Davey, one might conclude, had joined illustrious company, becoming an heir to the venerable tradition of Lloyd George and the young Churchill. Yet few would associate the weighty hand of history with today’s MP for Kingston and Surbiton. Remember, Davey’s most noteworthy moment at the last election wasn’t a striking policy proposal or a clippable statement of principle, but his repeated tumbles off a paddle board. Over the weekend, at his party’s spring conference in York, the Lib Dem leader continued his unique brand of guerrilla marketing. Taking to the stage to “Daddy Cool”, the former Secretary of State was later seen “dad dancing” to Chappell Roan. Forget Keynes and Beveridge; even the hinterland and gravitas of Charlie Kennedy now feels as distant as the Edwardians.

More to the point, and given the meteoric rise of both Reform and the Greens, one might ask: why does Davey persist with the slapstick persona? A decade ago the Lib Dems, past masters of the by-election upset, would have fancied their chances in Gorton and Denton. Last month, by contrast, they lost their deposit. It feels, in short, like almost everything in British politics has changed over the past year and a half — except for the Liberal Democrats.

Advocates for Davey’s brand of leadership might reply that whatever one’s views on his style, the results speak for themselves. Beyond his party’s success at the last election, Nowcast and YouGov predict further gains at the next one, the latter putting them on 85 seats.

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But is that really so impressive given that the Lib Dems have long been Westminster’s third party, and that the big two are in freefall? While it’s true that Davey made hay in 2024, cruising home in Tory strongholds like Chichester, Witney, and Guildford, he has not managed to make comparable inroads into Labour territory. Instead, it seems that everyone but the Lib Dems is ready to feed on the carcass of Keir Starmer’s majority, from the Greens and SNP to Reform and Plaid Cymru. Rather than dancing to Gen Alpha bangers, Davey should be asking why Farage and Polanski are making the political weather instead of him.

One explanation is that such ambition is institutionally off-limits. The Lib Dems have learned the hard way — principally from the doomed SDP-Liberal alliance of the 1980s and Clegg’s disappointment in 2010 — that conservative gradualism is better than radical failure. In 2024, Davey delivered on the former, and then some, with a relentless focus on Tory seats in the south of England, especially those that contain a Gail’s bakery. But given the sudden rise of Zack Polanski, who has taken the Greens to more than 200,000 members and a by-election win for the first time in their history, that now feels like a limited strategy.

Perhaps Davey habitually affects a jocular manner because liberalism itself has become an unserious worldview —  so much so that any Lib Dem leader would struggle embody gravitas. Liberalism is bereft of thick ties across society; nor does it offer a deeper sense of meaning to its devotees, something one certainly can’t say for Reform or the Greens. Today’s liberals, in short, believe in little beyond the dying status quo. Their post-Cold War triumph was so utterly overwhelming that, almost two decades after the Global Financial Crisis, they lack the tools to change course.

Adrian Wooldridge, author of Centrists of the World Unite!, provides an insightful explanation of how liberalism conquered all while losing its mojo. As he wrote for UnHerd, liberals “reaped the benefits of the past 40 years of economic and moral deregulation”, yet are “now incapable of running the world which they have made.” It should therefore be little surprise that, over the last decade, the Liberal Democrats have been perennially negative: stop Brexit, stop Corbyn, stop Boris — and now stop Farage. They can’t stand for anything because this is the world they wanted. And it sucks.

That applies to both pillars of what Wooldridge persuasively labels “double liberalism”. Why double? Because it combines the excesses of economic neoliberalism, increasingly pervasive since the early Eighties, with the dismantling of any conception of a shared moral universe, a change that goes back to the 1960s. It is the combination of these two liberalisms that political and media elites have in mind when they talk about the “center” — an increasingly meaningless concept, not least because it is neither the middle ground of public sentiment nor popular. “The strength of the post-liberal argument,” Wooldridge notes, “is that it recognizes this synthesis is now producing more problems than benefits.” What is presented by elites as a politics of moderation often animates resentment and even hatred. The leadership class of the Long Nineties, Tony Blair more than anyone, appears incapable of grasping that.

