish relations deteriorated. Partition was introduced, and a trade war ensued. The Irish economy did not recover until the Sixties.

None of this is intended to suggest that complete autonomy is not worth the effort. Interestingly, after joining the European Economic Community in 1973, Southern Ireland to some extent revised its earlier judgment. Fresh “opportunities” were anticipated under a new dispensation. But the important point is that constitutional upheaval inevitably comes at a cost. Opposing constituencies will differently evaluate what they are prepared to pay. But, either way, it is a basic duty of clear-sighted accounting to weigh up the calculus of benefits.

The fiasco surrounding Kwarteng’s recent “mini-budget” is just the latest in a line of collisions between expectation and reality. In its rush to make the world as it would like it to be, the government disregarded the facts on the ground. This arrogance is a consequence of a doggedly partisan spirit. The mentality is hitched to a neo-Thatcherite ambition to secure the imagined dividends of Britannia Unchained. But the approach has its roots in the Brexit referendum and its aftermath.

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First, beginning in 2016, “experts” were disparaged. While it is true that the record of economic expertise is wanting, ignorance is hardly an adequate substitute. Since then, inconvenient orthodoxies have been dismissed by the Conservative Party. An array of institutions have been disdained. The Civil Service has been scorned, and the Treasury derided. Leading public servants have been whimsically dismissed. Parliament was summarily and unlawfully prorogued, and suspicion has been cast on various aspects of the judicial system.

At the same time, the BBC has been under attack, and the competence of the Bank of England questioned. Dissenting opinion in the governing party has been audaciously purged, with the threat of a repeat performance having been trailed at least one more time. Diplomacy has also suffered. An international agreement has been set aside under cover of the most spurious pretexts. Under Boris Johnson, the government was prepared to deny accepted facts. Since his departure, Liz Truss has felt at liberty to select her own preferred truths.

It is a venerable myth in public discourse that Conservatism aims to conserve. But the current government is exploding that myth with unprecedented alacrity. In this it is a fitting successor to its immediate forebear. It handles itself with the same unapologetic swagger. It is similarly determined to advance its doctrines without regard to consequences. Today’s Conservative Party is the child of a crisis which it helped to foment. There is little sign that it has any desire to return to a path of consensus. It is often the case with political upheavals that leaders corrupt their supporters. But in the current straits the government has run ahead of the public — and there is little evidence that it has any idea of how to change its course.

This obviously wasn’t really about attitudes in 12^th century England and no one seriously believed it was; it was about Englishmen, or Britons, today, and it’s safe to say that on the eve of a Second World War the idea of a 20^th century “free-born Englishman” was a potent one.

It was believed to be as much a part of the national character as the repression of Trevor Howard in Brief Encounter, or the stoicism in all those roles played by Kenneth Moore. An Englishman was freedom-loving and would never submit to tyrants big or small, whether French-speaking sheriffs or Hitler, or indeed petty busybodies closer to home.

But that was 80 years ago, and if it was ever true, the idea of the freeborn Englishman has been quietly put to bed by the pandemic, exposed as nothing more than an empty myth.

Last February, with events in China giving us a grizzly image of our future and the full horror starting to dawn, that myth was often trotted out. We were repeatedly told that the British were too much of a freedom-loving race to tolerate similarly authoritarian measures. The ghosts of John Bull, John Wilkes and Robin Hood would rise up within us to resist this tyranny.

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Boris Johnson said as much, telling the House in Commons in September that “There is an important difference between our country and many other countries around the world: our country is a freedom-loving country…. It is very difficult to ask the British population uniformly to obey guidelines in the way that is necessary.”

The experts had even hesitated to act last February because they feared that British people would not be able to tolerate lockdown for long. There would be riots, some thought.

Yet like the military experts of the 1930s who predicted that aerial bombing would shatter morale, they were completely wrong. While Italy and the Netherlands have had serious anti-lockdown disturbances, the British public have accepted it with remarkably little in the way of complaint. They may not have liked it, and some rules may have been bent a little, but compliance has generally been strong — with an inevitable decline during the summer.

Not only that but lockdown is popular as a policy. Wildly popular, you might say. The Prime Minister has been miles behind British public opinion in every restriction he has reluctantly imposed, out of touch with a population who, as a whole, don’t seem to especially love freedom.

Although Right-wingers were the early doomongers about Covid, the issue soon realigned along culture war lines, with progressives far keener to lock down. Yet there was a big difference. While Nigel Farage flirted with the idea of lockdown scepticism, it didn’t last long because, Farage, whatever else people say about him, has a very good sense of what the British public think.

