Their initial emergence was much lower key. An earlier book from 2019, capitalising on their newfound fame as self-described “Remainer activists”, describes the period in which they first became known for pasting posters on billboards in Southeast England, gonzo style. It is written up as a kind of subpar Ealing comedy: four ordinary house husbands from Hackney accidentally get caught up in a daring and wildly popular social protest, eventually becoming national heroes feted by Tony Blair, Steve Coogan, and Saatchi & Saatchi.

In this early telling of their origin story, there are comic capers galore, involving mishaps with wallpaper paste, run-ins with security guards, and the strategic recurrence of Ben’s fear of heights. There are also quite a few barely latent daddy issues (“What is it about David Davis that makes him such a prick?”;“there’s something about Dominic Raab that is volcanically dislikeable”; “Olly is possessed by a visceral dislike for Michael Gove”; “Firstly and lastly, fuck Rod Liddle”). And despite braggadocio at times implying that the four are hardened activists (“We’ve scaled buildings and occupied headquarters, hung banners and even been arrested and prosecuted”), equally there is much hammed up nervousness about committing illegal acts: “This is criminal damage; it’s the A10 … We don’t want to get arrested, we both have to take the kids to school and nursery in the morning”.

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There is also enormous detail in the early book about how much things cost, giving rise to such fascinatingly banal sentences as: “We assume that ordering five 6x3m posters will set us back the best part of £1000 but in reality each poster is forty quid and delivery is free.” Gripping verbatim text exchanges from key moments in the project are included, such as “@Will, any chance of pdfs today? Or is kiddie craziness descending?” and “We should decide by tomorrow lunchtime so I can get the posters ordered to arrive his week”.

Things have got a lot slicker since the early days, and the virtual tomatoes are now heirloom variety (price available on request).  In the new book, our guys are no longer styled as plucky outsiders but as solemnly engaged in an “accountability project”. In the interim, crowdfunder targets have been smashed; mutually advantageous corporate relationships have blossomed; famous screenwriters and actors are now onboard; and the groups’ campaigns, both here and in the US, have become bloated with technical gimmickry, celebrity collabs, and self-importance. And now that being a Remainer is no longer fashionable, the mission has seamlessly drifted into vaguer ideological territory: towards fighting what the new book variously calls “populist politics and petty nationalism” and “ethnojingoism”.  Definitions are not supplied, but one suspects that however the authors mean “populist” and “petty”, it won’t turn out to include them.

In practice, their core business is still midwit vituperation by photoshop, mostly aimed at Right-wing politicians, plus some more positive interventions designed to tug at the heartstrings of the sort of person whose bicycle comes with a sidecar. So for instance: they enlisted a thousand volunteers to cover a wall of the Embankment with love hearts, thus creating “The National Covid Memorial Wall” ; covered the road outside the Russian Embassy with “non-toxic, chalk-based” blue and yellow paint; and projected “End Performative Cruelty” in giant letters onto the Bibby Stockholm barge, only months before releasing a remote-control banner in Liz Truss’s presence depicting her as a giant lettuce with eyes.

Also this year, they filmed six kilometres worth of second-hand kids’ outfits arranged on a Dorset beach and set it to the sound of Bach, in order to get people to “grasp … the number of children killed in Gaza”. (An earlier idea, thankfully rejected, involved “thousands of funeral shrouds”.)  In other words: if you like your morality tales childishly uncomplicated, prefer the literal over the symbolic, and don’t mind pedestrian visuals that rely heavily on scale for impact, then this is undoubtedly the art collective you deserve.

I am sure that all this feels cathartic and noble for participants, but does any of it actually work? Could such clankingly heavy-handed treatments ever initiate a real moral reckoning for a corrupt politician or institution? It seems scarcely credible. In both of the Led By Donkeys books, virality alone is frequently taken as meaningful proof of impact, but this is unconvincing: feral squirrels in train carriages also go viral, after all.

At other points, the authors do their best to suggest they are making a difference, but only by blurring the lines between contiguity and causation, giving us sentences such as: “A week after this intervention, Abramovich was finally subjected to UK sanctions”; “A week later, the Met opened an investigation into 12 Downing Street parties”; “and “Two weeks later, Sunak called the election”.  Coincidences? I think probably, yes; or else the real causal relation goes in the other direction, with the four cannily sensing which way the tide was already flowing before launching.

What does seem clear is that the group are absolutely terrible at changing political opponents’ minds, or even at persuading relatively intelligent neutrals. Confirmation bias is an exceptionally blunt instrument. In a recent Guardian interview, Ben Stewart talked approvingly about the “idea of the mind bomb”, as if he had stumbled upon a secret magic spell: the idea, apparently acquired during a stint at Greenpeace, of “an intervention that, when people saw it, their minds would immediately shift. The idea was the person putting themselves between the harpoon and the whale.”

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What this leaves out is that, unlike real bombs, so-called mind bombs work best in wide open spaces; upon psyches where there is very limited relevant information to compete with whatever crassly emotive image is being used as explosive. In contrast, where a person already has a lot of complex and relevant factual information and/or clashing background principles and theories, a would-be mind bomb is more likely to be a damp squib, cementing the impression that the person lobbing it is a naïve buffoon.

In reality, I imagine that the habitual villains of Led By Donkeys’ narratives — Johnson, Farage, Tufton Street think tank svengalis, and so on — are perturbed by their treatment for an average of about 10 seconds each. It’s not just that they know that the attention spans of onlookers will be short, and that the facile messaging is unlikely to trouble their support base anyway. Nor is it that they are (perhaps) already well used to trenchant critique and defensively hardened against it; nor even that they receive the negative attention as some kind of narcissistic tribute, though this is certainly possible. It’s also that, collectively, we have gone a long way to undermining the societal conditions for a genuine experience of shame, so that it’s a little late to start talking it up as a useful social tool now.

To name a few contributory factors: liberalism has eroded a firm sense of shared social or moral principles, which means a grip on what would count as genuinely shameful violations of principles has also been substantially reduced. The longtime popularity of confessional genres of writing and the availability of social media to record every passing thought have made candid self-disclosure completely acceptable, decreasing one’s fear that hidden parts of the self are bound to be badly received. In many workplaces, people have become more squeamish about overt hierarchies, so that responsibility for any problems becomes more diffuse and blame can be more easily shifted. And of course, for decades, hundreds of self-help books and magazines have encouraged us to think of personal feelings of shame as something to be fought and overcome, while complete self-acceptance is to be encouraged.

In short — though many of us still routinely feel it — shame as a functional tool is not what it used to be. Led By Donkeys apparently know this too, at least some of the time. In an early interview, Ben Stewart noted that “the concept of shame and political leaders paying a price for lying and dissembling is in retreat … if we begin to lose shame around lying to the public, then we’re in big trouble here”. The fact is, though, that we are losing it, probably definitively; and scandals which might formerly have caused public figures to quit on the spot in mortification are little more than minor irritants now. The closest we have to a Profumo-like figure — about to commence a lifetime of charitable work and prayer in order to propitiate his critics — is Russell Brand. And he is trying to monetise his own baptism.

But perhaps the ultimate proof of the uselessness of wielding shame as a weapon is the persistence of Led By Donkeys themselves. They have now been going for five years, tend to brush off criticism all too readily, and have vowed to plough profits from sales of the new book into future activism. Right-wing leaders in continual need of a hackneyed and unlikeable enemy in order to fire up the base will no doubt be delighted by this news. The rest of us, tired of forever wars between simple-minded fanatics, should probably consider indulging in some billboard defacement of our own.

There’s much in common between the two periods: a longstanding Conservative government disintegrating after a protracted fight over Europe, lacking ideas, direction and the will to govern, and facing a media-polished Labour opposition that’s fixated on winning. And then there’s the abiding impression of sleaze and snouts-in-troughs.

Major’s problems were generally dated to his conference speech in the autumn of 1993, when he urged the nation to celebrate “the old values: neighbourliness, decency, courtesy”. It was, he said, “time to get back to basics”. His director of communications briefed that the Prime Minister “was intent on rolling back the permissive society”. Elsewhere, cabinet ministers were denouncing absent fathers, single mothers and children born out of wedlock.

The newspapers saw all this as a challenge to seek out hypocrisy, and — under the mocking banner of “Back to Basics” — began publishing stories of Conservative MPs who might be failing in their moral duties, particularly in terms of sexual fidelity. There was no shortage of sinners, even if most were deeply obscure names: Robert Hughes, Rod Richards, Gary Waller, Tim Yeo. 

There was nothing illegal going on here. But then illegality wasn’t the measure of newsworthiness when it came to sexual misbehaviour. Far more important was the pleasure that people take in seeing the high and mighty brought low by human failings. So what mattered was whether it made politicians look foolish. Richard Spring’s “three-in-a-bed romp” did. So too did Hartley Booth writing love poems to a woman less than half his age (and him a Methodist lay preacher, as well). And David Ashby’s libel action against The Sunday Times, in which he testified that he was impotent, and said his wife used to assault him and call him a “poofter”. 