Yet, left to itself, post-liberalism also gives rise to wantonly self-destructive pathologies. If Davey is incapable of taking himself seriously, then Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage can, on a range of issues, appear outright deranged. How else do you explain the allure of the MAGA-sphere for so much of the British Right? We can ascribe some of the blame to the demise of an ideologically curious liberalism. As a result of this intellectual seppuku, politics on the extremes have become ever more puerile. I say this as a socialist: a historically literate politics of the actual center only serves to refine my own views.

Consider the economy. For all the fanfare around Elon Musk’s cost-cutting DOGE unit, the Brookings Institute recently suggested that America’s fiscal situation is actually deteriorating. In other words, Trump, for all of his radical, disruptive rhetoric, has retained the default platform of the Republican Party since Reagan: deficit-funded tax cuts and rising public debt. As long as the petrodollar exists, that strategy might remain viable for Washington. But it certainly isn’t for the Europeans and Brits, because we don’t benefit from having the world’s reserve currency. That Reform is still barking about a British DOGE — even now — should terrify us all. The enthusiasm underscores the extent to which we are the backwater franchise for a political operation already discredited across the Atlantic. And because liberals at home are ideologically bankrupt too — or, worse still, don’t actually care about ideas — imitation of the Americans still passes for radical, cutting-edge thinking.

It’s a similar story with foreign policy. The radical Right is becoming progressively unmoored from reality over Iran and the wider region, partly because the center has no credible blueprint of its own. At the end of February, Farage was as eager as anyone to become embroiled in yet another overseas conflict, a position he quickly disavowed. The same was true of Badenoch, who initially demanded strikes in the Middle East. Matt Goodwin, who finished second as the Reform candidate in Gorton and Denton, said he was willing to pay more to fill up his car if that was the cost of depriving Iran of a nuclear weapon. Such opportunism has been exposed only because, on this one occasion, centrists — specifically Keir Starmer — took a position founded on reason rather than complacent liberal interventionism. As a result, and unusually for his time in government, Starmer finds himself aligned with public opinion.

Perhaps a decisive position on the war in Gaza would have achieved something similar — especially had that position been taken earlier on. Yet the Iran response remains instructive. On the one occasion that Labour has broken with the liberal default of recent decades, Labour has Farage on the back foot. It’s strange indeed to see both Richard Tice and Tony Blair knocking a Labour prime minister. This may also be part of a wider pattern, or at least the start of it. Before dancing the Macarena last weekend, Davey argued that the entirety of Britain’s nuclear deterrent should be built at home. It’s important to remember that our Trident missiles are actually from a “shared pool” housed across the Atlantic. Green shoots of pragmatism? Maybe.

Don’t expect a transformation, though. It’s often suggested that contemporary Left-wing politicians aren’t as talented as Tony Benn, and that their Right-wing counterparts are less erudite than Enoch Powell. But why wouldn’t they be, when the ideological school that reigned supreme in recent decades has been so disinterested in ideas? Peter Mandelson is perhaps the most grubby example here, but there’s also Justin Trudeau, who led a country afflicted by a drug epidemic while insisting on the gender-neutral term “peoplekind”, and Kamala Harris — whose presidential bid was a series of meandering speeches and clips of her dancing on social media.

Looking back on his rivals, it is obvious why Trump prevailed not once but twice. While trying to lean into the attention economy, rather than defend politics as a serious vocation, centrists were a handmaid to the very populism they claim to abhor. Trump’s endless, shambling monologues — despite being occasionally funny — were only captivating because what the alternative was a world of clipped soundbites devoid of personality or political substance. Ironically, this also fueled the rise of Barack Obama, whose singular ability to speak capsized the Clinton campaign ahead of 2008. But Obama was the outlier, and Clinton the default for double liberalism. Even then, there was little of substance to what the senator for Illinois actually said.

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All of this helps explain the allure of Mark Carney. The Canadian PM’s recent Davos speech was both brave and intellectually coherent. Notably, Carney acknowledged some of liberalism’s failings over recent decades. But his words were conspicuous precisely because liberalism so rarely produces politicians of substance. For Wooldridge, there is little to read into this shortage of great statesmen. But there’s an argument that it’s structural, emerging from the inherent contradictions of the tradition. Carl Schmitt, a critic of liberalism, claimed it seeks to “dissolve the political into ethics and economics”. Should it really surprise us, then, that given the culmination of the liberal project meant the abolition of politics, competent exponents of the craft would gradually vanish too?

