Seeking to combine the image of a radical reformer with the reputation of a safe pair of hands, Reeves began her litany of mixed messages before she moved into 11 Downing Street. While she acknowledged the “severe damage” inflicted by George Osborne’s austerity program, she adopted his language to liken Britain to a person who had “maxed out the credit card”. Then, once in the Treasury, she demonstrated how using such language leads inexorably to a contractionary fiscal program. Turning John Maynard Keynes’ dictum “Anything we can actually do, we can afford” into its opposite (“If we cannot afford it, we cannot do it”), Reeves embarked on an austerian downward spiral.

First came expenditure caps on caring for the elderly, which would save the measly amount of £1 billion annually. Having warmed up, she followed with the termination of winter-fuel payments for pensioners, shortly before one of recent history’s coldest winters. Along with cancellations of urgent hospital and railway works, these cuts saved another £5 billion, with a further £16 billion tax rises in the works. Then, in her autumn mini budget, Reeves broke her promise not to touch National Insurance Contributions by extracting an additional £25 billion from employers. Hoping to frame this final measure as pro-labor, her tactic fell terribly flat once workers realized they would be paying for most of it in the form of dampened wages.

By that stage, the new Chancellor was caught in the same doom cycle that typified Osborne’s tenure: each austerian measure meant to rein in the deficit boosted the borrowing requirement, spooked debt markets, elevated interest payments, reduced its fiscal space and caused the Chancellor to seek more austerian measures. These, in turn, deepened the economy’s stagnation. And so it would go on.

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Tory critics have taken Reeves to task for being too ready to talk Britain down. But they seem to have forgotten that her claim of inheriting a £22 billion black hole from the Tories was a faithful imitation of Osborne’s strategy to blame his own austerity program on the “scorched earth” situation he had inherited from Labour. The Tories have also accused her of being insufficiently austerian, which is disingenuous: if deeper austerity were the right remedy, why was the doom loop under Osborne just as bad? If anything, deeper cuts in expenditure today would only worsen Reeves’s predicament.

Obviously, the Tories are trying to exploit Reeves’s woes. But what is truly startling about her stewardship of the Treasury is both how faithfully she has stuck to Osborne’s playbook, and how similarly the UK economy has reacted. And this despite the quite monumental difference in the circumstances the two Chancellors faced as they took office. Soon after his appointment, Osborne received a windfall from the Bank of England — in total, £124 billion was transferred from the Bank of England to the Treasury between 2010 and 2020. In sharp contrast, Rachel Reeves will be sending to the Bank of England £34 billion of taxpayer money every year for the next four years. Essentially, all the money her austerity raises will be sent to the Bank. And all because of a flawed set of monetary rules which she is refusing to change.

This madness all dates back to the financial crash and the subsequent fallout when, in addition to the taxpayers’ bank bailouts and ultra-low interest rates, the Bank of England created £875 billion to buy government bonds from the bankers. It flushed the banks with cash that they would then hand out in loans to stressed households and firms. In the process, the Bank of England made money from the interest rate difference — between the ultra-low official interest rates it was paying banks and the higher interest accrued by the government bonds. Hence the £124 billion windfall for the Treasury.

However, the situation was reversed after 2022. With the pandemic disrupting supply chains and triggering inflation, the Bank raised interest rates tenfold and began selling the government bonds back to the bankers in the hope that prices would stop rising. But bonds come with fixed interest rates. And by raising interest rates, the Bank of England had effectively pushed down the value of the older bonds it was selling off, thus inflicting large losses on itself.

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These losses could have been avoided in two simple ways, reflecting the wiser practices of other major central banks. First, it could refrain from selling government bonds at knockdown prices — and instead hold them to maturity. Second, it needn’t pay bankers the high official interest rate on every pound they choose to hoard at the central bank.

Indeed, many leading central banks pay the bankers the going interest rate only for part of their deposits, the rest at zero. This is precisely how the European Central Bank (which, by the way, no one can accuse me of being a lackey of) avoided major losses when deflation gave way to inflation. There are no good arguments for why the Bank of England should not follow the ECB’s example — except that the City bankers would not like it. And only a cowardly Chancellor would think this was a good enough reason to maintain a £34-billion subsidy for the banking sector every year.

Given the Bank is supposedly independent, some may ask whether Rachel Reeves is really to blame. But the issues at stake are in the remit of Parliament: the mindless fire sale of government bonds; the high interest accrued to bankers’ money; and, most crucially, the assumption, first promised by Philip Hammond, that the taxpayer would indemnify the Bank of England for whatever losses it might suffer. These fall under the Chancellor’s responsibility. And given that it is her duty to legislate for the common good, she could change them.

Just look at Reeves’s predecessors. Before Philip Hammond’s promises, George Osborne and Alistair Darling legislated that the Bank of England could print money for the bankers but not for households — against the advice of the not-exactly-Leftist IMF. And now Rachel Reeves has decided not to legislate away the stealthy BoE subsidy to the bankers, adopting instead their inane, self-evidently self-serving arguments. Chancellors, in short, cannot hide their responsibility behind a distortion of the notion of central bank independence.

Taking a broader perspective, ever since Margaret Thatcher vandalised Britain’s ailing heavy industry and replaced it with a vicious financial system, it was only a matter of time before a global financial crisis would bring Britain to its knees. Following the 2008 crash, overgenerous money printing for the bankers and austerity for everyone else trapped the UK into a low-wage, low-productivity, low-growth, low-take-home-pay, low-rent equilibrium. That is why, for a while now, Britain has felt like an advanced rentier society that has run out of rents.

But let’s be honest. Labor was never going to fix Britain’s broken business model. Nothing in their manifesto warranted any such hope. Nevertheless, it isn’t too much to expect minimal levels of competence and enough courage from a new Chancellor to rescind an annual handout of £34 billion to bankers already flush with taxpayer cash. Alas, overpowered by an urge to be accepted by the City, Blackrock and the Davos crowd, Reeves has fallen into a trap of her own making.

John Kenneth Galbraith once quipped that “[t]he process by which money is created is so simple that the mind is repelled”. Today, it is hard not to be repelled by how Britain’s scarce fiscal resources are sacrificed on the altar of the Chancellor’s cravenness.

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.

Rishi Sunak’s decision to cancel the Birmingham-to-Manchester leg of HS2 has been described as an embarrassing PR blunder, a spectacular snub of a host city that immediately invited the ire of mayor Andy Burnham and dozens of very sensible think tanks and highly credentialed economists.

These critics are almost certainly right. The building of a modern high-speed railway that will shorten the journey from Manchester to London to just over an hour — and free up the full-to-bursting West Coast Main Line to carry more regular and reliable local and freight services — seems to be a matter of when rather than if. Sure, we can kick it down the track for a few years, but the cost of doing so will only rise. And, in the meantime, local train services will continue to share tracks with faster intercity rail, and hordes of travellers will have to put up with the dismal services of Avanti West Coast, a company that sometimes charges us more to visit London than it would cost to fly to Italy, and then makes us stand up for two hours to drive home the humiliation.

“Make it make sense” goes the tagline of a popular online meme, and on the fact of it, cancelling this leg of HS2 just doesn’t. And yet, I think there’s a symbolism to this week’s decision that appeals to Sunak. It is the sign of a new last-gasp strategy, which involves killing what you might call Manchester-Toryism.

For most of the past 13 years, Manchester and the Conservative Party have been engaged in an awkward but mutually profitable embrace. Successive Tory governments have found the city to be a useful screen on which to project their claims to economic radicalism, starting with George Osborne’s Northern Powerhouse and reaching to Johnson’s unrealised notion of “levelling up”. Both men visited Manchester to make cliché-peppered speeches about reviving growth in the cradle of the Industrial Revolution, and both raised hopes that something might be done about the scandalous London-everywhere divide in this country.

Manchester, for its part, was a willing partner in this game. Play along, and you could get regeneration funding and devolved powers that rival cities will wait years to match. Since the late-Eighties, Manchester’s Labour leaders have become studied pragmatists in their dealings with Downing Street. In 2021, when I was researching a profile of Sir Richard Leese, Manchester’s council leader for a quarter of a century, one insider explained: “He understands the old adage that he doesn’t have allies; he has interests.”

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“I always thought Richard was an incredibly practical, pragmatic, not particularly partisan person,” Osborne told me, having worked extensively with him on Greater Manchester’s pivotal 2014 devolution deal. Leese was willing to shake hands with Osborne in his office in the Treasury and then flog the chancellor over austerity just hours later to a reporter from the Manchester Evening News. The rules of the Manchester-Tory compact had been established, and everyone knew how to play by them.

Crucially, everyone’s interests seemed to be broadly aligned. Manchester needed lots of money to fix its embarrassing infrastructure, and the prospect of public investment reassured and enriched the city’s biggest private investors. Conservative governments needed to show they had a plan for the country that didn’t involve capitulating to a depressing narrative of post-imperial economic decline. And a phalanx of think-tankers loved the idea of an economic plan that might spread prosperity outside of London. The Tory-Manchester consensus was firmly in place, so firmly that holding the party’s annual conferences in deep-red Manchester actually seemed to make sense.

And then, this week, the consensus was shattered. Why?

Touring my local Manchester pubs on Sunday night — chatting to Conservative pollsters and lobbyists and gossip mongers, all astonished to be buying pints of Spanish lager for less than £4 — I gradually gleaned the answer: Dominic Cummings.

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My understanding is that, after studying the Prime Minister’s dreadful polling numbers in recent months, Sunak’s close advisers called the exiled Cummings in from the cold. According to a source who works inside No. 10, the advice from Cummings was bracing: shifting the public’s perceptions of Sunak would be incredibly difficult. He made clear that only very big, very noisy moves would have any chance of persuading people that Sunak is an agent of change. No. 10 needed to pick some big public fights; the more blowback from former prime ministers and big business figures the better. Or, as one insider characterised Cummings’s advice: “Do mental stuff that proves you’re not the Establishment.”

I thought of that when I read in The Times this week that the PM’s HS2 move “has been opposed by a succession of senior Tories, including three former prime ministers — Boris Johnson, Theresa May and David Cameron”. That feels like a feature of Sunak’s strategy, not a bug.

Cummings, after all, is a long-term sceptic of HS2, having previously described it as a “disaster zone”. In one of his Substack newsletters, he wrote that his former boss Johnson had gone ahead with the project in January 2020 only after a “garbage model/graph was fed to a PM”. Cummings’s advice to Johnson, according to a later tweet, was “bin this farce”.

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It looks like Cummings got through to Sunak. The recent U-turns on the Net Zero timeline and HS2 have created a lot of noise and a lot of heat, even if they still look like a middle ground between the Prime Minister’s cautious, managerial politics and what Cummings was truly gunning for. The next few months might reveal more about how much influence Cummings has around No. 10.

From the perspective of Manchester, where I write from, canning the northern extension of HS2 — the last northern leg still standing — represents a striking break from a settled consensus. As The Financial Times’s Henry Mance pointed out this week, since 2010 the country has elected three Conservative PMs, all of whom promised to build HS2 to Manchester. The years in question have not exactly been a glorious period for the British economy, but they have seen astonishing growth in Manchester, one of Europe’s fastest-growing cities. HS2 and the Northern Powerhouse Rail project (building new lines from East to West in the North) was supposed to be the oil on the fire – the bit that could finally allow our great northern cities to meaningfully narrow the gap to the capital.

Andy Burnham, who excels in moments like this, pointed to the Manchester skyline during one of his interviews this week, a panorama in which new tower blocks appear seemingly every few months. “Look at the place, the place is doing so well at the moment,” Burnham said. “And you’re going to pull the rug on us?”

The death of Manchester-Toryism — the severing of the stable quid pro quo that has existed between this city and the party it is somewhat awkwardly hosting this week — is significant. We will wait to see what Sunak promises to the North in exchange for stopping HS2 in Birmingham, but few expect the “phasing” of those plans to bring any good news soon. Cummings’s chaos politics — doing “mental stuff that proves you’re not the Establishment” — is unlikely to be compatible with the long, expensive and detail-oriented task of driving regional economic development.

“It’s a complete betrayal,” one senior political figure told me last night in Manchester as he made his way to a drinks reception for local bigwigs. “How can local leaders and businesses here ever trust what this party tells them again?”

With a straight face, the multi-millionaire architect of Tory austerity under Cameron tells us that new podcast will “expose how the powerful become powerless when faced with economic forces they can’t control”. Meanwhile, Balls has been filmed drumming in a band called Centrist Dad, performing a Sex Pistols number alongside ITV’s Robert Peston. Who ever said that middle-aged technocrats don’t have a sense of humour?

Certainly, in terms of exhibiting the traditional technocratic vice of advertising expertise as a way of consolidating personal power, the pair seem off to a flying start. Their podcast has already been glowingly endorsed by influential cronies. David Cameron has tweeted that the podcasters “really know their stuff”.  Michael Gove has remarked — perhaps with the sort of sincerity he has become renowned for — that these are “two of the sharpest minds I know”.