The UKIP position on immigration was hugely popular during the Blair, Brown and Cameron eras; likewise crime, another area where Right-wing populist positions regularly poll 60 or even 70%. But lockdown scepticism? It barely made it into double figures.

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On almost every question relating to lockdown and Covid, the British public are far less liberty-loving than the Government.

They’re happy with closing borders, and they’re keen on putting people in quarantine. Some 70% support GPS trackers for people entering the country.

Are vaccine passports a hugely controversial infringement on our liberties? Not really — most people want them used for hospitality, offices, and even social gatherings. And the public favours compulsory jabs for nurses, regardless of how nurses themselves feel about this. 

Over three quarters of the population can cheerfully contemplate social distancing measures remaining in place until autumn. There is widespread, even overwhelming support for police enforcing lockdown measures. 

A majority of Britons even think a 10-year jail sentence for lying about your country of departure is fair, while 13% think it’s not harsh enough! I wonder what proportion of that 13% would support actually hanging them.

All the predictions that the British public would not tolerate harsh lockdown measures are completely contradicted by the polls, which show the Chinese government to be more in tune with the great British public than Boris Johnson is.

Contrary to all the predictions that we would never tolerate surveillance in return for the end of Covid, I reckon the average Englishman would happily have a microchip in his arm if it meant he could go down the pub.

Sure, this is the home of Magna Carta and we can make a reasonable claim to being the birthplace of liberalism, but John Locke’s ideas were much more influential in the United States than in his home country.

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The myth of ‘Anglo-America’

By Peter Franklin

Like much of our politics, our political-psychological idea of ourselves comes from the Civil War era. It was around that time that the phrase “free-born Englishman” was coined by Leveller John Lilburne, and they put him in prison.

Had YouGov been around in the 17^th century, a significant majority would probably have supported this, with another 13% wanting him burned to death, and the liberty-loving sect to which Lilburne belonged, the Quakers, were deeply unpopular for a long time. 

The Levellers believed that Englishmen had once been free, a natural liberty that had been crushed by the Norman Yoke; before that foreign occupation brought about the class system and privilege, free Saxons sat around in the forests of Olde England, presumably talking about cricket and the weather. It’s an appealing national myth and, of course, completely untrue; slavery was widespread in Anglo-Saxon England, before being abolished by the Normans.

Likewise, Lilburne thought that free-born Englishmen had their rights laid down by Magna Carta: “the ground of my freedom,” as he said, “I build upon the Grand charter of England”.

Magna Carta, although it had nothing to say about the ordinary peasant, did evolve to restrain royal authority — but even here it has been more influential in the United States, where its legacy can be read in the constitution (Clauses 39 and 40, for instance, influencing the 5^th Amendment).

Although three clauses are still on the statute books in England, attempts to make Magna Carta a sort of sacred English text of freedom have always been quite a fringe affair.

Among the wilder shores of the lockdown sceptic movement, there are modern-day sects of sort who cite Magna Carta Clause 61 to oppose Covid measures, claiming it allows “for lawful dissent and rebellion” and that businesses don’t have to close under Covid-19 regulations.

That Clause 61, which gave the leading barons the right to overthrow the king, did not appear in the approved 1225 version of Magna Carta makes no difference to their enthusiasm for this idea. It’s a myth, based on an idea of the English as being inherently free. Yet these groups are minuscule, and for most people our supposedly sacred freedom is not thought about much; Oliver Cromwell was probably onto something, public opinion-wise, when he referred to the document as Magna Farta.

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England has always been two nations

By James Hawes

And whereas America has the First Amendment, the British have come to accept a huge number of hate speech laws down the years, with Blair’s government being particularly illiberal on this issue, to the extent that police are now investigating 120,000 “non-crime” hate incidents.

Indeed, so well-known are the Britons for being downtrodden by overzealous, interfering government authorities that there is a meme in other English-speaking countries called “have you got a licence for that, mate?” making fun of us.

We are now the most spied upon country outside of the People’s Republic of China, London being the only non-Chinese city in the top 10 of CCTV global hotspots. And despite this, CCTV is very popular among the British public.

Perhaps it’s because the British love spying on people, which certainly is a national characteristic dating back to Francis Walsingham. Or perhaps we like being spied on. We think the reduction in crime justifies the loss of liberty, just as the reduction in coronavirus deaths does.