So what might a reanimated liberal politics for the mid-21st century actually look like? First, instinctive complacency would be replaced by an acknowledgment of what has gone wrong. In Europe, particularly, we may be in the foothills of our own Century of Humiliation.

On the level of politics, the priorities should be clear: sovereignty is a tool for solving problems — and national identities matter. People want a state that protects them and that stands as a source of authority; if it fails to be either they view it as a useless, wasteful encumbrance. The national community is real. That doesn’t mean forsaking your fellow man in other parts of the world, but it does mean accepting the nation-state as the primary locus of political action.

The policies of a new liberalism should be an extension of such thinking. The wealthy should do their duty to others and their country by accepting the need for a new economic settlement. Wealth is, essentially, collectively produced — and a liberalism that is indifferent to exploitation deserves to die. A renewed liberal politics, retaining its old aim of allowing individuals to be the authors of their own lives, must also ensure that access to the basics is guaranteed: cheap housing, transport, cheap energy. Nobody is reading the collected works of Jane Austen, or learning Mandarin, when they are living in their overdraft.

A great advantage of democracy, of course, is that systems can self-correct. Yet even here there are warning signs. Some centrist commentators have claimed that the Westminster system should become less, rather than more, democratic. Unconvinced by the merits of party primaries, which keep politicians on their toes, they argue for a political class that is even more insulated from the public. It’s ironic that advocates of a worldview built on reason, public deliberation and Enlightenment values often argue for the kind of decadence you might associate with the Hapsburgs or the late Ottoman Empire.

Fortunately, however, such voices are becoming quieter. Given the benefits that serious-minded liberalism has brought to all of us — from defending the rule of law to upholding freedom of expression — its reinvigoration, in a form fit for the present day, would be a welcome one. Just don’t expect Ed Davey to lead the charge.

Reform’s emergence as a government-in-waiting has stirred an out-of-sorts patriotism in Britain’s pallid center-left as it attempts to present a vision of Britain and Britishness to compete with Nigel Farage’s insurgent one. “The battle in the next election is between us and Reform,” their leader Ed Davey told the conference. And indeed, the whole event was colored by the idea that there is no more Left and Right, only Liberal and Reform. If “the Nationalists” intended on hoisting flags on A-roads, then the Lib Dems would jolly well get theirs out too.

For four chilly days in the Bournemouth International Center, the Lib Dems spoke of little but the threat the “Nationalists” — that incongruous troop of Reform voters, Tommy Robinson supporters and the occasional stray Tory — posed to “British values”. But they struggled to conjure a positive and distinct vision of Britishness in response.

Instead, in a clownish attempt at middle-class populism, Davey invoked a Britain of “Lionesses”, “cricket pavilions”, and “Male Voice choirs” — a post-twee, reactionary, commuter-belt idyll. And Farage is at the gate. In an attempt to frighten the Lib Dems into action, their leader painted an alternative picture of the country where Reform has the whip hand. Where Reform would roll back gun laws until “schools have to teach our children what to do in case of a mass shooting”. They’ll let Elon Musk expose your kids to porn. They’ll turn your son into Andrew Tate. They’ll denigrate the countryside with fracking and untrammeled development. And, worst of all, they’ll privatize the NHS. “That is Trump’s America,” Davey said. “Don’t let it become Farage’s Britain.”

“Reform is the most serious threat liberalism has ever faced, and we have to put all our effort into beating that,” Davey said. Yet the irony is that the Lib Dems need Nigel Farage if they hope to have a shot a power. In shattering the old duopoly, Reform has offered the Lib Dems a route to electoral success: mopping up the Tory moderates and Labour progressives, as both parties stagger in a futile pursuit of the Reform vote. In 2024, the Lib Dems won more seats (72) than any third party since the collapse of the Liberal Party more than a century ago, and in May’s local elections, Lib Dems finished second to Reform. But so far it has failed to articulate an alternative vision for government. The latest poll from More in Common has the Lib Dems in fourth place with a meager 13% of the vote.