Stewart, meanwhile, already has a very popular podcast with Alastair Campbell called “The Rest is Politics”. Like the Osborne and Balls roadshow, this too is framed as bringing sensible, well-informed discussion to the masses from rather different political perspectives, modelling reasonable disagreement along the way. In reality, though, it’s a chummy love-in between two liberals with similarly middle-of-the-road instincts. In a recent episode, the pair spent a lot of time talking about which of them looked better in a kilt at Stewart’s birthday party, and how nice it was to see Theresa May and “Willie Dalrymple” on the dancefloor there too. Vidal versus Buckley this is not.

Though their schtick suggests otherwise, a typical discussion between Stewart and Campbell tends to be quite superficial — citing a few facts gleaned from the broadsheets, a sprinkling of views from this “really, really interesting guy” or that “amazing professor”, but hardly venturing to explain to any sceptics listening what exactly makes their views so interesting and amazing. (In an episode last month, a listener asked which literary character each presenter would most like to be. Stewart chose Prince Andrei from War and Peace; Campbell chose Faust. When pressed by Stewart to justify his choice, Campbell answered: “I think that would be really interesting, yeah.”)

But for me, the most irritating thing about “The Rest Is Politics” is that it has pretensions to de-escalate and depolarise, and yet still patronises the life out of a huge number of voters: namely the supposedly weak-minded fools who voted for Johnson or Trump. “Populist” leaders are habitually presented as an obvious enemy, and the most charitable explanation Stewart and Campbell can muster for anyone voting for them inevitably involves susceptibility to manipulation, either by a corrupt media or by the politicians directly. Perhaps they assume that it is more palatable for grown adults to be called gullible than iniquitous, but I’m not so sure.

Stewart’s new book, meanwhile, is basically a plea for more intelligence in politics. He first entered parliament with a lively, inquisitive mind, a strong sense of duty, and a frankly astonishing CV that included tutoring Prince William, acting as governor of an Iraqi province under occupation, and running a NGO in Afghanistan. Yet once an MP, every aspect of the Tory party system seemed to conspire to subdue his native wit and initiative.

He soon discovered that the only acceptable activities for a newbie were toadying up to leaders and slavishly following orders. If you asked a searching question about an incoming piece of legislation, you were mocked. If you knew more than the average person about a particular policy area, this would be treated as a positive reason to keep you away from it. Phones pinged constantly with the latest messaging to be memorised, and the whips were ruthless in crushing free thought and free movement. Working for Liz Truss at Defra, she advised Stewart to “never be interesting”, though he didn’t listen.

Little by little, Stewart started to feel that parliament “reduced” him. Soon after giving a maiden speech comparing himself to Scott of the Antarctic, he found himself hiding in the toilets rather than voting as directed by the whips. A funny speech of his went viral — in which he talks Latin about hedgehogs — but few of his carefully prepared, serious interventions made a dent. Once he started to get slightly bigger political jobs, the list of people who wouldn’t listen to his good ideas grew longer by the year. Civil servants, ministers and prime ministers, ambassadors, foreign dignitaries, and world leaders all remained stubbornly oblivious. Eventually he got a job as prisons minister, and was for the first time allowed the autonomy and resources to make a tangible positive difference.

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His story certainly illustrates a pressing issue. Running a country these days involves oversight of hundreds of highly complex systems and sub-systems — economic, technological, judicial, diplomatic — directed at whatever goals currently judged socially desirable by voters or their representatives. Yet as Stewart said in an interview this week: The truth is… politicians don’t really know what’s going on. And yet we pretend to the public that we do.”

One suggestion in the book is that those destined for ministerial portfolios should be recruited from relevant specialist backgrounds, and then given enough time to see their initiatives through to the end. He bemoans the fact that “fluent Chinese speakers, decorated colonels, physicians, lawyers and many successful businessmen” were left on the backbenches by Cameron and May. New ministers are “amateur outsiders on very short tours, whose successors could introduce completely different agendas”.

Stewart clearly dreams of a system in which brilliant MPs of the right vision and experience are left to get on with innovation at the operational level, unhampered by the gloomy obstructions of The Blob and the reshuffling whims of their leaders. He is less clear about why the experts he wants in the system have to be MPs; why could they not, say, be members of a reformed, more collegiate, and less obstructive civil service? The implied answer seems to be: because that way, Stewart wouldn’t get to run things.

Still, few could disagree with his general sentiment. The cost of the Tories’ phobia of details are vividly sketched. At their most surreal, Stewart’s recollected exchanges with those in charge of the country read like the darkest of Evelyn Waugh satires. As Secretary of State for Defra, Liz Truss tells him: “I don’t believe in rural affairs, Rory. I think there is no relevant difference between rural and urban populations.” As Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson asks him to “sort out Libya”, describing it as a “bite-sized problem”. When Stewart demurs that the UK has no embassy there and so no real diplomatic influence, Johnson tells him to be more optimistic: he just has to motivate people.

The obvious dangers of technocracy include corruption and voter disenfranchisement. Stewart seems to think the antidote is a more participatory politics, involving things such as citizens’ assemblies to “build consensus”. If there had been a citizens’ assembly on Brexit, he thinks, “you would have ended up with a customs union”. This is a common enough technocratic fantasy, floated many times before by those such as Obama and Clinton: that if people with adequate intelligence are given access to the right sort of detailed information and time to think about it, their conclusions about practical decision-making will converge.

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But to me, this just further betrays the extent to which, for all his talk of avoiding polarisation, Stewart is still mired in the classic patrician attitude of the educated liberal who equates “clever” with “good” with “what me and my friends think”. His fantasy just isn’t true. Even when people agree about all the relevant facts in some domain, their radically different values will affect how they each respectively order and prioritise those facts, and what outcomes they then favour. And this does not necessarily make one side or other stupid.

Arguably, to genuinely lessen political polarisation, what the public needs is to witness robust, reasoned disagreement between people who differ radically on both facts and values, and yet who don’t resort to lazily dismissing each other’s characters or intellects in the process. But this is not what they get from “The Rest Is Politics”, and I suspect it won’t be what we get from “Political Currency” either. In the latter case, I predict many casual references to really really interesting guys, quite a lot of unconvincing football banter, and a bit of ribbing about Keble versus Magdalen. It seems we have no shortage of former politicians who think they are clever and interesting. We may even have some actually clever ones, like Stewart. But what we really could do with is a few wiser ones.

***

In the latest episode of These Times, Tom McTague sits down with Rory Stewart. Listen here.

Over the last few years, the people of Britain are increasingly falling on the side of Lord Byron — who, in 1812, mourned the Parthenon’s sorry post-Elgin look: “Dull is the eye that will not weep to see. Thy walls defaced, thy mouldering shrines removed.” According to successive YouGov polls, a clear majority of Britons want to see the Parthenon artefacts displayed in the magnificent New Acropolis Museum, in a special hall overlooking the defaced Parthenon.

Alas, the British government and Elgin’s surviving supporters are resisting tooth and nail, insisting that the Parthenon artefacts in the British Museum are its property and must remain so eternally. Their claim to legal property rights is both tendentious and detrimental to the British sense of justice. They point out that Elgin had a permit from the Ottoman occupying forces in Athens to take what he liked from the Acropolis — which, they insist, gave him the right to own and to sell on whatever he removed. Even if we set aside the fact that said Ottoman permit never granted Elgin permission to hack the statues and friezes from the monument with the use of saws, the claim is absurd and, indeed, quite dangerous.

Imagine if the Nazi occupying forces in Paris had granted some gentleman a permit to remove statues from the Louvre. Or if Putin’s men in Mariupol were, today, to grant a visiting antiquities dealer a permit to remove priceless artefacts from a local museum. The very notion that these permits bestow secure property rights over the removed artefacts is an affront to every decent person worldwide. As for the British establishment’s usual rejoinder — that the Ottoman occupation of Greece was centuries long, or that Greece had not been a modern nation-state before the Ottomans invaded it — it is terribly disrespectful to scores of Britons who, like Lord Byron, travelled to Greece shortly after Elgin had vandalised the Acropolis to fight alongside the Greeks reclaiming their liberty and founding the modern Greek state.

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This unending saga is back in the news. For the last six months or so, George Osborne, the former Chancellor of the Exchequer who currently serves as Chair of the British Museum, has been negotiating a deal with the Greek government. It will see a portion of the Parthenon sculptures sent to Athens, on loan, to be displayed at the British Museum in exchange for other antiquities. The real reason Osborne has entered into such negotiations is self-serving: he needs to raise £1 billion to refurbish the British Museum, but fears that, in view of British public opinion, unless he washes away the stench of Elgin’s larceny from the halls and corridors of the British Museum, sponsors will not be forthcoming.

Unfortunately, constrained by the British establishment’s determination to insist on maintaining full property rights over the artefacts Elgin brought to England, the deal Osborne is offering the Greek side is shameful. Indeed, it could not be otherwise, as long as the UK government and the British Museum insist that they own the artefacts outright.

Think about it: members of the British establishment, who consider the artefacts to be British, and know that the Greek side does not recognise their property rights, oppose even lending them to the New Acropolis Museum, fearing that a Greek court, if not the Greek government, might decree that they not be returned to Britain. The only way they would consider lending them is on the basis of the deal that Mr Osborne is now putting to the Greek government: a deal stipulating that, for the privilege of being lent half the removed Parthenon artefacts, Greek museums must send over other priceless artefacts to be kept in the British Museum as “collateral” — essentially as hostages that will force the Greeks to return the loaned Parthenon marbles.

No Greek government can ever agree to such a sordid deal. And no decent Briton should look at it with anything other than deserved scorn.

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Speaking personally, I think it is absurd, after 200 years, to be having the same discussion. It is upsetting for us Greeks and it is dispiriting for the Brits. I am no cultural nationalist, in that I do not want to see every fragment, every statue, every frieze or vase produced in Classical Greece returned to us. The Parthenon friezes, metopes and pediments are a very, very special case. They were created as integral parts of the Parthenon and were hacked down by Elgin with a permit from our enslavers. They belong neither to the Greeks nor to the Britons. They belong to the Parthenon, with which they can be best re-united if they are displayed in the perfectly-designed room on top of the New Acropolis Museum. It is visually connected with the temple in a manner that would bring tears to any visitor’s eyes.

And what about the British Museum? Does it end up with an empty room where the Parthenon relics are now? Absolutely not. As an internationalist, and an Anglophile, I would loathe that. But imagine the following. Let the Parthenon Marbles be re-united with the Parthenon permanently. And let the Greek government commit to keeping the relevant room in the British Museum stocked with a permanent, rotating exhibition of priceless stand-alone classical era treasures. It would allow the people of Britain and international visitors a reason to visit the British Museum again and again and again.

In this manner, the Parthenon will become whole again. And the British Museum will be enriched by a never-ending parade of splendid Greek antiquities that function as joyous ambassadors of Classical Greece in central London, not as Mr Osborne’s sad hostages.

On the one hand, he is expected to address the numerous economic problems afflicting Britain — the highest inflation rate in 40 years, an energy and cost-of-living crisis, a slow-motion housing market crash, strained public services, and growing industrial and civil unrest — while simultaneously boosting investment and economic growth. On the other, he’s expected to do all this while “restoring the confidence of the markets” by “fixing the country’s finances” — that is, reducing the government deficit and debt through higher taxes and/or spending.

These two objectives can’t be reconciled. Addressing the economic and social crisis, as well as mobilising the investment needed to boost growth, requires more spending, not less, which can’t realistically be offset through higher taxes. Meanwhile, attempting to balance the budget — which would mean allowing millions of households to slide into poverty, letting businesses go bust, and pushing public services to the brink of collapse — would likely make Sunak the third Prime Minister to be kicked out of Downing Street in as many months.

The good news for Sunak is that this is a false dilemma. The UK’s public finances don’t need “fixing”. As a currency-issuing nation, Britain can never “run out of money” or become insolvent on its public debt. I’m inclined to think that Sunak is aware of this; after all, he personally oversaw a massive increase in the deficit during the pandemic, which he paid for by having the Bank of England print the necessary pounds, essentially bypassing financial markets (and the issuance of bonds itself). The resulting debt is entirely owned by the Bank of England, and technically doesn’t even need to be repaid. There’s no reason he couldn’t do the same now.

The bad news — for Sunak and the country as a whole — is that the new prime minister can’t allow himself to acknowledge this simple truth. Not only has he long pushed the argument that his own pandemic support measures have created “huge challenges for our public finances” that now need fixing; even more crucially, in his rush to replace Truss, he fully embraced the mainstream narrative about the reason for her downfall: that she was punished by the markets for a fiscally irresponsible budget that almost destroyed the British economy — and that it’s now his job to correct her mistakes.

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This narrative is profoundly misleading. As Narayana Kocherlakota, former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, recently noted: “Markets didn’t oust Truss, the Bank of England did.” He points to the fact that the fall in the value of the pound was, in the grand scheme of things, rather negligible, while the gilt sell-off was largely caused by problems inherent within Britain’s over-financialised pension funds — itself a result of regulatory failure by the Bank of England — and then exacerbated by the announcement that the Bank’s bond market intervention would be short-lived.