In which case, which people are being referred to when we are told that “British people will never accept these sorts of restrictions”?

There is, it’s true, a strong liberal and Whig tradition in Britain, of which Boris Johnson is an inheritor, but they are certainly not the majority. On the political axis the median British voter sits somewhere in the top left quadrant, neither economically nor socially liberal, with culturally conservative and redistributive views.

The largest block after that are the progressives, who care most about equality and have barely-concealed authoritarian leanings. Then there are the genuine liberals, of which there are about 17 in Britain.

We tend to group like this because the major driving force in the British psyche is not liberty but fairness, and its step-brother spite. This is a country which hates benefit scroungers yet gets hugely sentimental about the issue of free school meals, because its people hate the idea of someone cheating the system. The one SW1 story that broke through with the public in recent years was the Dominic Cummings Barnard Castle saga — because it upset people’s sense of fairness.

The British are, in fact, quite conformist and placid. The French riot about literally anything, while after epic levels of political incompetence and 120,000 deaths, the worst that’s happened here is someone projecting “Boris is a wet wipe” on Parliament.

There’s a reason why an Englishman in the late 1930s might have seen himself as uniquely free-born and liberty-loving. Our political history and lucky geography has graced us with centuries of moderate politics, avoiding the ideological nightmares of our neighbours. But that doesn’t make us particularly freedom-living; indeed if it anything it makes us complacent about our good fortune.

Most of the British public still support Robin Hood against the Sheriff of Nottingham, but not because they care about freedom. It’s because they care about fairness. They don’t want a free England, they want a fair England.

A man of remarkable and ruthless achievements — victor of the Civil Wars, first to unite Britain and Ireland, the first commoner to be Britain’s Head of State and architect of a global empire — Cromwell remains an elusive figure.

Most of the public will have heard of him and some will know of his role in the trial and execution of Charles I, but both Cromwell and his turbulent age have little purchase among the British people, unlike, say, the Tudors or the Victorians. It is as if France knew little of its Revolution or America nothing of its Founding Fathers. Yet what a fascinating character he is.

As Lord Protector from 1653 to 1658, Cromwell managed to hold together a fractious and fragile alliance of politicians and soldiers. He was at heart a conservative committed to hierarchy and order, which met with the approval of most MPs, who were of Presbyterian bent and sought an established church, albeit one without bishops. But, an Independent in his religious views, Cromwell was also genuinely committed to liberty of conscience, which allied him with the “Saints” of the army, who, guided to victory by divine providence, believed England an elect nation, the new Israel.

Cromwell would die with this alliance still in place. But it was dependent wholly upon his personal authority and, having refused to accept the offer of Crown made by civilian MPs, in part because of the army’s opposition — “I would not seek to set up that which Providence hath destroyed and laid in the dust, and I would not build Jericho again”, he told Parliament in 1657 — the possibility of a smooth succession grounded in the Ancient Constitution of King, Council and Parliament became ever less likely.

And so Cromwell’s son Richard inherited the tenuous title of Lord Protector but not the loyalty of his father’s allies. Soon after, Charles II was restored, and Britain’s experiment in republicanism was over.

The figure who had made it possible was a manic depressive of relatively humble beginnings, who had proven himself a military leader of genius and a pragmatic politician whose Parliaments were a perpetual disappointment.

Impossible to pin down, he was a man of considerable personal tolerance. When John Biddle, a distinguished, though controversial, biblical scholar, had come under suspicion for denying the Trinity, the Protector had intervened personally to save the life of a man he thought “full of modesty, sobriety and forbearance, no ways contentious”. Banishing Biddle to the Scilly Isles in October 1655, Cromwell allowed him “a hundred crowns per annum for his existence”.

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By Suzannah Lipscomb

Though Cromwell was more concerned with political order than religious toleration when the crux came, his personal interventions in private religious matters were striking. Quakers were released on his instruction, and the trial and brutal punishment of the Quaker James Nayler in 1656 made Cromwell question the political role of his Major-Generals. Cromwell paid for the funeral of the Anglican Archbishop Ussher at Westminster Abbey in April 1656. He also refused to restrict admission to Catholic services at the Venetian ambassador’s residence and was friends with the aristocratic Catholic Kenelm Digby, whose father had been implicated in the Gunpowder Plot of 1605.

Despite his dour “warts and all” image, the Protector was something of an aesthete. Cromwell and his family moved into the suite of rooms that had served as the Royal Apartments in Whitehall in April 1654, probably after a rushed — and expensive — renovation, for they had been neglected since Charles I left London in January 1642. John Embree, Cromwell’s surveyor-general, spent more than £10,000 a year on refurbishments throughout the duration of the Protectorate, a sum comparable with the Stuarts’ annual expenditure.