The story that really stuck was that of heritage secretary David Mellor having an affair with an actress, and wearing a Chelsea strip during sex. That latter detail was — as no one then said — fake news, invented by the (yet to be disgraced) publicist Max Clifford, but it elevated the story to tabloid greatness. And it was readily believed, if only because it deflected one’s attention from the image of the “minister for fun” having sex.

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The sorry string of sex scandals left the headline-writers a little blasé. “Another Back to Basics Bombshell,” shrugged The Sunday Mirror. “How Much Worse Can It Get?” wondered The Independent. The answer to that came with the death in 1994 of Stephen Milligan MP. His body was found dressed in women’s underwear, with a satsuma in his mouth and a bin liner over his head. He had died from strangulation with a length of flex, the apparent victim of a session of autoerotic asphyxiation that had gone wrong.

Beyond sex, there were also tales of financial impropriety by MPs. Again it helped if there was an element of ridicule involved — and a killer phrase, as when Mohamed Al-Fayed, the media-loving owner of Harrods, claimed that one could “rent an MP just like you rent a London taxi”. He also said he’d had a couple of MPs, Neil Hamilton and Tim Smith, on his payroll. Smith admitted it, but Hamilton and his wife, Christine, wouldn’t let it lie, and loudly protested his innocence.

All of this got mixed up with the observation that industries that had only recently been privatised under the Conservatives now seemed to be employing rather a lot of Conservative ex-ministers. It made for an explosive equation: Back to Basics plus Fat Cats equalled Tory Sleaze. An opinion poll in October 1994 found 61% agreeing with the statement that “the Tories these days give the impression of being very sleazy and disreputable”. As Robin Cook said, this looked like “an arrogant government that has been around too long to remember it is accountable to the people”. It’s as true today as it was then.

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The attention given to the Mellor story bewildered some people. An affair with an actress, puzzled his French counterpart Jack Lang: “Why else does one become minister of culture?” It seemed a very British scandal. In other words, it didn’t actually scandalise anyone. People didn’t really care about the immorality. Lib Dem leader Paddy Ashdown discovered this when news of his adulterous affair was published under the headline “Paddy Pantsdown” (“dreadful, but brilliant,” he acknowledged), and he enjoyed an opinion-poll bounce. It was just gossip, adding to the gaiety of the nation. At a time when Cool Britannia was trying to replicate the Swinging Sixties, David Mellor was to John Profumo what Oasis were to the Beatles.

And that was largely the impact of Back to Basics. These stories embarrassed the MPs, and they embarrassed the prime minister — which made them even more entertaining because he seemed so incongruous a figure in the midst of such shenanigans. (Major’s earlier affair with Edwina Currie was not revealed until 2002.) Others got hurt in the process, but there was little public sympathy. Even the death of Stephen Milligan was largely greeted with giggles. And it all added to the image of a decadent government in its dying days.

The era came to an end with the 1997 general election, when Neil Hamilton — very much the poster boy of Tory sleaze — lost his seat to the white-suited journalist Martin Bell, standing as an independent. Thereafter, things got dull. 

Tony Blair’s government had its own image problems, and the cash-for-honours investigation meant Blair himself became the first prime minister to be questioned by police. But none of it was much fun. And New Labour was lucky. The biggest scandal on its watch was MPs expenses, and all the most colourful examples came from the Conservatives: the servicing of the boiler for Michael Ancram’s swimming pool, the cleaning of Douglas Hogg’s moat, Sir Peter Viggers’s duck house. John Prescott did his best, with mock-Tudor beams and having a toilet seat mended not once but twice, but despite that, and despite six Labour MPs being found guilty on various charges of fraud and false accountancy — five were jailed — the most the Tories could hope for was a public attitude of a plague on both their duck houses.

So how did the most recent Conservative Parliament match up to its less-than-illustrious predecessor? Not very well really. It all got a bit too serious.

Financial and other misdemeanours continued. MPs still fall, with depressing ease, for the undercover journalist offering money. But somehow the political consequences weren’t as severe as before. Under New Labour, Peter Mandelson had come back from two resignations, which seemed outrageous, but now it was scarcely worth clearing your desk: Suella Braverman resigned as home secretary, and was back in the same job a week later, courtesy of the next prime minister off the rank. 

There have been happy moments, of course. There was William Wragg, honeytrapped via the dating app Grindr — and then giving the scammer the contact numbers of his colleagues. There was Neil Parish watching pornography on his phone in the Commons, and explaining that “it was tractors I was looking at”. There was Mark Menzies, the last of the Parliament to lose the whip, following allegations of him having been locked in a flat by “some bad people” and needing money. And then there was health secretary Matt Hancock. In 2021 footage from CCTV emerged of him adulterously embracing his aide in his office, and he was obliged to resign, “because I fell in love with somebody”.

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But that wasn’t true. He actually had to go because he’d broken government rules on social distancing during the Covid pandemic. The same reason that Boris Johnson’s adviser Dominic Cummings had to go, after he’d taken his family from London to Durham, and then had a test-drive to Barnard Castle “because my eyesight seemed to have been affected by the disease”. And the same reason that Johnson’s poll ratings plummeted, when stories of Partygate refused to go away, and he was fined by the police for celebrating his birthday, the first prime minister found to have committed a criminal offence while in office.

Coinciding with Partygate was the Owen Paterson affair that badly damaged Johnson’s standing. The prime minister tried to stop the parliamentary suspension of Paterson, who had broken lobbying rules, representing a healthcare company that won two lucrative government contracts during the pandemic.

Even so, it was a sex scandal that finally did for Johnson, and perhaps that was appropriate for a prime minister whose sexual history would have impressed Lloyd George. The story went back to 2017, when the #MeToo moment cost the jobs of cabinet ministers Michael Fallon and Damian Green for inappropriate behaviour in the past. Also leaving office was assistant whip Chris Pincher, alleged to have behaved improperly towards a former Olympic rower, though he was cleared by the party and was back in government within weeks. 

In February 2022, Pincher’s career took him back to the whips’ office, and four months later he resigned again, this time after a drunken incident at the Carlton Club, where he was alleged to have groped a couple of men. Further allegations followed of unwanted sexual advances, and questions were asked about whether Johnson knew of the stories before making Pincher a whip. Initially the government denied any pre-knowledge, but then the prime minister had to admit that actually he had been informed. It was also suggested that he didn’t take any of it too seriously: “Pincher by name, Pincher by nature,” was said (by Dominic Cummings) to have been his comment.

Johnson’s duplicity came as a revelation to his colleagues. For years — decades, even — people had accused Johnson of playing fast and loose with facts, but it was not until Pinchergate that the scales fell from the eyes of chancellor Rishi Sunak and health secretary Sajid Javid. So shocked were they that they resigned from cabinet on a matter of principle, followed by dozens of other ministers, who made up in numbers what they lacked in public recognition. Michael Gove also wanted to resign, but he made the mistake of telling the prime minister in advance, and was promptly sacked. That was a final gesture by Johnson, who then resigned himself.

Obviously, Johnson’s defenestration wasn’t about Pincher at all. It was about those poll ratings and Covid. The Conservatives feared they might lose the next election if they didn’t replace Johnson with a plausible leader. Someone like Liz Truss (who’d survived revelations about her affair more than a decade ago). And for some, it was also about revenge for Brexit; Europe had brought down the last four Tory prime ministers, and played a part this time as well.

The removal of a prime minister was much more dramatic than anything the Nineties had offered, though essentially it was the same issue of hypocrisy, the gap between politicians telling others how to behave and then not doing so themselves. 

On one level, it was still as trivial as it ever was, politicians and commentators arguing earnestly about birthday cake. But it was so much more serious now, played out against a backdrop of all those deaths in the pandemic. And bubbling under the surface was the dark suspicion that those who imposed the lockdown regime knew it was pointless, which was why they were happy to ignore it. 

Partygate provoked genuine anger, in a way that David Mellor and Neil Hamilton never did. The mood of the country is different these days; much more despairing than when the economy was growing in the mid-Nineties. There’s less appetite for amusement. In a sign of dour times, we’re just about to vote a former Director of Public Prosecutions into Downing Street. Keir Starmer is not going to come a cropper like Johnson did; despite the press’s best efforts, Beergate didn’t take off, because no one could really picture Starmer at a party in the first place. There will be sexual misbehaviour and MPs on the take — there always are — but they tend not to hurt Labour so much.

On the other hand, we’re living in a time of proper scandals: institutional abuse and corruption, with cover-ups so common as to seem like this is simply how things are done. There’s public hostility to an establishment that seems more concerned with protecting itself than serving the people, and Sir Keir can look very establishment indeed. But that’s a while off yet, because incoming parties get a bit of leeway; not even the Bernie Ecclestone affair damaged Tony Blair in his first year as prime minister. Meanwhile we’re left with the bitter aftertaste of the outgoing Parliament.