“[It’s] easy to see how [this] contributed to the government’s demise,” writes Kocherlakota. “She was thwarted not by markets, but by a hole in financial regulation — a hole that the Bank of England proved strangely unwilling to plug.” In other words, if the Bank of England had played ball with the government — as any central bank should be expected to, if one believes that policies should be decided by elected politicians, not unelected technocrats — there would have been no “mini-budget crisis”.

The accounts that are emerging about the “advice” that Truss received from the Treasury and other departments are even more concerning. According to a new book on her downfall, Treasury chiefs told Truss the UK risked plunging to the status of a “Third-World country”, unable to sell its debt on global bond markets, with the City “reduced to rubble”. “They scared the shit out of her,” one insider states. If true, Truss wasn’t just sabotaged by the Bank of England — but by the government’s own unelected officials as well.

Now, it may have seemed like a good strategy to Sunak to gloss over these uncomfortable truths in his bid for the party leadership. But in the coming months, he may come to regret reinforcing the regressive, and fundamentally false, narrative about the disastrous fate that allegedly awaits any government that dares to stray from the fiscal orthodoxy. With mainstream pundits on both the Left and Right, and even opposition politicians, trotting out ridiculous tropes about the urgent need to “fill the fiscal black hole”, Sunak has no choice but to engage in some degree of austerity.

This, of course, may have been his plan all along. As the underlying message of his victory speech made clear, Britain faces a “profound economic challenge” and “difficult decisions [are] to come”. Even more worryingly, it has been reported that Jeremy Hunt has been holding talks with Osborne, the architect of the devastating austerity drive of the 2010s. What might all this mean? According to some reports, Sunak and Hunt are exploring tax increases and public spending cuts worth up to £50 billion — the amount needed to balance the budget.

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It doesn’t take a PhD in Economics for one to say with some certainty that this is not going to happen: Sunak and Hunt are perfectly aware that attempting to balance the budget at a time of recession would be crazy — especially considering that there’s really “no fat left to trim” from existing public services, many of which are still feeling the effects of a decade of spending restraint and more recent pandemic pressures. Even Whitehall and Treasury officials have warned against the risk of going too far in cutting public spending or raising taxes, which is probably why Sunak has confirmed Truss’s decision not to raise the National Insurance levy by 1.25%, and why even Hunt is saying that “I don’t think we’re going to have anything like [the austerity of the 2010s]”. So, we’re unlikely to see hardcore austerity. The problem is that even austerity-lite would be damaging at a time when more spending is needed, not less.

Meanwhile, Sunak will also have to contend with the Bank of England’s commitment to raise interest rates. This won’t reduce inflation that is entirely driven by supply-side factors, but will almost certainly cause huge pain to the economy, especially to the housing market, which is already in trouble. To some extent, however, having the Bank of England play the bad cop might actually benefit Sunak, providing him with a temporary scapegoat. But, further down the road, when he may find himself having to issue more bonds to prevent the economy from tanking and public services from collapsing, Sunak may regret having empowered the myth of central bank independence. We consider it normal that crucial decisions about every area of economic policymaking should be taken by unaccountable men in grey suits. But there’s nothing normal about it — it’s just another attempt to shackle democracy.

Of course, as economist Richard Murphy noted, Sunak could tell the Bank of England to stop raising interest rates and start buying the new bonds issued by the government to cover the cost of its commitments to the British people. But that won’t happen, given Sunak repeatedly attacked Truss precisely for wanting to curb the Bank of England’s independence. To put it simply, it’s hard to see how Sunak could ever succeed given the constraints that he has, to a large degree, imposed upon himself. By feeding the myths that ultimately brought down Truss, he’s boxed himself in.

And yet, for now at least, he can always count on the “L factor” to turn his fortunes around — the fact that Labour is even more terrified of markets and wedded to those myths than the Tories. In fact, the political contest now seems to have become who can enforce the most austerity, with Labour now presenting itself as the party of “sound money” and as an antidote to irresponsible Tory spending. It’s the depressing paradox of the current era: in the midst of the worst social and economic crisis in decades, both parties have been hijacked by representatives of the establishment. The populist window that had opened with Johnson and Corbyn has now been firmly closed. But as Sunak could soon find out, it won’t stay shut forever.

Amid this chaos, Rishi Sunak — former Goldman Sachs banker — has become Britain’s new prime minister. Has the technocratic order of the 2010s returned? Or has the modern world moved beyond its reach? Read Gray’s diagnosis, as well as his interview with Freddie Sayers, below.

The revenge of the technocrats

The point about these people is they’ve learned nothing. There’s no practical way of going back to before 2016. Already in 2016, the world hadn’t fully recovered from a near catastrophic financial crisis which these adults in the room, these extremely intelligent men and women, had given us. The halcyon period of technocratic competence included, going back to the start, long-term capital management melting down in 1998, after Russia defaulted on its debt. That was patched up but it also began what later was called quantitative easing … You then had the 2007-2008 crash. And you also had gruesome sideshows like 20 years in Afghanistan. This is what the adults in the room, this is what the technocrats, the people who are now coming back as safe hands, as competent administrators, this is what they did. So their record is not at all one of competence. It’s one of repeated near-disaster.

They think of themselves as the way of the future. But the future has melted down. It’s not there anymore; their future’s gone. Their future was one in which the whole world would marketise, in which geopolitics would surrender to geoeconomics, global markets. All the states that were emerging, China, Russia and others, would see that their advantage lay with integrating into the global market. Geopolitical struggles would attenuate. They would still be there, but would become less important over time. The opposite has happened. The global market doesn’t exist the way it seemed to exist then and it’s certainly not evolving towards this global market stability that they expected. So, the fundamental problem in this nostalgia, this Osbornist technocratic project, is that they’re adapting to a world that no longer exists, and isn’t coming back. It is a hopeless nostalgia.

What the Tories get wrong about Brexit

Insofar as Brexit’s a Tory project, it is: Global Britain, supply-side reforms, free market, open the British economy even more to the buffeting of the world. Whereas what people wanted in the North and the Midlands, and other parts of the country, from Brexit, I think, was some shelter from those storms. They wanted not a smaller state, a state that had retreated even further. They wanted actually, maybe not a bigger state, although most of them I think probably did, but one which was more protective of them and more concerned with their wellbeing and more active. So the majority of those who voted for Brexit did not vote — perhaps the overwhelming majority — for the reasons that the Tory Brexiteers thought. And that, of course, introduced a contradiction in the whole Tory Brexit project, which meant it couldn’t work.

Why the technocrats don’t get populism

The only way they could understand these movements, what they called populism, was to say that these are stupid, ignorant people. If they merit any sympathy, it’s that they’re being misled by demagogues. But there can be no real merit, no logic, no justice to their claims. And so that itself was a failure of intelligence. I think populism is a term liberals apply to the political blowback of their policies that they fail to comprehend. It was caused by them…

But I think apart from anything else, apart from the morally, profoundly repellent and even abhorrent attitude these technocrats, these liberals, these progressives, technocratic and otherwise, had for their fellow citizens — apart from that — it’s a failure of understanding. Where did it come from? The devil? Where did this strange sort of diabolical combination of demagoguery and mass stupidity suddenly emerge from? It’s a tremendous failure of intelligence and it’s being repeated.

The technocrats now believe they’ve got a second chance and they’re back in the seats of power. They haven’t got the conceptual equipment to understand that forces other than those that fit into their largely economic view of the world — and of human beings themselves and of human action, it’s an economic view of human action — isn’t realistic and doesn’t really work and they can’t acquire the skills without taking too much out of their worldview.

Why Rishi will fail

Anyone who thinks Rishi Sunak is going to be able to stabilise the boat of the British economy to the point at which growth can resume in a few years — they’ve only got two years more in office — is completely delusional. Because the recessionary forces — put aside even war — in the world economy are very, very strong. And the combination of tightening monetary policies with tightening fiscal policies, with higher taxes, lower spending, and cutting back on quantitative easing, can only exacerbate all kinds of painful trends for the general population. So it’s not going to be politically stable. I’m not convinced that the internal cannibalism of the Conservative Party will permit Rishi to even last to January 2025. There could be another cycle of regicide and folly. But then Labour come in, and then what do they do? Because they are actually also committed to Osborne’s vision.

Why Labour will fail 

They’ve joined the critique that the Tories were being fiscally irresponsible, and that the responsible thing is to obey the markets… But where’s the money going to come from? If they do shut down remaining forms of energy production, which they regard as damaging, where are the workers going to go? What will happen to Labour when it stops working, when the mixture of Osbornism and green utopianism breaks down, is that the party will internally fracture. I don’t necessarily mean a revival of the Corbynites but there are lots of people within Labour who are prepared to accept the bland neo-technocratic ideology of Starmerism because they think it’s a winning one. And it is a winning one, if only because the Conservatives have made such a mess of things.

Why the far-Right might rise

Mosley didn’t get very far in the Thirties. There wasn’t a single fascist MP in the Commons. We’ve remained, actually, relatively untouched by that. But one of the reasons we’ve remained, not untouched, but where we’ve been able to fend off those dangerously anti-liberal movements, is that the Conservative Party actually was able to moderate them and incorporate them within a broader political project that included social democracy, that included a paternalistic High Toryism, which included various strands. If the Conservative Party is going to melt down, which I think it’s in the process of doing now, then there are obviously risks, even in Britain, of something like that. I don’t know if people really, 10 or 15 years ago, thought that in Sweden there would be a government which depended for its support on having more or less a de facto coalition with the far-Right. But that’s the case now, is it not?

Why we need Proportional Representation 

The best outcome would be a change in the electoral system. I’ve not always accepted first-past-the-post. I used to support, 20 or 30 years ago, changes like the Alternative Vote. I think the only way that we’re going to get fresh thinking and a way through the intractable conjunctions that we face — the failure of the Global Britain Brexit, and the almost non-attempt at the more protective and state-centred Brexit that people really wanted — is by breaking up the existing party system and having a wider variety of parties and ideas.

Then contrast with Parliament. In a political environment where wolfish libertinism still howls, we respect this teetotaller, this dignified religious conservative. In a party of culture warriors, we are calmed by his refusal to join the fracas for easy Telegraph headlines. And in a Commons jammed with fumbling innumerates, we are gratefully relieved that a true numbers guy holds the national purse.

Solely by standing near them in photographs, Sunak makes his boss and his colleagues look, to varying degrees, stupid, crass, cadaverous, and morally dubious. Is all this calculated? Perhaps at first these contrasts were an accident of juxtaposition. Now they look like the willed creation of many hands.

A decade before today’s budget, Sunak was just another bored, wealthy, socially ambitious banker, most notable for marrying very well to a woman who is richer than the Queen. Today he is the most popular politician in the country. The press amplifies these common feelings. From Left to Right Sunak is imaginatively described as “genial”, “genial”, “genial”, and “nice”. In Lord Ashcroft’s sunny, flaccid Sunak biography, our protagonist is a schoolboy who never received detentions, a hedge fund partner who never screwed anyone over (or even made a bad bet), and a politician without enemies. How is that possible?

Sunak benefits from the hatred the press feels for Boris Johnson. Journalists direct their ire at the personality most gratingly reminiscent of their own, not the financier who thinks in excel spreadsheets, rather than headlines. The median pundit does not really know too much about spreadsheets, or what to do with Sunak, so they call him “genial” instead. As a result, the Chancellor is the recipient of puff pieces rather than asperities. Even the London Review of Books ends up defending him from clumsy Labour Party attacks, on racial grounds.

But Sunak also lacks obvious wounds for journalists to poke around in. Great wealth smoothed out any neuroticisms he had. They have nothing to claw at — for what is “genial” if not a synonym for boring? He is clam-tight, physically and mentally compact; he gives so little away. The only genuine insecurity would seem to be his height (a pocketable 5’ 7”); hence the suits carefully tailored to elongate and broaden him, and the choreographed posts on his Instagram where he stands tall, and the persistent rumours that Team Rishi genially emails social media users to delete comments that draw attention to any of this. What are his views on crime? On prisons? On education? We don’t know. Maybe he doesn’t either. In interviews he ducks behind bromides (“Being a parent is… hard”; Being in an office as a young banker was “really beneficial to me”) and references to popular culture. When the inevitable leadership question is raised he goes all chummy, all village fête, and says Oh Golly, Oh Gosh! Rhetoric that makes Johnson’s 2013 blather of balls and scrums sound comparatively Churchillian.

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Race, potentially so explosive, is not really part of the conversation around the Chancellor. But the ghostly embarrassments, triumphs, and crimes of the Empire in both the subcontinent and Africa are bound up in his family story. Generations of dislocation and exile — with all their potential traumas — are repackaged, in Ashcroft’s book at least, into a saga of strivers and self-starters who walked in the Raj so Rishi could run in Westminster.

One early foray into politics, leading a Policy Exchange unit researching ethnic minority attitudes, was technically about race. The resulting report was thoughtful enough, though it reveals the ambition of an apparatchik more interested in the present and the future than the past. If Sunak’s research had a message for Conservatives, it was to emphasise a civic British identity that ethnic minority groups already felt comfortable with. (The party had been doing this since at least 1983.) In 2015, he laughed off the antique chit-chat of Wensleydale farmers who fretted about his “tan” when he was parachuted into William Hague’s old constituency of Richmond, North Yorks. The overall impression is of a man who has given approximately ten seconds of thought to questions of personal identity. And this in an era when identity is the inexhaustible social, political, and personal question among the over-educated. Sunak, comfortably warming his hands above the culture war inferno, will seem like a relief from it when he becomes Prime Minister.