Davey has expended much of his mental capacity on Reform’s success. “Here’s the intellectual bit,” he said in a Q&A. “They make people laugh.” And so that is what the Lib Dems must do too. Davey marched through Bournemouth Gardens pursued by a band playing “Sweet Caroline”, he dressed up as a beekeeper, and he had “a blooming good time” planting flowers. And as usual, he didn’t quite pull it off. Farage’s humor isn’t affected in the way that, say, waving a scepter buffoonishly whilst leading a marching band is. Boris Johnson is, perhaps, the model, but he did that all naturally: no one ever wondered why he was acting like a buffoon.

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Davey thinks that “making people smile is the way to win them over”, but the polling disagrees: a majority of voters think his clowning makes the party look unserious and tin-eared. At a time when the electorate has never been so disaffected, when they have a “moral duty” to defeat Reform, and when they’ve never had a better shot at becoming a serious force in British politics, goofing around doesn’t make good policy. It’s just “bullshit”, one MP was reported to have said last week. Besides, it isn’t cutting through. Only a third of Britons can identify Davey’s face, with “Ed Balls” being the most common wrong answer. Those who do know him tend to think he’s just nice. But can “just nice” win an election?

That’s the unavoidable question, especially when it comes to the Lib Dems’ approach to immigration. Not everyone at Tommy Robinson’s “Unite the Kingdom” march was a nationalist or racist, Davey said; some just “felt like no one was listening to them”. But are the Lib Dems? Their home affairs spokesperson Lisa Smart seemed flippant at best. She spoke breezily about how migrant hotels are places “where people had their wedding reception… and, of course, [the hotels are] rubbish for the taxpayer”. Elsewhere, for all the Lib Dems’ suggestion that they’d combat Reform with a positive argument for immigration, that petered into some brief mumbling about the economy and the popularity of integration. “There is no harder brief for a liberal [than home affairs],” Smart said, and the Lib Dems seem determined to prove this.

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But the delegates need only look outside the conference center to gauge the problem. Of late, Bournemouth has become one of the most hotly-discussed epicenters of British decline, as photographs of litter-strewn beaches, antisocial behavior, and Muslims praying circulate amongst the online Right. Local hotels have said that bookings are down as a result of this attention, and a volunteer Safeguard Force has been established in response to a perceived increase in crime. “All towns change,” a taxi driver told me wistfully. “It’s more vibrant than it was. Just, well, different.” As the delegates arrived for the conference, 300 locals joined the “Bournemouth Patriots” to protest against the town’s three migrant hotels. And yet, last month, the Lib Dems beat Reform in a local council ward by-election. Surely if the Lib Dems could win here, one overly confident party member reasoned, they could win anywhere.

“We could certainly see a Lib Dem government,” Kamran Hussain, who was canvassing to be the party’s vice-president, told me. “If we keep on spreading our message, moderate people will come to the Lib Dems in droves.” But how? “Operation Leapfrog” is one means to ensure this: they will target Blue-Wall Tory seats, where they finished third in 2024, such as Central Devon, and Fareham and Waterlooville. And yet all the pollsters seemed to caution against this: “They’ve virtually picked up all the seats they could pick up from the Tories,” said John Curtice, while Luke Tryl, the director of More in Common, said that they’re more likely to attract “Progressive Activists” than One-Nation Tories. But are there any moderates left?

An even greater existential problem for the Lib Dems, if they really are serious about fighting Reform, is that only 24% of voters think they represent change, compared with 51% for Reform. And change is what voters want. But Farage’s Britain is the only future that Davey sees: there was no sense that the Liberal Democrats could change Britain, or especially wanted to. Beyond their dismissal of the “turquoise Tories”, the policies they unveiled could have been implemented by any government since 1997. An energy security bank to offer £10 billion in affordable loans to homeowners and small businesses. Solar panels in supermarket car parks. Health warnings on smartphones. All that was followed by sclerotic debates over ID cards and nuclear energy, and the late-woke silencing of a trans debate via trenchantly polite reference to procedure and “namecalling”. One quiffy-haired Young Liberal told me his party was a “party of fucking nerds”, known for their obsession with forensic policy analysis. And so they were as angry as Liberals can get when, on Monday, the BBC led with Reform’s decision to scrap Indefinite Leave to Remain, because, of course, their overnight policy release — a two-hour “doomscrolling cap” for under-18s — was so much more radical.