The image of a decadent government — Robin Cook’s “arrogant government” — was there all right under Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak, but it had a harder, nastier edge. I don’t think it’s merely nostalgia that makes me think the Nineties will remain the Golden Age of Sleaze. The negative publicity then led to the creation of the Ministerial Code and the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, overseen by the Standards and Privileges Committee, all in pursuit of better behaviour. It would be hard to argue that this goal has been achieved.

Luckily, one of his aides had brought a spare and handed it over. “Ah, sorry,” he mumbled apologetically before disembarking. As I followed him down the steps, I noticed the straps of that unwanted blue mask hanging out of his jacket pocket, flapping in the wind.

I often think back to this moment when reflecting on everything that has happened since: the scandal and resignation, the attempted comeback and, finally, his angry, conspiratorial departure from parliament last week. For me, the Belfast airport mask has become a kind of metaphor, representing both Johnson’s own chaotic nature and that of his premiership. It has become the scene I return to as I consider those strange months in 2021, when the country was in various states of lockdown and I was spending my time going in and out of Downing Street to profile the prime minister.

Never during this time did I witness any overt rule breaking — no parties nor secret gatherings, no bottles of wine, no abandoned slices of cake. But what I did see was a strange performative obedience to the rules that differed inside and outside No 10, as typified by this moment in Belfast, and which, I think, helps to explain the extraordinary rise and fall of Boris Johnson.

It is worth pausing, though, to reflect on the extraordinary arc of his story. Three and a half years ago, Johnson won the biggest Conservative majority for 40 years. A month later, he took Britain out of the European Union. And a few months after that, almost died of Covid-19. By March 2021, when we arrived in Northern Ireland, Johnson seemed unassailable: here was a Prime Minister with an 80-seat majority, leading Labour in the polls, and seemingly on course for a decade in power.

Johnson talked openly to me about needing a long time in power to deliver his agenda. And yet, today, he is not only not Prime Minister, but he is no longer a Member of Parliament. His political career seems dead.

There has never been a fall from power quite as spectacular. Perhaps Anthony Eden is the most obvious parallel; he left office after the disaster of Suez but upon the order of his doctors. A better example, I think, might be David Lloyd George, the “dynamic force” of his age who could not grow old gracefully. In truth, though, neither Eden nor Lloyd George’s downfall were quite as absurd, complete or sudden as Johnson’s.

My trip to Northern Ireland came at a time when fairly draconian restrictions about what you could and could not do were still in place. Only a few weeks earlier, the prime minister had announced a “roadmap” out of lockdown: for the first time, it was possible to meet one other person outside your household for “coffee on a bench or a picnic in a park”. Looking back, what strikes me is just how all-consuming these rules had become — and yet, when I crossed the threshold into No 10, or joined the prime minister on a visit, a sense of normality reasserted itself.

I still remember the feeling of unease as I sat on the flight to Belfast maskless; a feeling that disappeared remarkably quickly as normality reimposed itself. To join the trip, everyone had been tested in a room set aside in some discreet corner of Downing Street: none of us had Covid on the flight. Yet even though we had been travelling maskless inside a flying metal tube, once we arrived, Johnson had had to put on his mask to go outside. This was the theatre of the absurd we were all inhabiting at the time.

I don’t offer this memory as an excuse for the revelations about Johnson’s behaviour which would eventually cost him his job, though perhaps I do offer it as some kind of atmospheric mitigation. The truth is, once you crossed the threshold of No 10 during the pandemic, you really did feel as though you were entering a different world. This is not just because of a failure of leadership, though of course that existed. It is because during this time, when the rest of us were sat at home figuring out how to escape our houses within the rules, in Downing Street, a large group of people were working together in close proximity every day, catching Covid, taking tests, travelling on public transport. Evidently, this bred a degree of complacency — and, I would argue, quiet contempt — for the rules they themselves were setting. The fact is, Johnson was plainly imposing rules on others that he himself did not believe in. He saw their absurdity and could not bring himself to play along convincingly.

This, I think, lies at the centre of what would become known as “Partygate”, the scandal which would cost him everything. The irony of Johnson’s fall is that it can be explained, in part, because he failed in the performance of the job as much as anything. On the plane in Northern Ireland, Johnson was only doing what he had always done: a daily, performative mockery of authority. Only this time, he was the authority — they were his rules.

The thing is, a central part of the job of any prime minister is performative: projecting qualities such as empathy and bravery, understanding and control. Being prime minister is about much more than bureaucratic management or efficient decision-making. In moments of national crisis, a prime minister has to shape people’s understanding of what is happening to them and to show them how things will improve.

During the Manchester terror attacks in 2017, Theresa May remained behind closed doors, working as hard as she could to keep people safe. In many ways, it was admirable. Yet, by staying in London rather than joining mourners in Manchester, she failed in her job. She was still acting as Home Secretary, not Prime Minister. What is odd, reflecting on Johnson’s premiership, is that so did he, albeit for very different reasons.

The philosopher John Gray told me that the key to understanding Johnson was that the “mask has moulded to the face”.  Just as we all have our public and private personas, so does Johnson. But with him, the chaos and mockery, jokes and shallowness, are both real and performative. This is the key to understanding Johnson. He uses chaos to distract; but he is also chaotic to the point at which he undermined his entire premiership.

Johnson once described Benjamin Disraeli as “the greatest of all Tory magicians”, the heir to what he saw as his conservative tradition — and with some justification. Disraeli’s greatest biographer, Lord Blake, described him as “a slightly mocking observer surveying with sceptical amusement the very stage upon which he himself played a principal part”. It is hard to think of a better description of Johnson himself. For Disraeli, this performance “aroused an inextinguishable repugnance among those moderate, serious, high-minded middle-of-the-road men” who dominated British politics. The same is true for Johnson. As Disraeli himself wrote: “The British People being subject to fogs and possessing a powerful Middle Class require grave statesmen.” The problem for Johnson was that he was never a grave statesman.

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For a long time, the times were not grave, and Johnson’s mocking observations worked for him. I remember the moments after he bounded down the stairs in Belfast, straight into the meet and greets that are a prime minister’s daily life, offering almost clownishly over-performed elbow bumps, making everyone laugh. I noticed that whenever he left a group of people, they would immediately begin laughing with each other as they chatted, spirits lifted by their brief encounter with celebrity buffoonery.

Johnson’s mocking cynicism was both his superpower and his shield. Writing in the LRB a decade ago, the novelist Jonathan Coe spotted that Johnson was the inevitable product of decades of cynical satirical humour in which politicians were treated as nothing better than absurd blowhards. “These days, every politician is a laughing-stock,” Coe wrote, “and the laughter which occasionally used to illuminate the dark corners of the political world with dazzling, unexpected shafts of hilarity has become an unthinking reflex on our part, a tired Pavlovian reaction to situations that are too difficult or too depressing to think about clearly.” Johnson’s skill was to understand this and to get in on the act, becoming his own satirist, safe in the knowledge that “the best way to make sure the satire aimed at you is gentle and unchallenging is to create it yourself”. But as the late Barry Humphries put it, when everyone is being satirical and everything is a send-up, “there’s an infuriating frivolity, cynicism and finally a vacuousness” to life. And into this vacuousness came Johnson.

While Coe gets close as to the source of Johnson’s power, I think he misses a wider point. Poking fun at the hommes sérieux of our world was particularly attractive because of the failures of these serious men (and women). Johnson rose to prominence in the world that emerged after the fall of the Soviet Union, when ideological disputes seemed to have been settled and political battles were apparently being fought along managerial lines: about what worked and who was most competent to manage the system. It was a time of great hope and great projects: letting China into the WTO, expanding the EU, using Western military might to change the world — all apparently un-ideological and “evidence-based” but in fact just as faith-based as any other project in history.

Yet this world gave us the Iraq war, the 2008 financial crisis, the implosion of the Arab world, mass, unexpected immigration, austerity and eventually Brexit. After 2016, Johnson rose to prominence mocking the egos of the establishment that presided over this mess, eventually grabbing power at the height of its failure. His opportunity came because of the failures of the political class at home and abroad.

One of Johnson’s problems — perhaps his inescapable problem — is that he then became part of that failed political class. Only for so long can a prime minister wink at voters with wry, sceptical amusement at the unseriousness of his own government.

His brand of wry, mocking humour no longer suits the age. The world has moved on, but Johnson has not. Take a look at his resignation statement on Friday — a document that sounded far more like it was written by Donald Trump, full of conspiratorial anger and recrimination, than the old Boris Johnson. But Johnson without the humour is not so potent. And besides, Johnson himself no longer seems to represent the kind of insurgent populism he is now positioning himself to embody — his message neither populist nor popular.

Trump, that other populist who uses humour as a political weapon, in contrast, rails against China and puberty blockers, far-away wars and the Washington elite. His message and his humour has not changed. Johnson, however, talks as if the conservatism he stood for was some kind of conservatism of old: free-trade deals and tax cuts. This is the message many in his party want to hear, but not what won him power. Where is the Johnson who put up taxes and demanded a more interventionist Treasury to “level up” the country?