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If Sunak were born ten years later, he may have been more agitated by these questions. As an elder millennial (b.1980), he moved into industry when ideological agonies appeared to belong to the past. Goldman, followed by Stanford, followed by hedge funds. In the noughties, Sunak was another footsoldier of the Davos consensus. Why weep over Frantz Fanon in the library when there is money to be made? Why be outraged and indignant when you can be charming and suave? That was the way the brightest and the best of Sunak’s generation saw things, as they rolled into financial services en masse, pre-Crash.

Aspiration, not victimhood, is what Sunak claims to have learned from his family. It was his grandmother who sold her wedding jewellery to come to Britain in the Sixties. It was by the tills in his mother’s pharmacy that he learned about National Insurance and VAT. It was his parents who economised enough to send him to storied Winchester College. There, in 1997 — the apotheosis of social democratic rebelliousness in modern Britain — Sunak was a teenage Tory lamenting Tony Blair’s landslide in the pages of the school magazine. And what irritated the young Sunak more than anything else about New Labour were its plans to enter the United Kingdom into an “eventual European Superstate.” Not only a teenage Tory; a committed teenage Eurosceptic too. Was there a smaller minority of feeling in 1997? It’s unlikely.

Here is the ideological core of Sunak. He was, is, and always will be a “people must look after themselves first” Thatcherite. A believer in common sense, not theory. Hard work, achievement, tax cuts. William Hague might describe him as a “modern non-ideological conservative”, but the modern party speaks the language of intervention; many of its new voters are suspicious of globalisation and the City. So Sunak is old fashioned. It was Nigel Lawson who he consulted first when he became Chancellor. And it is a portrait of Nigel Lawson that hangs behind Sunak’s desk in No.11.

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The man who lost Afghanistan

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Here is the great irony of the Chancellor’s career to date. The Thatcherite who spewed £192bn on the public during the pandemic. He has the calculator-gambler soul of an axe man, and ends up with a public image close to Marcus Rashford’s. Scrooge is mistaken for Father Christmas. All the imagery — there is Rishi for the nerds, a Rishi for the boozers, a Rishi for the horny journalists, and a Rishi for the bumpkins — has been adroitly manipulated by his advisor and social media guru ‘Cass’ Horowitz. The Chancellor wouldn’t hurt a fly — unless it were relying on Universal Credit.

His horizon appears gorgeously cloudless. The joint No. 10-Treasury economic unit set up by Dominic Cummings to shackle the Chancellor in 2020 is now entirely at his command. His team expands all the time. The genuine Eurosceptic never bloodied his hands during the Theresa May years. He winked at lockdown sceptic MPs, flattering them without ever giving them public backing. Sunak has won several battles now without fighting. “Ascendancy” is the word used to describe No.11’s relationship with the Johnson team. It is easy to imagine him saying one day, as George Osborne did to friends after Cameron became leader in 2005, “I can’t believe how easily we have taken over the party.”

Today’s budget will disguise his instincts. His Thatcherism would go further, quicker, were he ever in charge. Tory donors would be delighted by it. Her Manchester liberalism was pliable, part-entertainment. His looks creedal, and well-practised from his years in business. Public opinion spurned her. It salutes Rishi. He is The Man Who Invented Furlough, The Eat Out to Help Out Bloke. £192bn disarms complaints present and future. 

Manchester is a city where people take great pride in not kissing Tories, not knowing any Tories, and definitely not electing a Tory to the city council. As in every other northern city, there are no Conservative MPs representing Manchester in parliament. But today, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak will arrive for yet another leadership hustings.

They shouldn’t expect a warm welcome. They’ll be greeted outside the conference centre by the serried ranks of Manchester’s Left: the CND, the TUC, a local refugee charity and the people campaigning against having police officers in schools. “I have some good Manc Tory info for you but only if my placards are being put on the news,” one activist texted me yesterday.

“Manc Tory info” is in short supply, for the simple reason that there are hardly any Tories here. The party hasn’t had a councillor in Manchester since the Nineties and managed to gain fewer than 10,000 votes at this year’s local elections, less than 10% of the vote share. As a result, 91 of the city’s 96 councillors are Labour.

“It simply isn’t healthy to have this monopoly,” says Diane, recalling a time before the coalition destroyed the Lib Dem brand here, when it was conceivable that Labour could lose control of the town hall. “I resent the loss of an opposition in the City Council,” she says. And she’s right to be worried.

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Labour has built a formidable electoral machine in this city, one that has maintained its grip on the working-class communities in the north of the city while benefiting from the influx of liberal young university graduates elsewhere. As a result, the city lacks meaningful political dissent: Manchester is a place where voters have handed Labour a virtual dictatorship but where the trains don’t run on time.

What is strange about this leadership contest is how detached it is from the issues that determine life here: the dreadful transport links to London or other northern cities, or the way in which energy bills and rising food prices are making every weekly shop stressful for poorer families.

If Truss and Sunak arrive by train this morning, they may get a taste of the nightmare that is playing out on the line from London, where Avanti West Coast has cancelled the majority of its services after staff “withdrew their goodwill” and refused to work overtime to keep services running. On Wednesday, passengers on one of the company’s trains were locked in a station late at night and had to scale a seven-foot spiked gate to escape.

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Civil disobedience is coming

By Thomas Fazi

These northern rail disasters don’t tend to get prominent national news coverage in the way they would if they happened in London. And generally speaking, they wouldn’t happen in London, which has benefited from decades of massive investment from Whitehall. As Mike Emmerich points out in his book about reviving Britain’s cities, real change only comes from “doing the right things, at scale, for a very long time”.

Liz Truss says she is committed to delivering Northern Powerhouse Rail — the much-needed new line connecting the northern cities — in full, rather than the pound-shop version laid out in the government’s recent Integrated Rail Plan. It hasn’t been a core theme of her campaign, but it would be hugely welcome. But real levelling up, as the Cambridge economist Diane Coyle told me recently, will involve changing Treasury funding formulas that have consistently benefited the South East, as well as a concerted effort to boost productive industries and create well-paid jobs across the region. Yet there’s plenty of evidence that candidates are planning to do the exact opposite.

Earlier this month, for instance, Sunak remarked in Tunbridge Wells that he had changed Treasury funding formulas because the ones he inherited from Labour “shoved all the funding into deprived urban areas”. The comment did him no favours in Manchester, where it reminded voters of the virulently anti-urban Toryism of the Thatcher years — the period that, along with the past decade of austerity, still frames this city’s view of the party.

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By Dominic Sandbrook

“I remember a fist fight in my ex-wife’s family when someone said they voted Tory,” says Pete, who grew up in the city in the Sixties. “It’s deep, it’s visceral. If you lived through 1981 or 1982 in this city, you would know why.”

He mentions Patrick Minford, an adviser to Thatcher who’s now considered Truss’s economic guiding light, whose plan to close unproductive heavy industry caused devastation in areas like east Manchester. The Tory government, most people here believe, didn’t care about those who were losing their jobs and wasn’t willing to invest in their communities to soften the blow. “They completely fucked this city,” Pete says. “The absolute dogmatic ideological cynicism with which they did it was what turned these great cities into total fucking basket cases.”

Nowadays, Manchester in the process of rapidly un-fucking itself. From my office on St Ann’s Square you can often see more than a dozen cranes at work; one estimate says the city has more tall buildings in the works than any European city outside of London. The city centre is filling up at incredible speed — up from hundreds of residents in the Nineties to tens of thousands today.

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The Haçienda saved Manchester

By Dave Haslam

Who deserves the credit? One Tory who does betray excitement about Manchester’s growth is George Osborne, whose Northern Powerhouse project was rooted here. “Manchester is buzzing — it’s one of the most exciting cities in Europe, it’s the go-to place for people who want to set up businesses outside London,” he told me last year.

I was interviewing Osborne for a profile I wrote about Sir Richard Leese, the man credited with overseeing Manchester’s economic renaissance this past decade, who stepped down as leader of the city council last year after a 25-year reign. Leese was a Labour pragmatist who gave private sector investors a leading role in the rebuilding of the city, and in doing so deeply antagonised figures on the Left. In a city with no prominent Conservatives, Leese was cast as a Tory by housing activists who felt he was “selling the city” and ignoring the need for affordable homes. One even emptied a glass of red wine over him during a fringe event at last year’s Conservative conference in Manchester.

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Keir Starmer's squandered chance

By David Jeffery

The dislike was mutual. “They’re middle class tosspots and I hate them,” I overheard him saying at a drinks event last year. Leese understood the old adage that you don’t have allies — you have interests. And while other northern leaders didn’t want to be seen taking money or favours from Tory governments, Manchester’s Labour leadership was willing to criticise the Tories in public while cooperating with them in private.

“Everyone used to say ‘Oh, he’s favouring Manchester,'” recalls Osborne. “Well the truth was, yes, it was the city I knew best. But it was also because they had the most original ideas. They would come to the Treasury with ideas about how to finance the metro system or how to get money into the cultural sector or how to support school reform in the city. And you just didn’t get those ideas from the other big cities of England.”

Andy Burnham, whose job was created by the historic devolution deal Greater Manchester struck with Osborne in 2014, has learned lessons from Leese’s tenure. Burnham’s best-known moment as mayor was his public confrontation with the government two years ago over lockdown funding. But the “King of the North” has generally chosen diplomacy over pitch battles with Tories in Westminster. The council leaders who sit with him around the Greater Manchester table have urged Burnham to be more critical of the government at key moments — for example after the recent announcement of an underwhelming bus funding package — but have been left disappointed.

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By James Sean Dickson

As the Tory leadership race rumbles on, Burnham and his officials have been negotiating with key figures in Whitehall over their promised “trailblazer deal” — the next instalment of devolution. The mayor wants more funding and powers in areas like education, and someone involved with the talks told me they are getting a positive response from some Whitehall officials.

“The problem is, we don’t know who we are really negotiating with,” one insider told me last week. It won’t be civil servants who sign off a new devolution settlement or “levelling up” policy — it will be Truss or Sunak. So when the candidates arrive today, they will likely be greeted with more charm by the power-brokers in Manchester — behind closed doors, of course — than by the activists out on the street.

This sums up the nature of political debate in Manchester, which takes place, as far as it exists, within a closed shop. Scrutiny will be kept to a minimum and local problems, such as the skyrocketing rates of homeless people living in emergency accommodation, will remain unsolved. Meanwhile, Diane is unlikely to get her wish of being represented by a Conservative councillor or MP in the next few years. But I think she’s right to ask the question: wouldn’t Manchester be better if it had more voices in the room?

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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Test article

By Will Lloyd

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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Is Boris taking us back to the Seventies?

By Dominic Sandbrook

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.

But the financier’s real qualification for office seems to be the accruement of a fortune so great that it enabled him to donate £147,500 to the Tories. So now he has been given a lovely lifetime place in parliament to rule over us with a peerage, plus the added bonus of a ministerial job with all those nice perks of office and status.

Offord will find himself in good company in the House of Lords. The Financial Times last year worked out that the elevation of billionaire Tory benefactor Michael Spicer made him the 22^nd former donor to be given a peerage in 13 years. Between them, they had given more than £50m to the three main parties.

Boris Johnson displays a special fondness for placing pals and party donors in the upper chamber; such folk comprise about one quarter of the people he has ennobled. The prime minister even overruled the appointments’ commission to force disgraced former party treasurer Peter Cruddas into the Lords. Lo and behold, the grateful new peer bunged another half a million into Tory coffers a few days after taking up his seat.

Yet Britons like to believe their country is not corrupt, preferring to lecture others on good governance. The harsh truth is the House of Lords, an archaic institution stuffed with people who bought seats or inherited titles, serves as a grotesque symbol of the blatant corruption that stains our nation. Instead of hiding the fact that well-connected people can buy power and influence, we hand them fancy titles, silly crests and scarlet robes.

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Why the elites have no shame

By Mary Harrington

Perhaps this is part of the same deluded exceptionalism that makes many Britons believe their empire was less brutal, damaging and greedy than others. Yet once again, we see how Britain is being built on foundations of stolen loot, led by the City of London as its accountants, bankers, estate agents, financiers and lawyers wash mountains of dirty cash for the planet’s dodgiest people. Another scandal has broken with the Pandora Papers, the latest massive cache of leaked papers, giving a glimpse into the hidden wealth, tax dodging and money laundering of some of the world’s richest and most powerful people. And with sickening inevitably, we see once again how our nation sits at the epicentre of these tawdry activities.

Take the revelations about the Aliyevs, the ruling family of oil-rich Azerbaijan which is led by a friend of Prince Andrew and has been home to huge British investment. When I visited Baku in 2012, I met an astonishingly brave woman called Khadija Ismayilova, who has endured blackmail, been filmed on hidden cameras having sex in her home and been imprisoned on trumped-up charges to stop her exposing corruption.