The trouble is, centrism is a hard sell these days. One evening in the Branksome Suite, the Tony Blair Institute (TBI) hosted a fringe event on “disruptive delivery”, where the Lib Dems were urged to assume the mantle of radical centrism. This, they said, is how to beat Farage. Sam Sharps, an ageless technocrat from the TBI, told the party’s deputy-leader Daisy Cooper that “there is no reason why you can’t be radical and sensible… There is no reason why you can’t have a transformational, thought-through, nicely-packaged, costed, implementable policy programme.” That, of course, is what the TBI’s other pet project — the Labour Party — offered with their “fully funded and fully costed” 2024 manifesto: this way lies madness, spending-cuts, tax rises, and an ever-accreting fiscal blackhole.

One disgruntled crowd-member asked them why nobody was speaking about the economy at this conference, and later three other questioners broke into tears: one had lost their seat on a parish council; another’s pub had been bought by the Chinese; another was scared of being a minority in today’s Britain. This is what Britain does to you: it grinds you down until you’re crying in a gray conference room as a think-tanker explains the benefits of bloodless technocracy.

The Liberal Democrats spent four days saying that they would address such griefs, but never did. They can criticize Farage, but they can’t combat him. And try as Davey might to put fire in their bellies, they can only see themselves as an opposition-in-waiting, not a government; they are the new reactionaries who’ll meekly defend the institutions as the Reform party blazes through them. The orders were clear: sharpen your best Farage insults, and prepare yourselves for opposition.

Today, England’s rendering of this fantasy, otherwise known as the Home Counties, seems warped and unstable. Travelling through Surrey, from the quiet villages nestled in the North Downs to its London border in the north, it resembles not a cliché of suburban aspiration, but a capsule of all England’s problems: the demise of its ruling party, a lost generation of millennials, polluted waterways and a cost-of-living crisis. In these leafy streets, decline and affluence have become entwined.

The Conservative Party has always relied on the Home Counties — both to symbolise its vision for England and for its dependable voters. Now, as even this region is threatened, other parties are sweeping in and vying for a new future coalition of voters. “The Tory party needs to die,” says Westminster’s new Liberal Democrat candidate in Mole Valley, Chris Coughlan. He is the product of the Surrey incarnation of the suburban dream; the son of a stockbroker, he grew up in the village of Peaslake, joined the army and then the Conservative Party, and had a stint in the City. He is now one of the many Lib Dems trying to do the unthinkable: turf the Tory party out of its spiritual home.

With the local elections less than two weeks’ away, the Battle for the Blue Wall, the affluent suburbs that cling onto London, is now very much on. The first skirmish came in 2019, when Dominic Raab nearly lost his seat to an unprecedented Lib Dem surge around the Surrey town of Esher. But the past three years appear to have set up a far bigger fight that goes well beyond the revenge of the Remainers. Alongside the material decline of the Home Counties, a further dimension to the campaign has opened up. As London ages and gentrifies, and a “parasitical housing market” bites, an exodus of young families, millennials and renters unable to afford life in the capital have found themselves pushed beyond the sprawl of London and out into the Tory shires.

This is not the ordinary flight to the suburbs that comes with each generation’s economic maturity. Not all of these newcomers are young families seeking homes. Professional-millennial émigrés have made areas of Surrey such as Guildford and Tandridge some of the fastest-rising areas for youth voters in the country. And they have found themselves in a very different home county from the stereotype of Surrey comfort. The south-east has seen the biggest fall across the country in disposable income since 2019, with a gap opening up between median income and house prices that far outpaces the rest of England. More recently, some of the country’s most expensive mortgages were among those hit hardest after the Truss Budget. Nor is the county immune from the cost-of-living crisis. Throw in rising unsolved crime levels and a cripplingly expensive commute into the capital, and it’s not unreasonable to talk about a wave of de-gentrification taking place not just in Surrey, but across the Home Counties.

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The material circumstances that once made these places Conservative are starting to crumble. But the battle for the Blue Wall will not just be fought along a straightforward economic realignment. Surrey still has some of the country’s wealthiest postcodes and an established Tory party machine. And for their most proximate challengers, the Liberal Democrats, a vision for Surrey that somehow ties together Tory defectors with younger economic exiles isn’t clear.