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Oddly, Trump’s humour has aged better than Johnson’s — that of the playground bully, not the wry observer. Trump’s is brutal, crude, powerful, effective and as potent as ever. Johnson, on the other hand, seems to have lost his, at least for now. He is too angry to maintain the performance.

It would be unwise to rule out Johnson completely. Like Lloyd George, Johnson is a “dynamic force” who remains popular among Conservative party members. And as Stanley Baldwin put it, dynamic forces are terrible things. Should Labour make good on its poll lead today and win the next election, there will no doubt be a clamour for Johnson to return among some members of the Tory party

Johnson’s great skill was to be able to harness the populist revolt without losing his old “middle-of-the-road men” of England who the Conservative Party had long relied on. In this he was helped enormously by the figure of Jeremy Corbyn and the failures of parliament to enact the result of the referendum. Yet this trick looks impossible for him to pull off again. Johnson without humour is a different beast altogether; Johnson without humour and populism is even more so. We sank giggling into the sea; I’m not sure you can do so twice.

Shortly after midnight on 17 June, 1972, a security guard at the Watergate Complex noticed that someone had taped over several door locks in the main office building and alerted the police, who arrested five men for breaking into the offices of the Democratic National Committee on the sixth floor. On 6 August, after the intruders were tied to President Richard Nixon’s re-election campaign, the Washington Post combined the words “Watergate” and “scandal” for the very first time.

Fifty years on, Watergate remains the political scandal, at least etymologically. Illegal parties at Downing Street? Partygate. A beer in Keir Starmer’s hand at a possibly illegal gathering? Beergate. The people who started a harassment campaign against women in the games industry in 2014 called it Gamergate, and that wasn’t even a real scandal. Even some countries where English is not the first language use the suffix. I suppose the sense of something opening, a threshold being crossed, is somewhat apt, but that’s not the reason why it is used. The man who started slapping -gate onto every potential scandal almost straight away was William Safire, a conservative columnist for the New York Times and former speechwriter for Nixon. Not all of Safire’s coinages stuck, and most are forgotten, but the format endured.

Safire later admitted that he might have been trying to minimise his former boss’s crimes, making Watergate just the first -gate of many. If that was the case, then he didn’t succeed. Watergate is the king of scandals for a couple of reasons. First, it epitomises the power of diligent journalists to bring high-level malfeasance to light. Played by Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman in the 1976 movie, All the President’s Men, the Washington Post’s dynamic duo of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein are still synonymous with dogged, shoe-leather reporting while Deep Throat (“Follow the money”) is the quintessential informant. Woodward and Bernstein were only part of the story but they gave it a halo of heroism. Second, the scandal had a satisfying conclusion: Nixon resigned in disgrace on the brink of impeachment on August 8 1974. Jimmy Breslin called his bestselling book about the scandal How the Good Guys Finally Won.

Watergate inspires nostalgia for a time when political crimes led to punishment. When Boris Johnson can ride out Partygate (for now) and Donald Trump can survive two impeachments thanks to partisan loyalty, Nixon’s downfall seems refreshingly decisive: truth prevailed and justice was served. Like all historical events, it took on an aura of inevitability after the fact. But the chain of cause and effect was not that simple.

The Washington Post’s first mention of the Watergate scandal, in August 1972, came in the context of despair. During Nixon’s re-election campaign, the paper complained: “Such potentially explosive issues as the Watergate scandal go by almost unremarked.” At that point, it had already been reported that the men who had broken into the DNC offices to plant listening bugs had received money from the Committee to Re-elect the President and that Martha Mitchell, wife of the committee’s director John Mitchell, had been held captive in the California hotel to stop her talking to the press. (Her story is the focus of the new Julia Roberts miniseries Gaslit.) A month before the election, Woodward and Bernstein reported that the FBI believed the break-in “stemmed from a massive campaign of political spying and sabotage on behalf of President Nixon’s re-election”. Nonetheless, Nixon went on to defeat Democrat George McGovern in a 49-state landslide with more than 60% of the popular vote, the killer irony being that none of the skulduggery was necessary.

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Strange though it seems, at the time, most journalists thought that Watergate was just an amusing caper which cast no shadow on a popular president who was scoring diplomatic coups in Russia and China. Few newspapers bothered to assign full-time reporters to the Watergate beat. On television, only CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite picked up the story. Throughout 1972, Woodward and Bernstein were too far ahead of the media pack, which made Watergate look like the Post’s hobby horse. Nixon’s campaign manager Clark MacGregor accused the paper of using “innuendo, third-person hearsay, unsubstantiated charges, anonymous sources, and huge scare headlines” to cook up a non-existent connection between the White House and Watergate on behalf of the McGovern campaign.

Not until the televised Senate hearings began in May 1973 did Watergate become a national obsession, inspiring comedy albums and novelty gifts such as the “jigsaw puzzle that will bug you”. Around 85% of viewers tuned in at some point. Amazingly, Nixon’s vice president Spiro Agnew was soon under investigation himself on unrelated charges of criminal conspiracy, bribery, extortion, and tax fraud. This shocking scandal, leading to his resignation in October, was a mere sideshow to Watergate.

In a scandal, the best defence is confusion. Nixon and allies such as Ronald Reagan shuffled through the full deck of excuses and decoys. It wasn’t a big deal. It was just a few bad apples. It’s a partisan attack by Democrats in cahoots with the liberal media, a witch hunt, a lynch mob. It’s hurting the country. “For America’s sake, let’s get on with the business of government,” said Reagan. In short, move on.

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Having first covered up his complicity in the original crime, Nixon then attempted to cover up the cover-up, and that was the real turning point for public opinion. The administration’s attempt to undermine the Senate investigation let slip the existence of a secret recording system in the Oval Office. Nixon then spent months fighting to block the release of the tapes.

On 20 October 1973, he ordered his attorney general Elliot Richardson to sack the staunchly liberal special prosecutor Archibald Cox, who was demanding that the White House hand over the tapes from the Oval Office’s secret recording system. Richardson refused and resigned. His deputy also refused and resigned. The third in line did sack Cox but this “Saturday Night Massacre” was a colossal miscalculation. Only then did the number of Americans who wanted him to resign finally overtake those who approved of his performance. Even if they didn’t understand exactly what he’d done wrong, they could see that he was acting like he’d done something wrong. Congress took the first step towards impeachment proceedings.

Despite all of that, one in four Americans continued to have Nixon’s back, even after the “smoking gun” tape revealed that the President had been involved in the cover-up since the beginning and triggered his resignation. Nixon and Agnew had energetically stoked white rage and resentment, and that was a faithful constituency. Nixon refused to quit until a posse of Republican greybeards sat him down and told him he was done, 26 months after the break-in.

As Leon Neyfakh’s brilliant 2017 podcast Slow Burn (the source material for Gaslit) argues, it could have turned out very differently. What if Nixon had destroyed the tapes, or there had been no recordings in the first place? What if the Democrats hadn’t held a majority in both houses of Congress? What if partisan polarisation had been as extreme then as it is now? What if influential news outlets had maintained throughout that it was all a smear campaign and reduced the scandal to a political litmus test? Much depended on the integrity of key officials. Elliot Richardson’s loyalty to the administration did not dissuade him from approving the investigations into Nixon and Agnew, even at the cost of his job. John Dean, White House counsel and Watergate conspirator, chose to collaborate with federal prosecutors. The FBI did its job. None of this was guaranteed.

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Yet for all the might-have-beens, Nixon did fall in the end. If it took an awful lot to bring down an election-winning heavyweight in 1974, then it’s even harder now, although it’s worth saying that the UK is in a better place than the US. Johnson may still be in office but a majority of voters, and 148 of his own MPs, want him to resign over Partygate. In Washington, meanwhile, only one Republican Senator voted against Trump during his first impeachment and only seven in the second. Even after the storming of the Capitol, his approval rating stood at 34%. Despite the damning findings of the House’s January 6 committee, Trump is still expected to run again in 2024 and may well win. When one Nixon loyalist was asked in August 1974 if new facts such as the smoking gun tape would change his mind, he replied: “Don’t confuse me with the facts.” During the Trump years that would made him a typical Republican.

Perhaps this failure to punish an attempt to overturn an election is a long-term consequence of Watergate. In 1964, 75% of Americans said that they trusted their government to do the right thing most or all of the time; in 1974, after a decade of gradual decline, it plunged to just 36%. It is currently 21% and has only once achieved a majority, immediately after 9/11. By cratering voters’ faith in politicians in general, Watergate bred a pervasive cynicism which took the air out of most subsequent scandals and explains why so many -gates have fizzled out without inspiring high-level resignations or prosecutions. If you think they’re all as bad as each other, then even egregious wrongdoing can seem like filthy business as usual, to the benefit of the worst offenders.