Another activist told me why he always locked his car: “Not just to stop people taking things but to stop the police planting drugs or a weapon.” Now we learn that a network of offshore companies tied to this gruesome family and its close associates has traded almost £400m of UK property over the past 15 years — including flogging a £67m property to the Queen’s crown estate.

Yet this is an autocratic regime frequently condemned for its nefarious activities that include rigged elections. Ismayilova and other journalists risked their liberty to fight for the democratic values we claim to espouse, revealing how their first family benefitted from state contracts awarded through hidden shell companies — including the £177m showpiece Crystal Hall used for the Eurovision Song Contest, which gave me cover to enter the country as a journalist. The European Union and human rights groups have condemned the “widespread and pervasive” corruption that scars Azerbaijan. Yet the Aliyevs were not stopped from buying and selling many lucrative properties in Kensington, Knightsbridge and Mayfair. One purchase was even made through an offshore company owned by the ruler’s son when he was 11.

Again, these sleazy disclosures cut deep into the heart of the UK establishment. They include one Russian businessman whose companies have backed 34 Tory MPs and made millions from an allegedly corrupt Russian pipeline deal, while another prominent Tory donor who backed Johnson’s leadership campaign was reportedly involved in one of Europe’s biggest corruption scandals. Only last month it emerged that George Osborne won business from a firm run by Oleg Deripaska, an oligarch close to Vladimir Putin and banned from the United States. It came through his friendship with the firm’s chairman Lord Barker, a former Tory minister in the coalition given a life peerage.

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The hypocrisy of David Cameron

By Peter Franklin

Similarly, half of Russian money-laundering involves Britain while our lawyers earn fortunes from their oligarchs fighting legal battles in London’s courts. No wonder Putin sees the West as so weak. The Pandora Papers show how even Raffaele Amato — the mobster tied to a dozen murders who inspired the gangster TV show Gomorrah — was able to use a shell company registered in the UK to buy property.

Five years ago, David Cameron hosted a landmark anti-corruption summit in London that underlined the self-deception — just a few weeks before losing the Brexit ballot and going off to lobby for Lex Greensill. We pour vast sums in aid into combating corruption around the world, then ignore how much of it is stolen by repulsive regimes.

The current chancellor Rishi Sunak seems complacent, claiming Britain’s track record on tackling money laundering is “very strong” while promoting freeports, So is it any wonder the Government does so little to stem the flow of dirty money, let alone shut down the tax havens under our jurisdiction that do so much harm to the world? Looters and thieves need help to stash their stolen cash. And according to the Tax Justice Network, the three places that do most to support such practices are the British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands and Bermuda — all of which come under our flag. An analysis of these latest documents by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists found 956 companies in offshore havens tied to 336 leaders, politicians and senior officials — with more than two-thirds set up in the British Virgin Islands.

Westminster could stop providing cover for crooks, despots and dodgy oligarchs with ease, if it were not so complicit. The Government has repeatedly pledged to bring in a register of the owners of the 100,000 offshore-owned properties; instead, we discover former Prime Minister Tony Blair and his wife Cherie saved themselves £312,000 in stamp duty using such tactics. The National Crime Agency’s international corruption unit has an annual budget of about £4m — which one quarter of the sum spent by its target, Zamira Hajiyeva, wife of a fraudulent Azerbaijani banker, in Harrods on jewellery and designer clothes. Needless to say, her £15m Knightsbridge home was owned by a company based in the British Virgin Islands.

Meanwhile, governments encourage City advisory firms to spread like knotweed in the undergrowth of Whitehall, where they rake off big sums from taxpayers even as they advise plutocrats and multinationals how to avoid paying fair dues to the exchequer. The “Big Four” accountancy firms have been accused by parliament of using expertise from staff seconded to the Treasury to help clients avoid tax. But as the civil service was cut back, ministers increased use of these consultancies. The pandemic boosted their earnings again as normal rules on tendering were ditched. So we see a firm such as Mckinsey pay out fines over links to a destructive South African corruption scandal and its lethal role in the US opioid addiction crisis, yet its advisers are still hired on hefty daily rates by Whitehall.

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The dictator who fooled us

By Ian Birrell

Britain needs to wake up. The mother of democracy has given birth to a system that aids kleptocrats and thieves. And as the famous saying goes, a fish rots from the head down. When appointing his latest minister, Johnson claimed he scoured the country for the best talent and gave Offord the job and peerage because he had “a huge amount to offer”. Few will be fooled.

The Prime Minister’s words drip with contempt for all those artists, carers, doctors, factory workers, retailers, teachers, scientists and soldiers who might contribute far more to the benefit of our nation in return for the £323 attendance allowance in the Lords — a tax-free daily sum roughly the same as the weekly minimum wage. Behind our facade of democracy, led by such a selfish and soiled elite, lies a country hideously stained with corruption.

What is it, you might wonder, that makes Mr Osborne the best qualified person to do this job? Does he spend his idle hours thinking about the best way to facilitate the curation of valuable collections and the ethics of repatriating plundered antiquities? Is he a scholar of archaeology and an expert on the way museums are run around the world? Does he have outstanding contacts in the arts world? Or is he, rather, The Right Sort Of Chap?

This appointment reminds us that the economy in this country is essentially divided in two. There’s a very big bit of it, involving most people, where you are expected to develop skills in a particular job. You train as a doctor or a lawyer, or you apprentice as a stacker of shelves or a maker of widgets. If things go well, you steadily ascend the ladder of your chosen career, becoming more senior and better paid. If things go badly — say, they invent a robot that can do the same job more cheaply, or people cease to want coal dug out of the ground — you are stuffed. You have to “retrain”, to move into another sector.

Then there’s this small other part of the economy — which is, incidentally, the part in charge — where you need no specific skills at all. It is about being, like George, The Right Sort Of Chap. You have ascended to a level of seniority by sucking up to the right people and getting in the right gang — and once you’ve made it, you’ve made it. Being The Right Sort Of Chap trumps any domain-specific knowledge or experience. You will swan into one board-level job or consulting gig after another. What they want is your contacts in the corridors of power and your name on the letterhead.

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Nero wasn't 'misunderstood'

By Boyd Tonkin

The Right Sort of Chap is a part of the nepotistic, private-school-dominated establishment, in which your path is eased by knowing the right people and projecting the right front (as a public-school educated brat myself I check my privilege in that department); but they’re what you might think of as the god-tier version. Public school chutzpah can help get you to the top of a profession; Right Sort Of Chapness, once you’ve got there, renders your specific profession irrelevant. You can run companies, newspapers, universities, cultural institutions or countries with equal confidence.

Sometimes people make it to this stage by toiling up through the first section of the economy and reaching escape velocity: they are at board level in their chosen industry and find themselves, in the silver back end of their career, accumulating seats in the Lords, directorships and chairs here there and everywhere. There’s the assumption, perhaps not always wrong, that corporate governance is a transferable skill. And there’s the agreeable sense that if you sit on each other’s remuneration committees everyone can be accommodated in a civilised way.

But some, like our George, get there with no very concrete sign of prior achievement at all. Having struggled to get anywhere in journalism (turned down for this trainee scheme; turned down for that job; reduced to freelance shifts on the Telegraph diary — and some of us know what that’s like) he plunged into Conservative Central Office as a young thing and ended up scooting up the political ladder with the Notting Hill Tory chumocracy. Right place, right time, right pals. He was now The Right Sort Of Chap.

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What Eton taught me about power

By Sam Leith

He had a golden few years in Cabinet and then, having bished up the Brexit campaign and seen his main patron throw in the towel, he started rampaging through the private sector, where former Chancellors of the Exchequer command a premium. Adviser to a handful of venture capital outfits; chair of a think-tank; honorary professor here; visiting fellow there. Why wouldn’t he end up editing the Evening Standard or chairing the BM as a sideline?

Propriety requires me to make a declaration of interest here: George fired me as a columnist from the Evening Standard. I don’t spend a lot of time plotting his downfall, but I can’t pretend I wouldn’t smirk if I read that he’d fallen down an open manhole. Still, the evidence that he was a poor editor of that paper is abundant even if, in firing me, he showed he was capable of making the odd sensible decision.

Having never been a proper journalist, he didn’t seem to get the idea that you’re not supposed to compromise editorial independence to suck up to friends, political allies and other employers of the editor. The coverage of Uber and Google and various other concerns was, we can say, suboptimal. But the Standard’s editorship, for George, was not so much a job as an influence-peddling sideline in any case; the main gig was a £650,000, three-day a week consultancy for the fund manager BlackRock, along with a by then uncountable number of other jobs whose highish salaries and lowish actual-work requirements were the main thing they had in common. And in this, he was not an outlier but a representative.

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Where is Boris Johnson?

By Howard Jacobson

The Right Sort Of Chap principle runs through British public life like the lettering through a stick of Brighton rock. It starts early: once you’ve finagled your way into one of the great universities, you can often make a quick change of course. I remember watching contemporaries do so with something like awe. You got into Oxford to do, say, Theology against less than stiff competition — but now you’ve decided you’d prefer to study PPE, so you switch. Tough luck on the suckers who applied to that vastly oversubscribed course in the first place and didn’t get in.

At the end of it you get a milk-round job in a big five consultancy where — nice suit, middling degree from a good university — you’re sent out to advise professional businesspeople on how to run businesses. Consultancy, as a burgeoning profession in public and business life, more or less enshrines the principle that Right-Sort-Of-Chapness trumps actual knowledge or experience. By then, you’re on your way — set up for a sideways jump into politics.

After all, the principle continues at the most senior levels of governance — and is, on the face of it, an extremely odd one. Once you’re in the cabinet (and don’t let’s get started on the track records that gave us the likes of Gavin Williamson, Matt Hancock and Priti Patel in their current seniority), you can be reshuffled to any portfolio at all. The quite absurd assumption is that the skills that outfit you to get in with the right gang in politics will outfit you to take any role in government. There will be first-year undergraduates who have a better grasp of economics than you — but the PM owes you one and you didn’t shit the bed as minister for fun, so boom: you’re Chancellor of the Exchequer.

These moves are not made on the basis of the candidate’s suitability for a given role but for reasons of Prime Ministerial patronage (it was a happy accident that when he became Chancellor, Gordon Brown was the sort of fellow who read books about post-neoclassical endogenous growth theory). And it’s for the same reasons that, rather than keep cabinet ministers in one department for many years so they actually learn something, they’re often as not bounced into a new one after a couple of years. That’s why we get Welsh Secretaries who don’t know the Welsh national anthem, trade ministers who haven’t grasped the importance of the Dover to Calais route and Northern Ireland ministers who haven’t quite got round to reading the Good Friday Agreement.

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Harry, the Prince of PR

By Sam Leith

This government has been even keener than most on the Right Sort Of Chap principle, even extending it to the awarding of public contracts during the pandemic. Companies with no experience of making PPE, or in some cases no experience of making anything at all, were awarded multi-million pound contracts to have a bash at it on the apparent basis that they drank in the same pub as a cabinet minister, or were mates with Dominic Cummings, or had the PM’s mobile number. And failure — as everyone from Serco or G4S to Matt (“totally fucking hopeless”) Hancock knows — is no obstacle to continuing in post.

Dido Harding is perhaps the outstanding example of the Right Sort Of Chap. She, too, made the right friends at university. She did her apprenticeship in consultancy, and there followed a merry-go-round of board-level appointments at which she was, mostly, heroically useless (notoriously presiding over the TalkTalk data loss fiasco). She failed upwards to become a Tory peer and, again with no domain-specific experience, was put in charge of Test and Trace — which had the distinction of being one of the most spectacular failures in the long catalogue of governmental failures during the pandemic. Not, apparently, troubled by self-reflection, she’s now campaigning to be put in charge of the whole NHS. She’ll probably get the job. And if she doesn’t, perhaps George will see her right with a senior role at the British Museum.

After all, he is part of an establishment that operates on the blithe assumption that all skills are transferable, that an aptitude for political schmoozing magically confers any number of lesser competences on its owner — and that the Right Sort of Chap is the right person for the job, even if they’ve proved otherwise, time and again.

True, he’s only had a year in the job. His big promotion came after just one year as a senior minister, which, in turn, followed just one year as a junior minister. But was it too soon for him to become Chancellor in the first place?

He got the job during the deepest economic crisis in living memory. And yet from his first Budget, barely a couple of weeks into the job, he shone — and kept on shining. Other ministers have stumbled. The Prime Minister almost died. Sunak stayed calm and carried on.

Ministers are sometimes described as “rising without trace”; they get promoted by simple virtue of not conspicuously cocking-up the jobs they briefly do. There’s more to Sunak than this though. The more you promote him, the more he rises to the occasion.

Sunak can’t, unlike some of his colleagues, be accused of dithering over big decisions. Radical measures of enormous scope, such as the furlough scheme, were implemented in a disturbingly brief period of time. Major adjustments, like the extension of furlough to the self-employed, were also made in short order.

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What we didn't learn from foot and mouth

By John Lewis Stempel

Sometimes in a crisis, like the foot-and-mouth epidemic 20 years ago, the Opposition can dictate the agenda — effectively giving government its daily instructions. But not this time — and certainly not on economic policy. Labour has conspicuously struggled for relevance. Keir Starmer has earned the nickname “Captain Hindsight”, while his Shadow Chancellor, Anneliese Dodds, isn’t called anything at all because no one knows who she is.