Their targets fall into two categories: the “Surrey Shifter”, (young, newly-arrived from London) and “Waitrose woman” (middle-to-late aged and socially conservative). But while both are some of the most “Bregretful” in Britain, beyond that they have little in common. And nothing divides them more than the issue of housing. Millennials are the Yimby generation, overwhelmingly in favour of increased house-building. But here the greenbelt is sacred, and though judicial review has been forced to intervene, Surrey Nimbyism is a well-funded and experienced political force, courted by both parties on the council. Down the road in Wisley, plans to build a new town of 2,000 houses have triggered outright rebellion among disgruntled locals. As ever in this part of England, the home-owning dreams of the new generation is becoming the older generation’s nightmare. 

One way to cut through the schism is to talk about other things, mobilising instead the apathy and disaffection that is more or less universal. Knocking on the door in Surrey, “the worst it’s ever been in our lifetime” will do well as a campaign slogan. Coghlan certainly says it a lot and so do other Tory defectors. Young families are using food banks in Dorking; the River Mole that runs through the Surrey Hills is one of the most polluted in the country. When Ed Davey came to visit Mole Valley, he was taken to a swimming pond in Fetcham, which is now, as one local told me, “full of shit”. The arrival of England’s decline in these once-protected suburban idylls is now as visible as it is pungent.

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For Geoff Eaton, a 64-year-old businessman and lifelong Tory voter, a reckoning is coming for his old party, which has “lost its moral compass”. He complains about lies, Brexit and even the lost legacy of the London Olympics. “The Conservative Party has moved away from me,” he says, “I haven’t moved away from the Conservative Party.” When I bring news of this reckoning on the Surrey doorstep to Sir Paul Beresford, the Mole Valley MP, he seems unfazed. Along with 27 colleagues, the Tory grandee has announced he is standing down at the next general election — a decision that possibly reflects the fact that his seat, which saw a record Lib Dem swing in 2019, is no longer the quiet Tory shire it once was. But when I ask if the character of Surrey has changed under him, he seems oblivious to the tensions. “In the past”, he says, “when I get talking to Surrey people, they usually come round to my way of thinking.”

But who is a “Surrey person” now? Electoral regions cannot be so easily presumed anymore. It’s much like asking who a Red Wall voter is. But while other realignments in the North and Scotland have been driven by a sense of political betrayal, in Surrey, the failure to reward conservative aspirations has elicited a different response. In the high streets of Dorking and Guildford, the Lib Dems can look for Waitrose Mum and Surrey Shifter, but their sense of decline translates not into political activism but terminal apathy. “I have absolutely no interest anymore in this country,” says Kieran, who moved to Surrey just before the pandemic with his girlfriend, and now does an evening Uber stint so he can save enough to escape to Canada. “Everything went wrong after Brexit,” says his opposite number, Jayne Bleby outside an artisan butchers. “But I can’t vote for the Lib Dems. There’s just something about them that’s not quite right.” Another gentleman in Bookham is blunter when I try to tease out his views on the county’s future: “Surrey is like the rest of England; it’s becoming a shithole.”

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“If the Conservative Party can’t win here, where can they win?” one Tory strategist said to me despairingly. Next week, his disbelief will be put to the first of many tests, not just in Surrey, but across the Home Counties, the towns and villages that once offered a tangible encapsulation of English conservatism’s ambitions. With the structural and generational changes of the last few years, it’s unclear whether the Tories’ vision for England still commands any loyalty here. Of the sleeping 20th-century suburbs, Ballard also said they “dreamt of violence”, to escape the stifling boredom of their eternality. The search for a new suburbia forebodes a different disquiet that will last well beyond the May elections.

The problem was that Cable, who later became an interesting Cabinet minister then a poor Lib Dem leader, struggled to connect his economic insights to practical politics. The ever-smaller band of hacks attending used to leave that room each week wondering what his seminars had to do with the Blair government, the Lib Dems’ prospects, or anything else that was then on the agenda at Westminster.