Thus the most paranoid of presidents gave birth to an age of national paranoia. Immediately after Watergate, this suspicion was dramatised by movies such as The Parallax View and Three Days of the Condor in which the truth either doesn’t come out or, worse, doesn’t matter. In All the President’s Men, Robert Redford plays a role in changing history. At the end of Three Days of the Condor, his CIA researcher, Turner, boasts to a senior official, Higgins, that he has told the New York Times all about a rogue operation and the murders the agency committed to cover it up. But as he walks away, Higgins shouts after him: “Hey Turner! How do you know they’ll print it?” Redford’s face says it all.

If the movie were remade now, I think the question would be even more cynical: sure, they’ll print it, but how do you know it will make any difference? How do you know enough people will care?

For Home Counties reactionaries, there have been absences from key votes on gay equality and gay adoption, and scepticism expressed in print about gay marriage: “If gay marriage was ok — and I was uncertain on the issue — then I saw no reason in principle why a union should not be consecrated between three men, as well as two men; or indeed three men and a dog.” There are also suggestions that some in Johnson’s camp falsely represented a rival for his Henley seat as gay, in order to present Johnson as the more palatable candidate.

For the liberal metrosexual Londoner, meanwhile, there was eventual backing for gay marriage, highly publicised appearances at Stonewall award ceremony presentations, the return of the rainbow flag above the Foreign Office after a ban by Philip Hammond, and the frankly terrifying sight of Johnson in a pink Stetson at a Pride parade. And for the ever-present peanut gallery in Johnson’s head, there have been plenty of gags on the way to some other political target: “tank-topped bum boys” as a means of lampooning Peter Mandelson in 1998, or describing Polly Toynbee in 2007 as “the defender and friend of… every gay and lesbian outreach worker, every clipboard-toter and pen-pusher and form-filler whose function has been generated by mindless regulation”.

For most of his career, these lurches in attitude have occupied roughly distinct phases with occasional overlap, depending on who he was trying hardest to impress at the time. The inconsistency has perhaps been somewhat masked by Johnson’s capacity to induce selective amnesia in those susceptible to him. Recently, though, the wild haymaking on LGBT+ issues has become more obvious and more incoherent — forced into the light because of the surrounding political fuss about gender identity policies and their effects.

For when properly understood — as most MPs still do not — this controversy exposes a tension between, on the one hand, the goals of official organisations claiming to speak for gays and lesbians, and on the other the interests of many gays and lesbians as they themselves conceive of them. And clearly, Johnson — and perhaps the Tory party more generally — does not know which way to jump.

In this antagonistic context, the usual lazy progressive gestures from politicians are not going to get the crowd-pleasing results they once might have done. Put a rainbow flag up on a government building and the grassroots automatically see it as captured by Stonewall — as indeed, it often is. A politician may parrot what looks like a safe and indeed utterly vacuous tautology on Twitter — “trans rights are human rights”, say, or “love means love” — and yet the grassroots still will respond furiously, not because they disagree with the sentiment, but because they know exactly which organisation told the politician to express it and why.

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Into this conflict, Johnson appears to have wandered either unaware or indifferent, banking on his usual strategy of being all things to all Tory voters and hoping that nobody notices the mismatch. For instance, at the beginning of October last year, he attended a Stonewall-organised event at the Conservative Party conference, listening to his wife give a supportive on-message speech in familiar Stonewall-approved jargon, and waxing expansively, if not entirely accurately, that “being LGBT+” is “still a crime in 71 countries” and in 11 countries is “punishable by death, just because of who you love” (er.. Carrie, I think you might mean homosexual people). A mere two weeks later he was publicly backing the LGB Alliance — an organisation of which I was then a trustee, whose aim is to protect the rights of same sex-attracted people, specifically. The fact that the aims of these two organisations are diametrically opposed to one another seemed to pass him by.

Since then, his government has lurched abruptly from, first, pushing for a Stonewall-favoured ban on “conversion therapy” for non-standard gender identities — a ban which, experts feared, would criminalise talking therapies for young people confused about their gender identity, including many gay and lesbian youths — to backtracking on the proposal, thereby pleasing practically nobody in the process, and precipitating the collapse of a flagship international LGBT+ conference the government was supposed to be hosting. And at no point during this turbulent period has Johnson indicated any real grasp on why any of this might matter, or moved much beyond spouting with great enthusiasm whatever script an adviser just hastily handed him.

And yet I think there is perhaps a deeper and more interesting problem here than the short-term priorities of career politicians, bad as that is for politics generally. For the cynical prevarication of their leader is at least partly facilitated by a genuine lack of clarity at the conceptual level about how modern conservatism should view gay and lesbian people, and their political interests.

On the one hand, there are the sexual libertarians in the Tory party, prioritising personal freedom above all else. In this, they take themselves to be broadly in line with liberalism generally, though perhaps unlike them, most sensible liberals are willing at least to have a conversation about what happens when the desired freedoms of particular individuals or groups clash. For sexual libertarians, there is a clear and simple line to be taken on sex and gender if at all possible: let the people be free, to sleep with who they want, wear what they want, do what they want to their bodies surgically or medically, and go where they want to in physical and social space.

Their stance seems well represented by MP Crispin Blunt, who recently wrote in favour of the conversion therapy ban for gender identity, and against his own government, by connecting the issue with freedom: “We have no choice but to work to sustain our personal freedoms, to continue to make the case that these freedoms are good for all, economically and socially, in our societies and help those who languish under discrimination and criminalisation win their freedom to the benefit of all”. The present iteration of Stonewall bureaucrats apparently agrees, broadly speaking, though they seem completely unwilling to examine how the constant drive to legislate to protect the freedoms of one particular group (e.g. trans people) might curtail freedoms for those in other groups (e.g. gays and lesbians, or women).

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On the other hand, there are those conservatives more concerned with preserving social order and building a cohesive society than with pursuing personal freedom. Whether these self-describe as One Nation Conservatives or Red Tories or something else, they stress continuity with past traditions and the importance of producing laws and policies grounded in people’s existing values, rather than trying to impose certain elite values only from above.

They also tend to be concerned with preserving traditional family structures in the name of social stability. Though they may not admit it, for this kind of conservative, gays and lesbians — and indeed trans people too — pose a philosophical and political problem, because it’s unclear on what grounds their specific interests should be promoted, over and above the provision of basic human rights. Aside from liberal appeals to personal freedom, there is no pre-existing cultural norm in the UK that you might appeal to in order to justify two women marrying, or two men adopting a child.

On the contrary, what you will tend to find, and particularly in more cohesive traditional communities, is strong suspicion of any such arrangements, and even disgust and fear. And in fact, it’s worse than this, because from the perspective of the traditionalist, appealing to personal freedom in order to justify gay and lesbian rights is likely to open the door to the destruction of other traditional social values and norms in the name of freedom too. And in that, they in fact seem to be right. Put comically, this was presumably Johnson’s point when he discussed the perceived slippery slope from marrying two men to marrying three men and a dog.

This tension within conservatism is rarely confronted in this context — the temptation is often just to stick a rainbow on it and cross the fingers — but I think it is felt keenly by some lesbians and gays left in the middle, between crazy liberalising ambitions of others on their behalf, and the disapproving stares of traditionalists. The modern Left can’t help them either, because it too contains within itself a version of this tension — between the Left-liberals, focused on breaking down traditional cultural norms in the name of progress, and the older socialist Left, comfortable with traditional family structures and so uncomfortable with homosexuality.

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At the grassroots, many gays and lesbians can see clearly what damage is being done by sexual libertarians in the name of freedom around sex and gender identity: medicalising gay children, ruining women’s sport, and bringing inappropriately sexualised materials into schools, for instance. But equally, gay people can’t take solace in pretending that they seamlessly fit into a mostly heterosexual society, even when they try very hard to do so — or that they don’t need a positive political argument to justify their place there. And since they do need an argument, the argument from personal freedom looks to many like the best they’ve got.

A different possibility is to mimic an idealised form of heterosexual lifestyle, differently filled out — that is, to go for the marriage and the kids in a stable home, but with same-sex parents. But equally, there’s no overcoming the difference homosexuality makes to the traditional possibilities of reproduction. And when gays and lesbians attempt to get what they need from the opposite sex in order to “fit in” in this way, whether via sperm donation or surrogacy or something else, they quickly run up against a confrontation with tradition once again. Here too, they need an argument to justify themselves, and here too, the appeal to personal freedom comes calling once again as an apparently compelling option.

Stuck between dangerously unconstrained freedom on the one hand, and dangerously hostile tradition on the other, what the situation of lesbians and gays arguably exposes is the deep ideological fault-lines within modern British conservatism — and even within modern politics generally — hiding within plain sight all along. No wonder the politicians stick to meaninglessly trite mantras. Trans rights are human rights. Love is love.

We talked about everything, from Partygate and his relationship with Boris Johnson, to the deep state and whether he needs a therapist. What follows is an edited version of our conversation.

Were you surprised by the Sue Gray report?

Some of it is a bit brazen: where she says she stopped investigating the party in the flat because the police got involved — even though the police didn’t then investigate it. So basically, they have sort of just said: “Fuck this. We’re not going to get involved with the after-party on the night of 13th.”