Given the unprecedented nature of the current crisis, ministers have no choice but to make it up as they go along. The trick, however, is to look as though you know what you’re doing — which Sunak usually does.

More than any senior politician in recent memory he’s shown himself to be a master of the short-term. I don’t mean that as an insult. When events are moving fast and timely decisions are all-important, the short-term matters to everyone. And, in more normal times, when the short-term ought not to matter as much — it is made to matter by our goldfish-brained culture of politics.

And yet Sunak’s ability to move fast and not break things may yet be his undoing. He wouldn’t be the first politician to trip over his fancy footwork. David Cameron was both admired and reviled for his “essay crisis” style of leadership. He’d get himself into a tight spot, only to wriggle out of it with seconds to go. But then one day — specifically, 23 June 2016 — the magic stopped working. Living in the moment can have the longest of long-term consequences.

Rishi Sunak is not an essay-crisis Chancellor. More of a swot than a jock, continuous effort is what he’s about. But that can still get you into trouble. Determined progress over a cliff edge is just as fatal as a last-minute lurch in that direction.

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Did 'Eat Out to Help Out' cause a second wave?

By Aveek Bhattacharya

No single policy is more closely associated with Sunak than “Eat Out to Help Out” — and no single policy serves as a clearer warning of the dangers of not thinking ahead. It would be a grotesque distortion to blame this measure alone for the pandemic’s second wave, but it was emblematic of our summer of complacency. Instead of kicking the virus when it was down, we moved too soon to unlock the country and its borders — a mistake that was repeated again in the run up to Christmas.

The Chancellor was not the only Cabinet minister responsible for the unlocking policy, and the UK wasn’t the only country to let its guard down. Nevertheless, he’s always been in the forefront of efforts to get back to normality — including those that were clearly premature. The short-lived scaling back of the furlough scheme is one example; another is the pressure he’s come under to extend the Stamp Duty holiday.

As Chancellor, Sunak is discovering something new in his political career, which is that as well as making decisions that actually matter, he has to live with them. A rapidly promoted minister is forced into a short-term mode of action because there’s not enough time in any particular job to see through long-term reforms. There’s also precious little incentive. For politicians in the fast stream it is the quick wins that are rewarded. As long as you get the right headlines tomorrow morning, who cares about the history books?

“Up-or-out” is the name given to the sort of career track found in cut-throat commercial sectors like consulting (or academia for that matter). In a ruthlessly hierarchical industry, the biggest rewards are at the top the pyramid. To winnow out the lower layers, individuals are expected to achieve regular promotions or else quit — thus making room for easily exploitable fresh recruits. But once you’ve made partner or achieved tenure, you’re safe.

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The PM's cabinet of puppets and placemen

By Peter Franklin

It’s an unhealthy dynamic. Being all about the concentration of wealth and status in as few hands as possible lends itself to the extraction of economic rents and the over-centralisation of authority. Furthermore, it creates a demand for quick thinkers not deep thinkers, and nurtures a culture of presenteeism in place of work-life balance.

Toxic stuff, which is why we should be worried that politics increasingly resembles an up-or-out industry. If we want our country to be run by workaholic yes-men who’ve never had an original thought in their lives, then we’re going the right way about it.

Of course, there’s one big difference between government and the other up-or-out industries — which is that, for ministers, there’s no security at the top either. That’s especially true of Chancellors. Once you get to that level there’s only one rung left on the ladder.

In the last 50 years, there have been 12 Chancellors of the Exchequer, plus the current incumbent. Of those 12, only two went on to become Prime Minister — John Major and Gordon Brown. Of the other 10, only Geoffrey Howe continued in Cabinet after being Chancellor.[1.  Ken Clarke had a brief outing as Lord Chancellor after a thirteen year break from government; and there may be a comeback for Sajid Javid.]

If this pattern holds, then, at just 40 years of age, Rishi Sunak’s ministerial career depends on surviving as Chancellor for many years to come or succeeding Boris Johnson as Prime Minister. Either way, he will need to shift his thinking from the short-term to the long-term.

Boris Johnson isn’t normally thought of as a deep thinker, but he has a sense of history. He also saw far enough into future to read the runes on Brexit — and to defeat those who stood in its way. He evidently has a better feel for the course of events than his enemies do.

Therefore, when he looks ahead to the post-Covid world — as he did in a speech last October — we, and his ministers, should pay attention:

“In the depths of the Second World War, in 1942 when just about everything had gone wrong, the government sketched out a vision of the post war new Jerusalem that they wanted to build. And that is what we are doing now — in the teeth of this pandemic.

“We are resolving not to go back to 2019, but to do better: to reform our system of government, to renew our infrastructure; to spread opportunity more widely and fairly…”

As Chancellor, Rishi Sunak needs to start fleshing out that vision. Next week’s Budget is his first big opportunity to do so.

He can’t, of course, ignore the demands of financial sustainability. We can’t carry on living on our debts. Borrowing should be for investment, not subsistence. But merely setting out a timetable to unwind the emergency measures of the last year is not enough. To leave it at that would mean going back to 2019.

Most likely, the Budget will feature some future-facing announcements — for instance on the financing of Britain’s climate change commitments. We may even even see the makings of a carbon tax. However, this is Treasury policy in support of the policies of other departments — which while necessary, is not sufficient if the Chancellor is to prove himself a man of vision.

For that we need some idea of what Sunak believes about the fundamentals of our economic system. At the very least, we need some idea of what he thinks needs to change before we get an economy that works for everyone.

If the answer to that question is “not much”, then I can only hope that his own future trajectory is out and not up.

What I’m describing, of course, is the plot of the 1994 blockbuster, Speed. It’s also a metaphor for the situation in which Rishi Sunak finds himself. Like Sandra Bullock, he’s in the driving seat — in this case, of the British economy.

Sunak is building up public debt like no peacetime Chancellor has done before. He really ought to slow down or stop altogether, but if he does then, kaboom, the economy blows up.

Just imagine lockdown without the furlough scheme and all the other lifelines thrown our way by the Government. We’d be looking at depression-era levels of unemployment and bankruptcy. As bad as things are now, they could have been much, much worse.

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Since when did the Tories care about workers?

By Matthew Sweet

But, despite the impending vaccines, the danger isn’t over yet. What we have been through so far is only phase one of the crisis. Phase two will consist of the recovery period following the pandemic. And then after that, there’s phase three, in which we’ll need to find long-term answers to the underlying weaknesses of the economy.

At no stage can the Government afford to slam on the brakes. It must keep flooring that accelerator, injecting enough stimulus into the economy to maintain momentum. Obviously it must do so without crashing the whole thing or running out of money, but nevertheless the need for speed is ongoing. As he unveils the spending review, I just hope that Sunak is prepared for the bumpy ride ahead.

At this point, you might think I’m sounding very Keynesian, wanting government to spend money like there’s no tomorrow — so allow me to explain.

To put it very crudely, Keynesianism is the counter-intuitive idea that the best way to deal with mounting debt is to keep on borrowing. The justification is that debt oils the wheels of growth. Individuals and enterprises borrow to enable the investments that will make them richer in the future than they are now. They also borrow to bring forward purchasing power from that richer future — which has the added bonus of helping to create the demand that stimulates investment in the present.

Austerity, on the other hand, throws grit into the works. It not only immediately reduces the level of demand in the economy, it also creates the expectation of reduced demand in the future — causing others to withhold investment and put off purchases. Therefore, in place of the virtuous circle of credit-fuelled optimism, there is a vicious circle of money-hoarding pessimism. If lenders lose faith as a result, then interest rates go up and your debt problem becomes a whole load worse.

That’s why Keynesians believe we must spend (and, if necessary, borrow) our way out of recession — with a special responsibility on government to substitute for any lack of demand from the private sector.

It’s a strong argument, but I don’t buy into it completely and never have. That’s because not every economic crisis is primarily a crisis of demand. Sometimes, it’s more structural than that — a crisis in the systems that underpin the everyday business of buying and selling, borrowing and lending. For instance, if people lose confidence in the value of a currency — then you’ve got an inflation crisis on your hands and you have to deal with that first.

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Who will pay for this Covid catastrophe?

By Peter Franklin

13 years ago, the number one problem was a global financial meltdown. Governments had to intervene to stop the banks from collapsing one after another. The banking crisis then morphed into a sovereign debt crisis. Having panicked about the value of mortgage-backed securities, the markets panicked about the value of debt issued by countries with big economic problems. This nearly brought down another house of cards — the European single currency.

In the midst of a solvency crisis, stimulating demand is clearly not the top priority. Rather, it’s convincing your citizens that their savings are safe and the money markets that your country is still capable of honouring its debts. This means bailing out the banks and getting control over public spending. It’s only when the danger of bank runs and sovereign defaults is over that governments can even think about rekindling the ‘animal spirits’ of the economy.

That’s why, 10 years ago, when George Osborne took the driving seat, the British government made the right call. Never forget that Britain was in a perilous position. With our outsized financial sector, we were fully exposed to the global financial crisis; and, to make matters worse, our nice little earner — North Sea oil — was running dry. This was no time to test the confidence of the money markets.

Osborne (though he also made a big mistake that I’ll come back to) was right to defy his Keynesian critics. The subsequent jobs miracle would vindicate his position.

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Is it time to end the war on welfare?

By James Kirkup

So, no, I’m not a raving Keynesian. The fact is there are some economic emergencies in which the go-to Keynesian solutions are not appropriate. I’d also like to add that the online obnoxiousness of certain Keynesians really gets up my nose. Admittedly, that’s a rather less important consideration, but I mention it to make it clear where my personal biases definitely don’t lie.

It thus gives me no pleasure to admit that in the context of 2020 the Keynesians are right. We really do have to borrow our way out of this one. That’s because this is unequivocally a crisis of demand. Rishi Sunak, unlike George Osborne, must spend spend spend to stop the economy from blowing up.

In phase one — i.e. the pandemic itself — government has had to support household incomes so that employers can retain staff and workers can pay for basic necessities.

In phase two — i.e. the recovery — we’re going to have to work out how to get people consuming normally again. It’s barely been noticed, but for the first time in decades, Britain’s trade balance is back in the black. As Frances Coppola points out, that’s not because we’ve suddenly become an exporting powerhouse, but because we’re saving our money like mad.

Believe it or not, this is an age of surplus — of £3 coffees and unused gym memberships. It’s not just the top 1% who can afford the second or third family car or the second or third family holiday. Abundance, while far from universal, is sufficiently widespread to allow millions of us to spend substantially more than we need or even truly want. Indeed, a lot of spending is motivated by nothing more than habit — and habits, in this pandemic, have been broken.

As soon as those with spare cash have the confidence and opportunity to spend it again, there will be some rebound in consumerism. But we can also expect an enduring downshift in lifestyles — in some cases out of preference, in others because we have no choice but to pay off debts, rebuild savings and compensate for lost income.

It all adds up to a long-lasting loss of demand, which must be replaced if we’re to get back to full employment and anything like normal GDP. Government must be ready and willing to provide the stimulus needed to get recovery truly underway. ‘Eat out to help out’ was just the beginning — and truly radical ideas, like experimental shots of universal basic income, should be actively considered.

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By AVEEK BHATTACHARYA

Obviously, there are limits. We can’t push fiscal and monetary policy much beyond that of comparable economies. If the money markets take fright, interest rates will go up — a disaster when you’ve accumulated so much debt. However, it’s not just the absolute size of each country’s debt pile that the markets are comparing. They’re also looking at other metrics like debt servicing costs as a proportion of GDP. It’s therefore really important that things like growth and productivity look good compared to other nations.

This brings us to phase three of the challenge facing us as a nation — how to tackle the underlying weakness of the British economy. In this respect, Rishi Sunak must not repeat George Osborne’s big mistake. Though the Coalition government was right to get current spending under control, it was wrong to stick to Labour’s spending plans and slash the capital budget. Instead, stimulus took the form of quantitative easing — funny money pumped into the financial sector. This helped to inflate share values and house prices, but what we didn’t get was the real investment that we actually need, the sort that supports innovation and enterprise and therefore growth.

We’ve just had a decade of ultra-low interest rates, low inflation and no pay rises. This was a perfect opportunity for the corporates to invest in the future; instead they busied themselves with share buy backs and other get-rich-quick schemes. They had their chance, so now government must lead the way. That will require the Chancellor to have some difficult conversations with his fellow Conservatives — especially over tax policy. Raising sufficient revenues in the next years will not be easy, but it makes sense to target idle wealth in preference to job creation.

Ten years ago, George Osborne had to face down his Keynesian critics, but most of those were in the Labour Party and other hostile institutions. Rishi Sunak has the harder task of taking on vested interests and free market ideologues on his own side. Nevertheless he must do so if he is to swing the power of the state behind the productive use of capital.

As long as we’re not doing really stupid stuff, like building nuclear power stations, we shouldn’t hold back on public investment or sharper incentives for private investment. It’s not that there’s any lack of work to be done. We have entire regions of the country to level up, houses to build and natural environments to regenerate. Under-investing, as we have done for decades, will only damage our growth prospects and thus make our debts less bearable.