Those Commons sessions — erudite, informative, almost devoid of politics — came to mind while I read Cable’s latest book. Money and Power is good and interesting, but fails utterly to deliver on one of its key promises. The book is 16 portraits of world leaders who made a real economic impact, and if you’re looking for a brisk, slightly old-fashioned “great man” primer on modern economic history, pre-order it today. But if you’re taken by the publisher’s promise of a book “examining the fascinating interplay of economics and politics”, prepare for disappointment.

Because this is economics largely estranged from — and sometimes wholly divorced from — politics. Time and again, the matter of whether and why economic policies and their authors are approved or rejected by their populations is an afterthought, treated like a weather event: something that just happens. And in his intelligent but bloodless way, Cable unwittingly says quite a lot about what can go wrong with economic policymaking. By omission, he points towards some things that the next generation of economically-interested politicians should be thinking hard about now.

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Maybe the first and biggest question is: how important should economic policy be to politicians? Cable quite rightly notes that for most of the post-war period, countries around the world have given national priority to rising living standards and economic wellbeing. He goes on to describe how a variety of leaders have sought to do that, with varying degrees of success. Cable’s measure of success for the politicians he profiles is largely based on economic outcomes: did they deliver more wealth and wellbeing for their populations?

The importance of that barely needs to be explained: sustained economic growth in recent decades has transformed human experience in ways that were barely conceivable even a generation ago. Infant mortality has plummeted, lifespans are soaring, and the years of life we have are happier and healthier than ever before.

But is that enough? And is the pursuit of growth above all always the right thing for politics to do? Cable’s economic policymakers often come across almost as Platonic guardians, distant and superior beings making decisions about the best interests of the masses who will eventually benefit, whether they know it or not and whether they welcome it or not. One of Cable’s most revealing observations is about Margaret Thatcher: “One of her traits — and an admirable one — was to introduce and persist with measures that she knew to be unpopular but judged to be necessary.”

In this book, elections, opinion and consent are peripheral; where Cable says “politics”, he often means a leader’s ascent through the hierarchy of a party, not anything directly involving the people who feel the results of economic policies. His depiction of Ludwig Erhard, father of social market economics, is crisp, informative and challenging (I speak as Director of the Social Market Foundation) but says almost nothing about post-war politics in West Germany. He writes about Franklin D Roosevelt’s success in establishing a generation-long post-war consensus around a “strong, active federal US government, labour rights and social protection”, but he does so in a single paragraph and offers no explanation of how FDR turned economic success into political wins.

And as Cable acknowledges — but cannot explain — there is no certainty that good economics is also good politics. He profiles Leszek Balcerowicz, Poland’s finance minister at the fall of communism: his “Big Bang” liberalisation of the Polish economy put the country on track for years of strong growth and, eventually, EU membership. But Balcerowicz lasted barely two years, as Poles rejected him and his allies. By contrast, Cable notes that Peronism in Argentina “has combined one of the most abject, sustained failures in economic policy with continued political popularity, evidenced by the 2019 election of a sixth Peronist president”.

What makes the difference? Cable doesn’t know and doesn’t really try to answer. His puzzlement over voters’ curious choices is evident in his last and probably unwise profile, of Donald Trump, which appears to have been hastily finished in the strange days following the November election.

Trump’s eclectic but not haphazard approach to economics perplexes Cable (and others), who cannot understand how Reaganomic tax-cuts could sit with a fixation on protectionist bilateral trade policy and nostalgia for inefficient manufacturing — and command the support of a large section of the American electorate.

All of which leads to one of the questions Cable doesn’t ask, but which emerges clearly on reading his book: what happens to economic policy when people decide there are more important things in life than economics?

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To be fair to Cable, he’s hardly alone in this. All sorts of people — politicians, journalists, academics — have been keen to try to explain the politics of recent years in solely economic terms. Trump won in 2016 because white non-college incomes fell and jobs disappeared; Britain voted Brexit because of austerity.

And economics may have been one factor for some voters. But that economics-first view overlooks other things, the cultural and the social, which some people consider more valuable than GDP growth. Philip Hammond used to say that none of the 17.4 million who backed Brexit voted to be poorer, but some of them did. Some were quite happy to forego some portion of future economic growth in exchange for what they saw as sovereignty, national pride, a sense of control.