You mean the party in the Downing Street flat on 13th November 2020?

It was reported a few days after I’d gone, in Metro weirdly. Somehow the story got out but because we were in extreme lockdown it got no coverage. The media was so happy that I’d gone, no one wanted to talk about it.

Dozens of people downstairs could hear it, so all the police had to do was interview any one of them to find out. You don’t have a work meeting, at the top of Number 10, where the music is so loud that you can hear it in the fucking press office.

Why aren’t people angrier? Why is nothing happening?

The Tory party itself is quite rotten now and the sign of that is that they can’t think of anyone better than Boris, who’s clearly just completely shot. They are collectively saying, “if we get rid of him, we might get somebody worse”. It says a lot about the state of the Tory party. And they actually could get somebody worse: Liz Truss would be even worse than Boris. She’s about as close to properly crackers as anybody I’ve met in Parliament.

Do you ever feel bad that you helped him win the election?

I don’t know. I don’t feel bad about it. Because I think the reasoning at the time was pretty simple. Various people from Vote Leave were attracted to the idea of just staying out of it and letting the Tory party collapse.

When was this?

June 2019. But there were two basic problems. One was that if we didn’t go in and sort it out, Brexit wouldn’t happen, and there would be a second referendum, which we thought would be very bad for the country indeed. And the second was Corbyn. It’s one thing to stand back and let the horror of the Tory party blow up, it’s another thing to let Corbyn take over.

So we reluctantly thought: the downside is we save the Tory party, but the upside is we can crush a second referendum. Kick Corbyn off the stage. And there’s a chance, with Boris being as lazy as he is, that we’ll be able to set the country on a new path — hence me making various terrorist demands of him when he came round to the house — but even then, we thought: there’s a reasonable chance that this goes tits up.

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Why?

Carrie.

We had worked with Boris during the referendum. Then, of course he was with Marina who was a stabilising force. She’s intelligent. She was good at calming him down. Carrie was obviously the opposite. She was sort of injecting more craziness into the whole situation. She basically supported us until 10pm on election night, simply because she thought, as she put it to me in July: “He has no clue how to get through this. He doesn’t have a clue how it all actually works.” Carrie was supportive of Vote Leave from the day we came in to help with the 2019 election. She personally called me and said “Please do this”.

And if we hadn’t, you’d have had that completely wrecked Parliament colliding with Covid in March 2020. God only knows what would have happened. Possibly with Corbyn as prime minister. Even more people killed. Fuck knows what.

You keep saying ‘we’: who do you mean?

My team from Vote Leave.

But what was going wrong?

The way that the Tories went about Brexit on every level was a total disaster. Starting the whole formal process before they even knew what the hell they were trying to do. Using EU citizens as negotiating chips, which we’d said should never happen. We should have passed unilateral legislation immediately to guarantee their rights.

They just fucked up, all the way down. People kept saying, “why does everything have to be so aggressive?” But it wasn’t Vote Leave that drove the country crazy. The Tory party and Whitehall spent three years cocking it up.

By summer 2019, something had to break: there’s no clean way of getting out of that situation. A second referendum would have been very bad. Smashing through things, the way that we did, had downsides, but staggering on just unable to resolve the issue would have been a disaster as well.

What did you think about a second referendum?

Back in 2015, I floated the idea of having two referendums, and said that maybe the way to do this is: you have a referendum on the principle and then you negotiate a new deal. Then you have a second referendum on the actual deal. Everybody said, “no way”: the Prime Minister, the Tory party, the Labour Party, the official Remain campaign, the CBI. Everybody said, “Absolutely not. One referendum, it’s got to resolve this for a generation.” And then they spent three years dicking around, only to say, “you know what? Fuck it, we actually can’t do this, because it’s unsolvable. You shouldn’t have voted like this.”

Do you still think it was right to leave Europe?

A lot of people, especially the centre-Left in London, thought joining the Euro would be a success. Now we know we are best off out of it. When the Euro came under pressure it completely wrecked the Greek economy.

That took the blinkers off for me.

Especially now, when you look at how history worked out, and knowing that Covid was coming, it’s very hard to make the case that things could have been different. We know that Whitehall was completely unprepared for Brexit; we know that the whole thing was a complete shitshow; we know the original plan had to be ditched. And we know a bunch of us had to steer it, while dealing with him. And on top of that, we had a non-functioning government with no parliamentary majority. I mean, my God, imagine how much worse the whole thing could have been.

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Was there a time when you did get on with Johnson personally?

We are both really odd characters. In the second half of 2019, he was just completely desperate. He knew that he had only been put in there because no one could think of anything else to do. He sort of did as we told him and at that point Carrie wasn’t causing chaos. She was basically saying: “Listen to what they say.” So as far as anything can be with him, it was reasonably stable, if chaotic for the country. He was reasonably focused because he knew he was not far from being booted out.

So, you got on with him on the basis that he took your advice. And then he stopped?

He trolleyed around a bit, obviously, but in terms of big things he mostly listened. But as soon as he came back in January from his holiday, you could see immediately that the whole thing was going to be a disaster.

That quickly?

Immediately after the election. The election happens; there’s five or so days and then he’s sauntered off to some sort of billionaire island; and then at the beginning of January she immediately was on at him about firing all of us, which obviously is not a great way of starting a new government.

Perhaps not.

But also, from the start we had completely different attitudes. My attitude was: okay, we’ve won the election, we’ve got a supermajority, now we have the chance to solve a whole load of fundamental problems. 2020 is the year to do the hard things: things like planning reform, which no one dares touch, decade after decade, because it’s so politically difficult. Fuck that. It’s time to do it. Ignore the press. Focus on this.

And he didn’t share this view?

His attitude was: I’ve done the hard thing, which was the election. Now it’s time to enjoy myself. And so very quickly, there was this clash of basic ideas.

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Because you want systemic change in almost every part of the state. You had been talking about planning for procurement, reforming the civil service, nuclear weapons, pandemics: is that because you are all doom and gloom?

Some people would say that. But in the last couple of years, I’ve thought: “What did I say about pandemics?” Now, we’re all talking about nuclear war and Putin. But with nukes, for example, it’s incredibly complicated. The timelines are very long. The budgets are huge. For any PM, it’s very tempting to continue the cycle of: “Keep everything extremely secret and punt the bills off to the next poor sucker.”

And then in 2019, I came along and started poking around, trying to get all the real figures. I was sitting down with the deep state saying: “Open the books.” And they’d say, “Can I just tell the truth?”

What do you mean by the “deep state”?

I mean the set of officials who actually control Whitehall — people like the Cabinet Secretary, those who run the intelligence services, certain crucial people in the Cabinet Office. These people who have a lot more power than basically any ministers — apart from, nominally, the Prime Minister.

Certain conspiracy theorists use the phrase “deep state” in America.

I think to some extent Trump does use the phrase as a conspiracy — but that doesn’t mean I do. I am talking about something entirely real. I’m not talking about any kind of conspiracy.

But to some extent, Trump had a point, right? In the sense that there was obviously a whole set of people, particularly around the intelligence community, who did hate Trump and would attempt to cause trouble. And I know people who were going to be appointed who were shut down, like scientists who were going to get jobs who were then frozen out. The FBI simply refused to vet them for 18 months.

Trump obviously talks a whole load of shit but as a lot of the Russia stuff showed, there actually was a conspiracy against him in parts of the system.

Do you mean the machinery of government then? I ask because it seems to me that you pitted yourself not just against Johnson but against that machinery.

The irony of the situation is that of all the different players in Westminster — the political parties, the media, Boris, the Tory MPs — the people who we, the Vote Leave team, got on with best was the deep state. There was a kind of alliance in a lot of ways. We both wanted to sort out some of these problems: the shitshow around nuclear weapons, procurement, bringing technology into Number 10.

The media presented us as Vote Leave psychopaths, at war with everyone, but that wasn’t true. Our relations with the Tory party were extremely bad. But our relations with the deep state were obviously variable, depending on exactly who you’re talking about.

When you say Vote Leave, you’re not talking about Nigel Farage?

No. That’s why there was the coup in January 2016. To try and get rid of me. Because Bernard Jenkin-type people wanted to merge the whole thing together with Farage. I refused. He’d always said to me “I’m a general but I shouldn’t be overall Commander. Everyone will have their role. I’ve got 15% — maybe 20% — of the country’s support and my job should be to mobilise them.” But around July 2015, suddenly his attitude changed. It was: “I’ve got to run the whole thing.” He’s a bit like Boris: he has some communication gifts but he’s also a total organisational shambles.

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You’ve written a lot about the kind of people who go into politics, and you’ve been criticised for your attitudes to work/life balance — and yet you’ve also been promoting women around you.

It’s not really contradictory.

Some people would say it is, because if you want people in the office 16 hours a day, and you want this buzzy start-up feel, how do people go home and put their kids to bed?