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Covid-19 has exposed our financial fragility

By Jonathan Tepper

One has to ask whether Rishi Sunak really gets this agenda. It’s still too early to tell, but he’s already gone much further than any previous Chancellor — Tory or Labour — would have dared. He’s made the state the wage-payer of last resort and gone halves with us on lunch. Looking ahead, he sees the sense in tackling this country’s greatest structural weakness: the economic disparity between North and South.

Later today we’ll get an idea of how big a commitment this government’s willing to make, but there has been one encouraging sign. It’s reported that a National Investment Bank will be established. If true, this would reverse the most telling error of the previous decade — which was when the Green Investment Bank, only set up in 2012, was flogged off five years later to a private equity firm. As well as being an incredibly shortsighted thing to do in itself, it was symbolic of a misplaced trust in the neoliberalism that’s failed us over and over again.

While the Chancellor has an economy to save, he shouldn’t feel so protective about our current model of capitalism. Even before the virus came, it was falling to bits and running out of road.

So, let’s not blow this chance to move on.

It is only in the most extreme circumstances that people, stripped bare of the veneer of civilisation, show their true natures. A crisis like the present one brings out the best, and the worst of the humanity. We are tested in the fire. In this case, not the purifying fire of war but the ouchy burny fire of staying at home with our spouses and children for ages and having to play boardgames because we feel guilty about too much screen time. And real characters emerge, thus, according to our favoured boardgames.

Risk

Risk is great fun. You get to try to take over the world. You build armies, squash your enemies, and eventually dominion is yours. There’s a bit of strategy in it, a lot of aggression, and more than just a soupçon of chance: if a few dice rolls go against you, your magnificent army is suddenly a lot less magnificent and, oh crap, there goes Russia. It’s a game, really, for people who want to have kind of a lazy and consequence-free shot at taking over the world, have a bash and hope for the best. Steve Bannon, say, or the Prime Minister.

Diplomacy

Another world domination game, Diplomacy is much subtler and better than Risk. With Diplomacy you can’t just hole up in South East Asia and build an impregnable defensive army in some Pacific island bottleneck. And there is no element of chance. Every territory on the board can house only one military unit – so the game’s essence is in strategic horse-trading with other players in secret conferences in, for instance, the spare bedroom. Then, of course, comes the opening of the sealed orders in which it emerges that everybody has betrayed absolutely everybody else. Henry Kissinger is very good at this game. Michael Gove thinks he’s good at it but isn’t. Gavin Williamson knows he is hopeless, but wants to play with the bigger boys anyway. 

Scrabble

Nobody who seriously plays Scrabble nourishes the illusion that it’s a game for people with good vocabularies and imaginative ideas for unusual words: rather, it favours vicious sadists and pedants who have memorised a complete list of the allowable two and three-letter words (most of which look like a fat-thumb error on a QWERTY keyboard) and who are determined to deploy them in the most pinched and obstructive way possible. You’re thinking: “Wouldn’t it be lovely to make ‘BANANA’ with my two blanks!” They’re thinking: “Good. If I play QG sideways that will spoil the triple-word for everyone else.” I have a hunch Priti Patel plays a mean game of Scrabble, pun intended.

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Dominic Cummings is no chicken

By Tom Chivers

Cluedo

It’s a game about logic, really, isn’t it? I mean, what are you doing just drifting from room to room making random guesses? You idiot! Now you’ve got the player to your left showing you Professor Plum again: a totally wasted suggestion! Look, I know it looks like a bit of fun to you but actually I think you’ll find there are any number of optimal strategy guides available in the rationalist blogosphere. Oh — you what? Colonel Mustard with the candlestick in the billiard room? Dear me. Well let’s have a look. You fluky BASTARD: I know from my notes that it was a 17-2 chance against you guessing correctly and now you’ve won — which is sad, actually. A senior government source is very good at this game but still always loses.

Monopoly

The attractions of this game to the egotistical, plutocratically minded and unimaginative are obvious enough just from the name. It’s all about money — and about winning by getting all of it. It is also notable for three other features of its gameplay. Once you’ve established a commanding lead, it gets easier and easier, just like real capitalism. Cheats almost always prosper, and people who win at Monopoly almost always cheat, just like real capitalism. And Mayfair is expensive and crap, just like real capitalism. This is the ideal game for the Sir Philip Green in your life.

Trivial Pursuit

This game is a particularly interesting psychological test, not because it attracts pub quiz bores (though it does), but because of the design of the game itself. Ignore the idiotic questions about the litreage of Lake Titicaca or Ginger Spice’s bra: the mechanism is irrelevant. The point is that it is a very long game. It lasts at least twice as long as it takes for everyone around the table to be bored to tears as they make a 65th attempt at getting that orange piece of pie. The team in the lead doesn’t want to stop, though, because they think they’re going to win; and the losing teams can’t give up for fear of looking ungracious. Mind-forg’d manacles, right there: chaining you to the table. It’s the game for god-tier passive-aggressive monsters. Theresa May is the sort of person, I’d suspect, who’d finish a game of Triv. 

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Self-isolation is feeding my Warhammer addiction

By Tom Chivers

Bridge

“No man is an Iland, intire of itselfe,” wrote John Donne. He was almost certainly thinking about the game of bridge when this insight occurred to him. Here is a game in which partnership and communication are everything. It is a game in which ruthless killer instincts are couched in extreme courtesy, and if you exclaim “Three no trumps are you out of your tiny mind?” at your partner it will be distinctly frowned on by your opponents. Glory is shared in bridge, as is ignominy. Suitable only for happily married couples with an intellectual rapport such as Ant and Dec, Dr Evil and Mini-Me, or Piers Morgan and Susanna Reid.  

Catan

The game for policy nerds. You are encouraged to build a civilisation, gathering and allocating resources, building infrastructure, and basically doing all the stuff that for most of us seems to be rather ruled out by the word “game”. If you’re the sort of person who’d rather muse on the parameters of short-term outlay versus medium-term economic growth implied by HS2, go wild. You are likely to find yourself playing Catan with earnest, slightly thyroidal young men from free-market think tanks or, if you’re specially lucky, George Osborne. 

Cranium

This is the game for your flamboyant uncle and your tipsy mum who misses karaoke. It’s a game for the high-spirited and giggly and creatively inclined and slightly showy-offy. Why master chess when you can measure out the rest of your life in 45 second bursts, trying to hum the Wombles theme tune or make a recognisable three-dimensional image of Ann Widdecombe out of a thumb-sized piece of orange Play-Doh? Davina McCall is undoubtedly excellent at Cranium, as — secretly — is Jeremy Corbyn. 

Snakes and Ladders

It’s entirely random, snakes and ladders. It barely qualifies as a game at all. With poker, say, you’re surfing the waves of chance with on-the-hoof calculations of probabilities, all tempered with psychological acumen. With snakes and ladders it’s more like: yeah, rolled a six. I won. Woo. Or: yeah, rolled a four. Back down the ladder for me. Like, curses. Your turn. Accordingly, it is the preferred game of existentialist philosophers. Also, toddlers.

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By Sam Leith

 

Many of the stories that dominated the news agenda early that year, though, seem quaint in retrospect. The then-chancellor Alistair Darling cut stamp duty for first-time buyers and increased taxes for the better off. The Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, was recorded disparaging a member of the public who ranted to him about Eastern Europeans “flocking” to Britain as a “bigoted woman”. Volcanic ash closed British airspace for a few days.

At May’s general election there was a change of government after 13 years; yet it hardly seemed a seismic event at the time. A tired Labour administration was replaced by a coalition government headed by two slick television performers who promised a “new politics” in which “compromise, give and take, reasonable, civilised, grown-up behaviour is not a sign of weakness but of strength”. Asked what he thought of new Prime Minister David Cameron, the late polemicist Christopher Hitchens replied: “He doesn’t make me think.” This summed up the mood of many, who felt that Cameron was, as Hitchens put it, “content free”.

Indeed, many were fooled by Cameron’s — and to a lesser extent Clegg’s — presentation as leaders of a moderate liberal reforming government, including many former Labour voters, who failed to anticipate just how radical the coalition would be. Cameron was a “new kind of Conservative” alright, but largely in the sense that his conservatism was inextricably wedded to a flavour of economic liberalism which had very little to do with traditional conservatism at all.

By September 2010 the chancellor, George Osborne, was ready to “wield the axe”, as the BBC put it at the time. Funding for the police was to be cut by 20% over four years, the budget for new social housing reduced by 60% over the same period and the justice department faced cuts of 6%, with 3,000 fewer prison places.

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What's David Cameron hiding?

By James Hanning

Significant in terms of what would transpire during the Brexit referendum was the unprecedented rolling-back of the public realm. The austerity programme introduced by the Coalition government was made up of 89% spending cuts and 11% net tax rises. In the end the Coalition reduced public spending as a proportion of GDP by as much in five years as Margaret Thatcher managed in 11.

The impact in many parts of Britain was severe. There were a million requests for emergency food aid in the last year of the Coalition Government. Morbid online jokes about deceased individuals being declared “fit for work” by the Department of Work and Pensions functioned as a coping mechanism for a society in which people really did drop dead after being declared fit for work. The DWP was run at the time by the severe figure of Iain Duncan Smith, who might as well have been lifted straight from the bureaucratic apparatus of one of Charles Dickens’ workhouses or boarding schools.

Of course, austerity didn’t cause Brexit. But it did contribute to the disillusionment many felt with the Westminster establishment — disillusionment based on feelings of abandonment by the powers that be. In working-class towns such as Blackpool, Rugeley and Ebbw Vale — towns I spent time in in 2016 during my six-month trip around the country to research my book Hired — Brussels functioned as a lightning rod for the disillusionment caused by economic decline and deindustrialisation.

All around there were reasons to want to ‘take back control’, as the anti-EU slogan had urged people to do. “Look at this country and look at how it was thriving in the Fifties, Sixties, even up to the Seventies, but since we joined the EU it’s just gone down,” a former miner at the shuttered Bryn Colliery in Port Talbot told me.

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Imagine David Cameron had won his referendum

By Peter Franklin

Austerity made life harder still, reducing peoples’ benefits at a time when zero-hours contacts and insecure work required a comprehensive social safety net rather than one deliberately riddled with holes. Homelessness was so bad in some of the places I visited that it felt as if there were a person under a pile of corrugated cardboard in nearly every shop and restaurant doorway. A study from Sheffield Hallam University from published in 2015, shortly before I embarked on my journey, found that 21% of people who had their benefits sanctioned became homeless as a result.

There was much speculation following the referendum as to the cause of the result. London journalists were sent off to explore working-class communities that were said to have been ‘left behind’ by capitalism — and which had consequently rebelled against the status quo as represented by Brussels. Other liberal commentators damned their fellow countrymen as spluttering racists and unreconstructed bigots. The EU — for these intolerant champions of tolerance at least — was synonymous with contemporary bohemian affluence: the free movement of cheap labour and capital, free trade, rule by avocado-eating technocrats etc.

Few of them expected the referendum vote to favour Brexit at any rate. Moreover, the palpable shock of that summer morning in 2016 led many to lose their intellectual footing. Newspaper columns were filled with histrionic pronouncements of ‘creeping fascism’ and impending economic collapse; 2016 was dubbed liberal democracy’s annus horribilis.

Had Gordon Brown scraped through in 2010 a Labour government would undoubtedly have made cuts. But they would have been nowhere near as deep as Osborne’s. This takes on some significance when we are talking about a narrow vote to Leave in the referendum of 2016, a referendum that Labour would never have called in the first place. To say that these two decisions have reverberated across the decades since is an understatement.

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Where would the Left be without Brexit?

By James Bloodworth

The Labour administration that was thrown out in 2010 was certainly exhausted after 13 years in power. It was assailed on all sides by a corporate media which, apart from the Daily Mirror and, curiously, the Daily Mail, had never taken to Gordon Brown, whom it unceasingly mocked as gaffe prone and ‘dour’. By contrast, Cameron and Clegg were politicians well-suited to the television and social media age. Their vacuous soundbites, sharply pressed suits and phosphorescent smiles captured the mood of a country that was tired of Brown’s bureaucratic profligacy and had grown suspicious that the undeserving were taking advantage. As the British Social Attitudes survey reports, “The level of agreement with spending more on welfare benefits for the poor fell from 61% in 1989 to 27% in 2009.”

And so the British public voted for a PR man to be their Prime Minister. Eventually it would become apparent that Cameron’s peculiar self-confidence came not from any exceptional political skill but from a sense of entitlement drummed into him by a traditional upper-class upbringing. But not before the fateful decision had been made to vote him in a second time, this time with a majority. Incredulity ensues among the young when I tell them that Cameron was once considered a safe pair of hands by the British establishment. Looking back through the archives, I am pleased to report that in 2015 I described this widespread misconception as a “façade”.

The British establishment of the late 20th and early 21st century resembles a curiously incestuous beast. Cameron got his first job in politics because Lord Lexden, who was deputy director of the Conservative Research Department at the time, received an anonymous telephone call from Buckingham Palace tipping him off about “an outstanding young man”.