Clement Kinnersley, Cromwell’s keeper of the wardrobe, was lavish in his spending. Between February and November 1654 he paid out more than £12,000 on such items as a bed for the Whitehall apartments, “after the Indian fashion”, most of which had been part of the royal collection, along with an array of paintings and tapestries. Whitehall, after all, was part of the public face of the regime, where ambassadors and emissaries from across Europe would seek an audience with Cromwell. Whatever the ideology of the Commonwealth, it would seek to offer similar splendour to its allies and rivals across the Continent.

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Hampton Court, built on the Thames to the west of London by Henry VIII’s chancellor Cardinal Wolsey, was Cromwell’s weekend retreat, where he would gather his family and closest allies. Its renovation was a challenging project, with leaking roofs and negletced garden, but Cromwell and Embree had ambitions for the site. A huge marble fountain was brought from Somerset House to become the focus of Cromwell’s private garden. Originally commissioned as the centrepiece of an assembly of classical figures, like the Banqueting House, it was designed by Inigo Jones for Charles I in the 1630s.

This “Diana Fountain” could hardly be less puritanical in its symbolism, decorated with nymphs, dolphins and sea monsters, the supporting cast to a statue of the goddess Diana atop. The Puritan Mary Netheway was appalled by “those monstres” and wrote to the Protector to remind him that that “while the altars of the idols remained untaken away in Jerusalem, the wrath of God continued against Israel”.

The tapestries at Hampton Court, a particularly expensive form of decoration, are far from puritanical, depicting the sinful, adulterous figures of Vulcan and Venus. Those in the aptly titled Paradise Room went even further in their dabbling with morally dubious narratives, celebrating the Triumphs of the Seven Deadly Sins.

Cromwell’s collection of paintings was no less decadent in its themes. Gentileschi’s Besabe, or Bathsheba washing herself, was unlikely to fulfil puritan requirements of decorum, while Andrea Schiavoni’s Madonna and Child with St Elizabeth and Luca Cambiaso’s Assumption of the Virgin Mary were deeply Catholic devotional works, which sat ill with Cromwell’s professed Calvinism.

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By Tom Chivers

Cromwell loved music. The Royalist Antony Wood reported that the Protector especially enjoyed works by John Hingston, who had trained two boys to accompany him in “Mr Deering’s printed Latin songs for three voices”.

Chamber music was popular, usually in the form of a consort of viols, always a sociable form of conversational music making, with its inwardly circular arrangement of players, though a new instrument from the Continent, the violin, also made the occasional appearance. Wind bands were accompanied by organs, including one removed on the instructions of the Protector from Magdalen College, Oxford to Hampton Court, where Cromwell employed a Mr Farmulo as his own “virginal musician”.

Much of this will come as a surprise, though what remains least understood about Cromwell is, perhaps, his conservatism, which often dragged him into conflict with his more radical supporters. Above all, it was Charles I, his head turned by the new ideology of European absolutism, who was the innovator. Cromwell preferred to hold to some form of the Ancient Constitution — though he bowed to “cruel necessity” on more than one occasion, for none of his Parliaments came close to his ideal. Nor, ultimately, did his nation, which he had hoped was rather more saintly than it actually was. In that, he has a more recent historical parallel.

Consider this: an East Anglian, nonconformist, philosemite, suspicious of, though not fundamentally opposed to, monarchy; a unionist uncomprehending of Ireland, a courageous advocate of military action, who left considerable problems of succession to those who came after them? It appears that Margaret Thatcher was cut from similar cloth to the Protector. And it may take just as long for a statue near Parliament to be raised to her.

With Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn now odds-on to face each other across the dispatch box – and with our society in the midst of a cultural civil war of sorts – you could say that not since the 17th century has this country been led by two men who so embodied the classic archetypes of the Cavalier and the Roundhead.

Boris, with all his man-baby ‘divine right’ sense of entitlement, may not be everybody’s idea of wromantic – though his number of progeny and extensive back catalogue of amorous liaisons may suggest that some have indeed seen him that way. He does, though, embody something of that politically captivating sense of party-fun and devil-may-care irresponsibility that eventually made the Royalists a more attractive proposition than the moralistic fun-sponges of the resistance.