Number 10 is obviously big enough that you could have, say, some young woman who’s just had kids and only wants to work three days a week. But my basic point is that if you’re in Number 10, there are huge responsibilities. And it’s your job to be trying, all the time, for millions of people — a lot of whom have got fuck all and have very desperate lives. Your job is not to be thinking, “well, how do I have a nice life and get home for bath time?” There has to be a core of people who are there, demented, working extremely hard — because that’s the nature of it, this constant chaos.

When you put your call out for “weirdos and misfits”, people interpreted that as you wanting employees who would be totally dedicated to you.

Partly. But it was also a call to Whitehall and Westminster. They’re full of very similar people who did very similar degrees at very similar universities. My view is that you need different kinds of people around. I think the Covid inquiry will show that groupthink was a very serious problem.

I put out that blog about “weirdos and misfits” in January 2020 and it became the foundation for recruiting. It did bring in some excellent women. By summer, 29-year-old women were sitting at the Cabinet table, saying to Matt Hancock, “you just said that it’s not growing exponentially and you’re wrong. Here’s the actual graph. Here’s what’s happening.”

A lot of people didn’t like what I had done, but I thought: “this is now working as it should”. You’ve got smart people, who know what the fuck they’re talking about, telling either ministers or senior civil servants who don’t know exponential growth from a hole in the ground: “Here’s the actual facts.” So, I’ve radically improved how decisions are taken. The advice to the Prime Minister, though he could still trolley around and fuck things up —which he did, obviously — was at least much better.

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Have you ever had therapy?

I’m not interested in my own emotional state.

Why not?

Never have been.

But you’re interested in other people’s emotional states?

I’ve got no interest in my own emotional state. Or myself. I find my own emotional state the most boring subject I could think of.

Isn’t one of your gifts being able to interpret other people’s emotions? I’m surprised to hear you say that you’re not interested in your own. It sounds like denial to me, but a lot of people in politics are like this.

Most people in politics are recruited based on whether they can stand up and speak. I noticed that a long time ago, with Boris and Gove: we’d all be exhausted, arriving somewhere where one of them was speaking, and I would always think “my God, the idea of standing up and speaking right now is just completely horrific”, but they feel the exact opposite. They both love speaking and they’re both energised by it, whereas I would be driven catatonic at the thought of it. Then there are the 1,000-yard stares among the likes of Hancock and Truss. Rolling news and social media encourages more of the narcissists to get involved as a sort of low-grade alternative to being a celebrity.

Do you still have contact with people there? Is Johnson staying?

As far as we know. The fact that Rishi blew himself up makes it much more likely that Boris will somehow survive. I don’t want to say “no chance”, but I think Rishi is out of the running. They’re going to be thinking who can win the next election. Whatever you might think of Michael Gove’s abilities, he is not a loved character. There are some very junior people who I like, who I won’t curse by naming — if I name them then everyone will hate them. But it’s a very, very poor Cabinet.

You said you thought Labour should be led by a woman from the North like Lisa Nandy?

Yeah, because Starmer is pretty rubbish.

What about the trans stuff?

The  last thing we should be doing is giving a desperate Tory Party that has been a fiasco for years a wedge issue — the chance to say at the next election, you can’t define a woman. Labour is stupid. The more they try to fudge it, the worse the problem gets.

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You’re not in the Tory party. Do you want to be in another party?

I’m not a joiner by nature. I don’t like parties. “Parties” or parties. I don’t like going to parties.

Were there journalists at the parties?

Carrie is friends with a lot of them and it was persistently stated that they were hanging out with her and him. But obviously the police and Sue Gray decided not to investigate that — or to investigate Chequers either.

Were there parties at Chequers?

So people say.

There are a lot of rumours about Carrie now.

Nothing would surprise me. She can’t be happy with the situation now. Obviously it’s all blowing up in her face. And then there’s all of his money stuff.

Did he talk about all this with you?

That was an important part of the whole disaster with Covid, because he was literally in the process of trying to finalise his divorce. He was broke. He was having to find money to pay Marina, and at the same time, he had Carrie doing this insane renovation of the flat with Lulu [Lytle, the interior designer] running up these huge bills. In January, he said: “You’ve got to help me get money to pay for this stuff. She’s upstairs, she has spent £100,000. All this gold wallpaper and stuff. And I’m fucked with my divorce. I can’t pay for it.”

I said: “Go to Coutts. Get one of your rich friends to take out a loan.”

“No, fuck that. I want to get donations in to do it. But obviously it’s bad PR so I have to keep it quiet.”

I said: “That’s illegal. What the fuck are you talking about? You idiots. The Prime Minister can’t get secret donations.” But his mindset was very much: “Fuck that. I’m going do what I want.” He’s always been like that: famously turns up at places and then just leaves and lets everyone else pay the bill.

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By Giles Fraser

What do you do for fun?

I had a child three months before the referendum. So either I’ve been doing the referendum and then Number 10, or I’ve just been hanging out here reading and playing with him. That’s about it.

Do you like music? Do you like film? Do you watch telly?

I watch telly. I used to watch a lot of movies. Not much really. I just hang around, read, go for walks.

Do you like cooking?

Not really.

I know you like Russian literature. Do you speak Russian?

I could speak basic Russian, when I lived there 20 years ago.

Must have been a fascinating time to live there.

Russia is such a fucked-up place. It’s not Europe. It’s a dark place. There are some wonderful people there — some of the best-educated people you will ever, ever meet in your life.

Did you know about the Lebedev peerage?

I can’t remember when he got the peerage formally, but I was there when the decision was made. I was in the room when other people said, “Prime Minister, you shouldn’t do this.” And I said to him: “You shouldn’t do this.” One of the many, many battles after the election that I didn’t win. I suspect they’ll just keep all that quiet until Boris goes. Unless the deep state people decide to leak it, which they might do.

He always thinks he can get away with it. And now?

You never know. He goes through those funny moods. I suspect he’s thinking if they don’t put him out before August, he’s got a reasonable chance of swinging the election. And he’ll be thinking: “Oh, I’m still here. I was close to disaster but just escaped”. Also, he will be looking at Starmer and rightly thinking, “He’s rubbish”.

But remember, he doesn’t really want to be there very long. All he wants to do is not be a loser and not be put out in disgrace. He’s not actually interested in the job. Even in January 2020, he was saying to me, “God, you know these people who say they want to do this job and go on and on? Well I want to write my Shakespeare book.”

The election was on 12 December. By mid-January he was whinging about what a difficult job it is. I said: “You are Prime Minister and if you want to sit upstairs in the morning and do a bit of writing, that’s up to you, but I wouldn’t run around the building telling everyone that you are finding the job boring. Otherwise, you might find it hard to get people to do what you want”.

He must have trusted you to tell you that.

He’s very odd. He does overshare but also at the same time never trusts anybody. Also, part of the oversharing is to see what then turns up in the newspapers to see if you’re leaking.

You’ve been accused of leaking.

I have been accused of all sorts.

I don’t have any sort of personal relationship with someone like Laura Kuenssberg. It was just a professional relationship. And it was important particularly when Covid kicked off. The Mail started to report things like tanks on the streets, rumours that London was going to be locked down and people wouldn’t be allowed to leave. She would call me and I would be able to say to her: I guarantee you that is not true. The BBC is the national broadcaster. Do not put that on the news because you’ll cause chaos.

The BBC political editor is going to have a relationship with the Prime Minister’s main political adviser. That’s just a fact of life. To think I have been criticised for that: it’s just crazy. People thought there was “Dom’s dark web”. Johnson thought: “He wants to cut me and my friends off from dealing with the media, so that everything goes through his secret network”.

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Okay, what’s your secret network?

The irony was that in 2020, I was barely speaking to the press. But he never believed it. I stopped speaking to the press in November, before the election. I talked to Laura, sometimes [Robert] Peston. That’s about it. I would tell Lee [Cain] what was happening.

12 March 2020 was the most insane day of the whole thing, and probably the most insane day in Number 10 since 1945. The day started with me trying to bounce the system towards much more radical action against Covid. Trump then tried to get us to engage with a bombing mission — to fly over and bomb a load of people in the Middle East. That was never revealed at the time — it only came out when I mentioned it to the MPs last year.

Bomb who?

I can’t say who — but okay, mostly people in Iraq.

So, I say to Boris: “Listen, this idea of us cancelling all these Covid meetings because we’re going to start bombing the Middle East with Trump, it’s fucking crackers. We’re going to have thousands of people dead here in the next few weeks. We’ve got to sort out Covid.”

And he says: “This fucking Times story about Dilyn. It says the whole place is chaos. And me and Carrie are living like students with Dilyn shitting everywhere and the staff, the cleaners, all going mad. I want a fucking inquiry. I want to know who briefed it. Carrie thinks it’s you.”

We’ve got meetings on bombing. We’ve got meetings on Covid. Everything is going down the fucking toilet. But he’s getting texts from her about whether he’s started the inquiry into the Dilyn leak.

That’s what we’re dealing with.