Britain has been paying the price for this lack of judgment by the palace (Was it Prince Andrew who made the call perhaps?) ever since. But then who are we to judge when, as a country, we voted Cameron into office — not once but twice?

The trouble started before Cameron of course. There was a colossal loss of public trust in politicians over the Iraq war, the MP’s expenses scandal and the global financial crisis. But it was the decision to elect Cameron in 2010 — a politician whose measure President Barack Obama had two years earlier when he reportedly described him as ‘lightweight’ — which set us on the path to where we are today. BC — Before Cameron — the situation was recoverable. After, not so much.

Last week the Evening Standard – now, of course, a propaganda rag for George Osborne’s Remain-inspired end-of-the-world fearmongering – led with the following front-page headline: “Who’ll look after our elderly post Brexit, ask care chiefs”.

I’m still spitting blood at the arrogance and callousness of that question. It summed up all that I have against the Osborne neoliberal (yes, that’s what it is) world-view. And why I am longing for a full-on Brexit – No Deal, please – to come along and smash the living daylights out of the assumptions behind that question.

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By Alex Clark

First, let me answer the question. Children have a responsibility to look after their parents. Even better, care should be embedded within the context of the wider family and community. It is the daughter of the elderly gentleman that should be wiping his bottom. This sort of thing is not something to subcontract.

Ideally, then, people should live close to their parents and also have some time availability to care for them. But instead, many have cast off their care to the state or to carers who may have themselves left their own families in another country to come and care for those that we won’t. The Evening Standard’s headline was the complaint of those who realise that their ‘help’, the Polish or Spanish care worker, might not be available to look after Mum and Dad. OMG, they might just have to do it themselves!

Writing in the Independent last year, Luciana Berger – MP for Liverpool Wavertree and recent Labour defector, and also a member of the Health and Social Care Committee – spoke out against the effect of Brexit on the social care sector. “A massive increase in demand for elderly care is predicted in the coming years. More than 1.2 million older people will need some form of care by 2040, according to the Department of Health and Social Care. That’s double the number of people compared to 2015,” she wrote.

And Brexit will be disastrous, she went on. “The Department of Health itself estimates that there could be 28,000 fewer workers in the social care sector in England five years after leaving the EU… The result of this would be thousands of hours’ worth of lost earnings.”

Interestingly never once in the piece did she mention the word family. Indeed, the only way the piece related to family life and the mutual care that this has traditionally implied is through the idea that caring for a family member equals “lost earnings”.

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By Giles Fraser

My GP friend also told me another story. Just before Christmas he did a home visit to an elderly woman, living on her own, but surrounded by Christmas cards. She proudly told him how well her kids had done, showing him the cards sent by her children living all round the world. “I never see them very much now” she explained. She was on her own for Christmas. They might Skype.

This is what happens when that much over praised value of social mobility becomes the way we think about dealing with social inequality. Social mobility is very much a young person’s value, of course. Get on. Get out of your community. Find a job anywhere you please. Undo the ties that bind you. The world is your oyster.

This is the philosophy that preaches freedom of movement, the Remainers’ golden cow. And it is this same philosophy that encourages bright working-class children to leave their communities to become rootless Rōnin, loyal to nothing but the capitalist dream of individual acquisition and self-advancement.

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The slow death of Britain's towns

By Will Brett

Always on the move, always hot desking. Short-term contracts. Laptops and mobiles – even the tools of modern workplace remind us that work no longer has any need of place. All this is a philosophy that could not have been better designed to spread misery and unhappiness. Human beings need roots for their emotional and psychological flourishing. They need long-term, face-to-face relationships; they need chatting in the local post office; they need a sense of shared identity, shared values, mutual commitment. No amount of economic growth is worth sacrificing all this for.

Because robbed of their most go-ahead young people, working class communities become ghost towns of hopelessness. And care homes for the elderly become ways to warehouse those who cannot be persuaded to make the trip to Dignitas.

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Would you let a robot care for Grandpa?

By Rhiannon Williams

My GP friend is Muslim, and a fairly conservative one I think it’s fair to say. We were eating in a Pakistani restaurant in Tooting. All around us extended Muslim families were sitting together, children and the elderly, aunts and uncles. It was a buzzy hub of a homogeneous society – the sort of society that the West sometimes criticises for being inward looking. “They must integrate!” comes the familiar line, which, in effect, means they should disperse, learn the values of progressive individualism.

From where I was sitting it is these people – and not George Osborne swanning off to his new £3 million chalet in Verbier – that have got it right. For the attraction of socially conservative and traditional values are that they constitute a highly successful form of mutual care. Indeed, these are the values that have formed the basis for the most effective form of social security the world has even known: family and community life.

The idea that this form of life constitutes “lost earnings” shows how far the Remainer free-market, free-movement philosophy is a threat to the web of support on which the poorer and the most vulnerable especially, have to rely. Remain is all about ever new opportunities for the rich. Brexit seeks a reclamation of something we have lost. The ability to stay put and care for each other.

The latest Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) report on EEA migration is in many ways an admirable piece of work. But, in its assumptions and way of proceeding, it is cut largely from this technocratic cloth.

In his foreword to the report, Alan Manning says that its purpose is “to provide an evidence base for the design of a new migration system after the end of the implementation period in 2021”. However, when he says later on that “EEA migration has had impacts, [but] many of them seem to be small in magnitude when set against other changes”, and specifies a 1.7 % increase in prices following the EU referendum, a few alarm bells should be ringing.

By any measure, the changes in our communities and increase in population over the past 20 years have been more significant than a small adjustment in prices brought on by exchange rates. This, though, is the level of elite discourse on immigration. It focuses on ‘data’ and ‘evidence’, but in an abstract way, directed towards business interests and removed from the lived experience of people. The MAC itself acknowledges there may be dangers to this approach – but only deep into the report, far from its headline statements.

It is an approach characteristic of that behemoth which dominates British government and wants to keep the tap of mass immigration firmly on – the Treasury. George Osborne, now editor of the Evening Standard, articulated this when he attacked Theresa May’s immigration targets as “economically illiterate”: “If I had a regret,” he said, “it’s not that we didn’t manage the immigration system properly… we were, I think, too intimidated to make the arguments about the benefits of immigration.”

Further reading

How Labour lost the art of politics

By Jonathan Rutherford

At about the time Osborne is referring to, Gordon Brown’s former economic adviser, Jonathan Portes, was demanding that Cameron’s government put prosperity and growth before arbitrary migration targets, praising the UK’s flexible labour market and employing the now almost ubiquitous language of “open, outward-looking Britain”.

It’s fair and reasonable to make the economic rationalist argument that maximising the economy is best achieved by a liberal migration regime. The trouble is that this view is often pushed forward as rational in an absolute sense, with any dissenting views denounced as “irrational” – and often worse.

Portes, who carried out some analysis for the MAC report, has never been backward in his politics over immigration – and is keen to invoke his authority as an expert to back it up. As he wrote after the report’s publication:

“Over the past eight years, immigration policy has been based not on analysis and evidence but on unpleasant and damaging nativism. The MAC report provides an opportunity to reverse that – let’s hope our politicians have the courage to take it.”

This echoes a theme that recurs in my book, The Tribe: the Liberal-Left and the System of Diversity – the marrying of economic rationalism with the politics of diversity and identity. As I have written it, this has happened particularly around the subject of immigration. For Portes, as for others, mass immigration appears rational on an absolute basis because it is supported by the “analysis and evidence”. However, we can see him also playing the race card, attacking governments that have talked about limiting immigration as “nativists”. The way he presents it, they aren’t just irrational but also racist.

This informal alliance between free market liberalism and the politics of diversity over mass immigration is, as I say in my book, “one of the political stories of our time”. It has given technocratic liberals some moral authority for free market policies, while also allowing the liberal-left to claim economic credibility and support from business for their advocacy of increased diversity. You can see the merging of these tendencies in figures like Portes, Osborne and Sadiq Khan.

It’s an alliance that first found sustained expression during the 13 years of New Labour government from 1997 to 2010; Portes was an influential figure, helping to establish the consensus in policy-making circles that remains with us today. Even politicians on the farther reaches of the Left, including Diane Abbott and Caroline Lucas, now gather around this position and the authority it offers.

Abbott, for example, responded to the MAC report by calling it “rational”, invoking the authority of “evidence” and “expert advice” in order to support high levels of immigration. We can see similar forces at work in the support of far-Left politicians and activists for the European Single Market – something that the older generation of Lefties, including Tony Benn and Jeremy Corbyn resolutely opposed.

Further reading

What should a sensible and fair immigration policy look like?

By David Laws

But the strength of this position is a political one; it is not necessarily an indication of how appropriate a liberal migration regime is for Britain now – or in general. In my book, I avoid making a technical, calculating judgment of the kind that the MAC report leans towards and that Osborne, Portes and Abbott advocate. I think contemporary mass immigration is much too complex for us to be able to do this. Any judgments we make are limited by what we take into account – as well as what we don’t – which is generally dictated by our politics.

For while the tabloid treatment of the immigration question often plays on fear, unjustifiably and stupidly politicising migrants (at least in headlines) as negative and dangerous, the economic rationalist approach also reduces modern immigration to a lot less than it is. Specifically, it tends to rule out any consideration of the existential aspects: of how we experience and interpret the world, often treating such aspects as illegitimate: as ‘subjective’ and ‘irrational’, as not based in facts and evidence, and therefore to be ruled out of consideration and banished from politics itself.

But the feeling of loss that someone experiences when their world becomes less familiar, and their connections into it die off, is real and important. It’s an experience of what I would call ‘existential defeat’ – of losing rather than winning in ways that aren’t always clear and certainly aren’t easy to explain. It’s unsettling, traumatic even.

Further reading

If you're pro-immigration you can't be anti-development

By Peter Franklin

The economic rationalists are making a political choice when they dismiss these concerns as trivial or describe them as ‘necessary’ sufferances in order for the modern world to progress. It’s the same with their accusations of racism or ‘nativism’. It’s their way of adjusting to the world and and assessing where political power lies within it. Osborne, for example, knows he can align with the bulk of business opinion and many on the liberal-Left by supporting the loosening of migration rules. The same goes for Portes and Abbott.

We all make calculations like this – considering what best suits us – in our daily lives. And how immigration affects us is no different. If democracy is to have any meaning at all, it must listen to and respond to the voters. If we allow core existential questions like who we are and what we are to exist beyond the frame of democracy, in the hands of those who present their politics as facts, then there is little point in democracy at all.

The Tribe: the Liberal-Left and the System of Diversity by Ben Cobley is out now on Imprint

Suggested reading

People not places: the real hope for a northern powerhouse

By Phillip Blond

When we speak of a place being ‘left behind’, the people who leave it behind are, first and foremost, its very own, it’s ‘brightest and best’.

That’s why I fully agree with Phillip’s people-before-place prescription for northern revival. “The North,” he says, “has to become deeply attractive to the people it needs to bolster its technical, entrepreneurial and educational reach.”

Spot on, but investment in places – as long as it serves the primary aim of attracting people – has an important part to play. Moreover, the ‘who?’ of the decision-making process is just as important as the ‘what?’, ‘where?’ and ‘when?’ of the actual decisions .

It’s a point brought home in a piece by Tom Arnold for CityMetric:

“Saturday 23 June marks a significant anniversary in British political history. No, not that one: it’s four years since George Osborne, in a speech at Manchester’s Museum of Science & Industry, first coined the phrase ‘Northern Powerhouse’”

Real devolution to the North of England is in fact a bit older than that – starting with 2011 Localism Act and the launch of the City Deals process in the same year. Furthermore, its true driving force wasn’t George Osborne, but Greg Clark – who I had the honour of working for at the time. Nevertheless the Northern Powerhouse label was a touch of genius – and has long since passed from being a mere government slogan and into the full ownership of the North itself.

Suggested reading

Westminster's broken: To rescue our British parliament, establish an English parliament

By Peter FRanklin

Arnold notes that “right now… Osborne’s promise of improving infrastructure to the point where traversing the North is the ‘equivalent of travelling around a single global city’ appears laughable”. However, he also acknowledges some real achievements:

“Its most significant achievement is the creation of Transport for the North (TfN), the UK’s first ever pan-Northern government body. Established in 2015 and granted statutory powers in April this year, TfN can now be regarded as the Powerhouse project’s civil service.”

Significantly, this new ‘civil service’ is reshaping the policy agenda it inherited from the actual (London-based) civil service. The previous “over-emphasis on the North’s largest cities, and Manchester in particular” has given way to a more holistic vision. This makes sense because no one city dominates the North to the degree that London dominates the South. A much better analogy is with Germany’s most important conurbation, which isn’t Berlin or Munich, but the Ruhr. With a population of over eight million, it is Germany’s industrial heartland and the third largest urban centre in the EU; but how many of its individual cities could you name?

It is surely right for the North of England – and especially its Liverpool-to-Leeds core conurbation – to aim for the same degree of cohesion.

Tom Arnold remarks that the “the Northern Powerhouse probably isn’t what George Osborne thought it would be”. But that’s the whole point of devolution: London politicians shouldn’t be making the big strategic decisions anymore.

One can’t expect the North’s natural leaders to stay in (or return to) the region if it isn’t in charge of its own destiny.