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By Diane Purkiss

Admittedly, that word ‘eventually’ is doing a lot of work here. For not until long after the king’s head was separated from his body, and the grim moralists had had their day, could the party times return again – which conjures the image of that blond mane being held aloft at Traitor’s Gate. Whatever the modern-day equivalent of decapitation might be, it’s not a wholly unlikely prospect.

Likewise, earnest Jeremy Corbyn does a more than passable impression of stolid Leveller single-mindedness. Just think of all his moralistic, almost Old Testament prophetic determination for reform according to some Biblical blueprint for the flattening out of our social and economic differences.

Corbyn’s mentor, Tony Benn, was thoroughly steeped in the revolutionary politics of the English Civil War – a long war that he believed had never been fully settled. The war was grimly repulsive to some, visionary and right to others – though one suspects that there will be never enough of the latter for Corbyn to successfully complete the reformation he has in mind.

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Of course, the danger here is one of projection. Corbyn is hardly the visionary thinker that this comparison suggests. His big ideas are all borrowed and as second-hand as his wardrobe. He may love pottering around on his allotment, but that hardly makes him Gerard Winstanley in 1649 on St George’s Hill.

Boris also is flattered by this archetype. He would love it, I am sure, if we were to associate his whirligig of mood swings and curious on-off relationship with the truth with the spirit of the dashing Prince Rupert – at turns leading his troops into battle and the life and soul of the riotous after-party. Oh what fun. But I suspect the joke won’t last long. It’s only a few hundred yards, after all, from No 10 to the Banqueting House where Charles I met his sorry fate.

But there is a serious point buried amid the fun: the extent to which Roundheads often misunderstand the appeal of the Cavaliers – and also of Boris. No one expects Cavaliers to be morally virtuous. But people do respond to Cavaliers’ general attitude of celebration and fun. And to the belief that being a flawed human being is no disgrace.

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Why I like my politicians to be hypocrites

By Giles Fraser

That is why the typical Roundhead attacks on Cavalier immorality often serve to deepen the popularity of their target. This infuriates Roundheads and confuses them. Think of LBC Radio host and permanently angry Remainer James O’Brien – who prides himself on knowing a thing or two about being right – doing his absolute nut with incomprehension at people voting for Boris.

“I voted for Boris Johnson to be Mayor of London in 2006,” he admitted yesterday, but I “can’t really remember why”.

Well, I can tell you why many people did: because they recognised in themselves the very flawed characteristics that they see in him – and ones that Roundheads would put on trial. Indeed, the reason Roundheads are widely regarded as repulsive is because their self-righteousness is seen as persecutory.

Boris’s voter appeal may also be linked to his unpredictability, this being an unusual moment in time when, for Leavers at least, his many vices act more like virtues. Can you imagine how maddening the spreadsheet Eurocrats in Brussels will find the explosion of floppy haired chaos that will descend on them after his coronation? They don’t know what he will do because he doesn’t know what he will do. And Boris has had a lifetime of knowing how to turn the chaos he creates to his advantage. Brussels is afraid of him because they fear he could be someone genuinely barmy enough to go for a no deal.

And only when they start to worry that they are playing chicken with someone who is so unmanageable that he will keep driving full throttle towards them – someone who won’t listen to their sensible advice that this will hurt you more than it will hurt us – only then will the EU be forced to change course.

This was, incidentally, also Prince Rupert’s novel tactic: making his cavalry charge full tilt at the enemy. It is, though, a worrying comparison for Leavers. Let’s not forget who lost the war.

Like Rupert, Boris Johnson is unlikely to be remembered as a successful leader. The flaws – so appealing to some – will inevitably bring him down. Posh boy charisma is no substitute for character. And when he falls, this country will continue to be faced with the ongoing task of making peace with itself.

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Charisma will only get you so far

By Elizabeth Oldfield

The Church of England was revived after the English Civil War as a kind of peace treaty between two sides who saw the world very differently. The church represented a sort of truce or pact between former enemies who would sit and pray alongside each other in their local parish church and agree to disagree. In this new-look church, the aptly named Book of Common Prayer would offer a focus for unity, and pastoral care would matter more than divisive theology.

It was in this post-civil war period, in response to the destruction that had gone before, that the English especially developed a suspicion of ideology and a renewed sense of the value of compromise. I do not know what institutions of healing we have left any more. And there is an important challenge in that thought.

But once this present battle is past, and our politics returns to the reassuringly boring, we will all need to learn again how to see the good in each other, and how to sit alongside each other without reaching for the pitchforks.