That’s not a choice I’d have made, but I think people who make policy need to accept it as a valid choice. They also need to think more about why some people feel able and compelled to make such choices: free trade made America richer in aggregate, but didn’t benefit everyone, or make everyone feel happier about themselves or their country. Economic policy should acknowledge such perceptions and experiences and reflect them more, rather than — as Cable’s analysis sometimes seems to imply — regarding voters’ irrationality as an inconvenient obstacle to be overcome or just avoided.

Here, I should note that I have a lot of sympathy for Cable’s Platonic view of policymaking: both as a columnist and a think-tanker, I’ve often argued for politicians to do unpopular-but-sensible things. (And I still do: the sooner we start taxing housing assets to fund social care the better.) But my guess is that it’s going to become even less viable to make economic policy by doing complicated and contentious things for the greater good of the electorate in the hope of securing their weary consent later. I suspect electorates empowered and (sometimes) informed by social media and possessing a very(historically speaking) high level of wealth and comfort are only going to expect more from their leaders than sound economic management.

My bet is that sooner or later, that’s going to mean people in politics start talking a lot more about central banks. A conversation about their role in modern economics — and politics — is surely overdue. Our elected leaders have handed vast power to technocrats whose legal mission is to do what’s best for the masses, not what they want. There’s nothing wrong with this — it’s better than the alternatives — but where’s the political process to deliver consent? The economic guardians of monetary policy routinely make decisions with profound political consequences: ultra-low interest rates and quantitative easing are effectively transferring great wealth to older property-owners, at the expense of younger people struggling to buy a home and amass decent pension. Yet in the UK at least, politicians barely talk about any of this. In QE, economics trumps politics to such an extent that politics is barely present.

That cannot last. Cable several times cites Bill Clinton’s campaign slogan — It’s the economy stupid — as a truism that explains all politics. Not anymore.

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There’s another even deeper canyon on the politics-economics faultline that Cable highlights without apparently noticing. Can economics be used to suppress politics? Can you provide enough wealth to buy your way out of the political need to win arguments and elections? These questions arise in Cable’s analysis of east Asian leaders, in which he has disappointingly little to say about political freedom.

His portrait of Lee Kwan Yew, for instance, has more to say about the academic background of Lee’s economic advisers than about the people of Singapore and their view of a leader who delivered economic growth and an increasingly authoritarian state.

And then there’s China, which is posing one of the biggest questions of all about politics and economics. Is it possible to make a country and a people rich without making them free? Our entire idea of the West is premised on the assumption that economic growth and political freedoms proceed together: as people own more stuff, they demand and acquire legal rights over that stuff, and in due course a say in how those laws are made. Educated, property-owning masses cannot be denied political freedom forever, we trust.

China is doing a depressingly good job of proving us wrong on that. The CCP’s embrace of the market has made many of its people — by global and historical standards — rich. Hundreds of millions of Chinese people have smartphones and flatscreen TVs, but not one of them has a vote. Effective economic policy is trumping politics.

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This is the stuff I’d like to read about in a book that offers to guide our understanding of the future relationship between politics and economics. Sadly Cable barely touches on this and his book sometimes goes beyond being simply apolitical and borders on the amoral. His chapter on Deng Xiaoping treats Deng’s role in Mao’s mass murder of their countrymen — and direct responsibility for the Tiananmen Square massacre — as mere factual context for the man’s views on markets, industrialisation and agricultural reform.

The results are jarring, especially when Cable writes blandly about the catastrophic Great Leap Forward, when private farming was banned and crops seized by the state. This horror took place when Deng was one of the three men running China, yet Cable presents it as little more than a bump in the road to economic success:

 “…countless millions died in the famine: 45 million according to some Western sources; 16-17 million on Chinese official estimates. It was an epic disaster which appears to have persuaded Deng (working with like-minded senior leaders) to press for ‘adjustments’: radical economic changes designed to raise living standards.”

After all, what other response could a good economic policymaker have to helping cause the worst famine in human history than to seek to raise living standards for those still living? Deng may have been, in Cable’s phrase, an effective economic architect, but he was a gravedigger too. Shrugging off a state’s murder of its own people because it made the ones it didn’t kill richer is the logical, dismal conclusion of a worldview that accords economics priority over politics.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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