It feels like no one is in charge.

It definitely feels like the institutions are all kind of crumbling.

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Is this what you wanted? This disruption?

There are a lot of people who think that. It’s partly why a lot of people voted for Brexit. It’s partly why a lot of people were happy at the thought of the Vote Leave guys going into Number 10. They thought, rightly, that we would shake that shit up and things would be very different. People like me say: all these things are rotten. They say: we are going to cause chaos.

Looking at what happened with Covid, our fears were vindicated, right? The whole fucking thing did fall apart like a deck of cards. And from our point of view, it vindicates our basic idea: that we should do Brexit.

But that’s the start. You then have to go through these institutions and they need to be ripped up and rebooted in all sorts of ways. It needs new people coming in, new ideas. It needs new incentives. Or we just keep going with the closed shop of the old lobby, the old parties, the old boys’ club in Whitehall. Then we’re going to get the same old results, which is a shitshow: stagnant economy, terrible public services, no fucking A&E. It’s totally imploded in large parts of the country. Unless some force actually starts to rejuvenate these things, then…

What do you think of people who don’t vote?

Most people just think: “What’s the point? They’re all a bunch of wankers.”

This interview is adapted from Suzanne Moore’s Substack, Letters from Suzanne.

Had the 2022 local elections been held across the entire country then Labour would have a national equivalent vote of 35% compared with the Conservative’s 32%. Were this replicated at a general election, it would likely deliver a hung parliament and make Keir Starmer the first Labour Prime Minister since Gordon Brown. For all of these reasons, in recent days MPs, columnists and pollsters have been writing Johnson’s political obituary, urging him to go before he ruins the Conservative brand forever. The only way forward is to change course — and to do so quickly.

Only, not so fast. Look more closely at what just unfolded and there are good reasons why Team Johnson — after everything — should be feeling quietly confident about the next general election. For a start, many people are exaggerating the predictive power of local elections: in reality, they are a poor guide to what will happen at general elections.

People tend to forget this today, but Labour similarly won the national equivalent vote at the local elections in 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, and then again in 2016, before drawing even with the Conservatives in 2018 and 2019. Ed Miliband’s Labour Party made striking gains at local elections between 2011 and 2014, winning an impressive 857 seats and gaining 26 councils in 2011, before winning another 823 seats and 42 councils in 2012. Yet Miliband never saw Number 10.

At all three of the general elections held during this period — in 2015, 2017, and 2019 — it was the Conservatives, not Labour, who won majorities or were returned to power as the largest party. Turn the clock even further back and you will find other warnings from history. Even under the radical Left-winger Michael Foot, Labour consistently outperformed Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party at the local elections between 1980 and 1982, including when Thatcher lost more than 1,100 seats in 1981, shortly before she won her second landslide.

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And five years later, in 1986, Thatcher again lost around 1,000 council seats before winning her third and final landslide the following year. So too did John Major, in 1991, shortly before he won his surprising majority in 1992. And while the Conservatives routinely finished ahead of New Labour at local elections in the early 2000s, their share of the vote in 2005 lagged well behind their national equivalent vote at the local elections. In short, local elections are like the weatherman: worth listening to but they do not always give us an accurate forecast.

Even if you do view them as a useful indicator it is also worth remembering that, historically, opposition parties that have gone on to win the next general election attract a national equivalent vote share of around 40% and enjoy double digit leads over the governing party.

This is what Tony Blair achieved in 1996, when his 14-point lead over John Major at the local elections cleared the path for his massive majority. It is also what David Cameron achieved in 2009, when he fell just short of the 40% mark but still led Brown by 15-points before emerging as the leader of the largest party in 2010. In fact, at no point between 1979 and 2022 has an opposition party managed to overturn an incumbent government after attracting a national equivalent vote of less than 40%. Labour, for the record, just polled 35% — the same share that Jeremy Corbyn achieved in 2018.

This should be a cause for concern in Team Starmer. After everything — after the Covid-19 pandemic, Partygate, Cummingsgate, Rishigate, scandals, inflation, and a rapidly escalating cost-of-living crisis — Labour attracted just a five-point lead over the Conservatives. A five-point lead. Those who compare politics today with the Nineties, arguing that a string of Tory scandals will propel Labour into office, miss a crucial point. At the local elections between 1993 and 1996, Blair and Labour averaged a 14-point lead over the Conservatives.

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These points are especially important given that, historically, incumbent parties tend to better their local election performance at the following general election — as Cameron did in 2015, Theresa May did in 2017, and Johnson did in 2019. Meanwhile, opposition parties tend to underperform. In other words, if you take the lessons of political history seriously, then all of this gives us a message: while the Labour Party has stabilised, it is still a long way from winning the next general election.

And this is especially true when you look at Labour’s performance in one part of the country that will play a major role in determining the outcome of that election: England. While Labour is moving in the right direction in London, Scotland and Wales, stacking up votes in lots of areas where it already has support, across a large swathe of non-London England, which was the engine behind populism, Brexit and Boris Johnson, it is an entirely different story.

Labour only advanced modestly in southern England, while falling back by three-points in the north and failing to demonstrate serious progress elsewhere. Of the four local councils Labour took from the Conservatives, three were in London and all were in the south. Despite all the talk over the last two years about Labour “winning back the Red Wall”, Labour recorded net losses in the North and Midlands. Remarkably, the Greens (+63) and Luftur Rahman’s Aspire Party (+23) gained more councillors in England than Labour (+22) — a damning indictment of a party that hopes to return to Number 10 less than two years from now.

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These shifts point to what I suspect will be Team Johnson’s strategy between now and the next election — throw absolutely everything at mobilising non-London England against what they will argue is the looming “threat” of an economically chaotic Labour-SNP alliance. You can already see elements of it in the Queen’s Speech — the strong focus on making more of the Brexit Dividend, the Levelling-Up and Regeneration Bill, a British Bill of Rights, tougher action on illegal immigration and the Channel Crossings, and the focus on law and order.

All this is geared toward mobilising pro-Brexit English identifiers who have been trending from Left to Right for 20 years. Labour, remember, have still not won the popular vote in England since 2001. This strategy has been used before, of course. It was in 2015 when, despite a similarly difficult economic environment and bleak numbers in the polls, Cameron won a majority mainly by capturing 60% of seats in England and 41% of the vote — his party’s highest share since the rise of New Labour in 1997.

It was then implicitly used again four years later, in 2019, when Johnson won 47% among the English and 65% of seats in England, cementing a much stronger relationship with English Leavers. Now, he may be hoping that a similar strategy will not only retain the Red Wall but expand it even further, offsetting losses in the southeast by targeting the nearly three dozen seats in the Red Wall 2.0. With both Brexit and Boris having alienated liberal graduates in Remainia, some around the Prime Minister might well conclude that this is now the only viable strategy — to lean into the realignment.

Only, this time around, Johnson is unlikely to have a Ukip or a Brexit Party breathing down his neck, with the latter estimated to have cost the Conservative Party 50 seats in 2019. Will the one in four 2019 Conservative voters who are currently telling pollsters they plan to sit out the next election really do this? Put the prospect of a Labour-SNP coalition in front of them and watch what happens.

There is no doubt this is incredibly high risk. If levelling-up fails to deliver, if the government fails to show it can control illegal immigration, if the cost of living escalates to such a point that the Conservatives are no longer considered more economically competent than Labour, and if Starmer wins his gamble over Beergate and proceeds to exploit the recession, inflation, rising unemployment, and a sharp economic downturn that looms on the horizon, then it is not hard to see how Johnson’s entire coalition could fall apart in one fell swoop.

But looking at these results and the direction of British politics, with less than two years to go until the next general election, both the Prime Minister and the people around him may well conclude that there is no alternative — that their path to retaining power no longer lies in being a one-nation party but rather a party for forgotten England.

Ask yourself what the party’s core message is and how it would improve lives and communities around the country, and few, if any, answers are forthcoming. But ask yourself what the party actually does, and the answer pops up instantly. Labour gives every impression of being preoccupied with purges and internal warfare. Talking to the country appears less a priority than removing all remaining vestiges of anything associated with the previous leader. Scarcely a day goes by without Keir Starmer making a new effort to signal to the electorate that the bad old communist Grandpa is gone.

Still licking its deep and self-inflicted wounds from the general election of 2019, the party under its current leadership appears desperate to convince voters that the Corbyn era was nothing more than an aberration, a squalid interregnum which came about because a proud movement momentarily took leave of its senses. Such a strategy is not without merit, of course. After all, that Corbyn was unpopular on the doorstep is undeniable, as is the fact that the gulf which existed between the Labour Party and its traditional base at the point of his departure was greater than it had ever been. So great, in fact, that there remains a question mark over whether it might ever be bridged.

In his eagerness to detoxify the Labour brand, Starmer should be aware of one or two risks. The most obvious is that a return to anything resembling Blairite liberal-centrism — undoubtedly the wistful long-term desire of many within Labour’s ranks — would do nothing to bring about rapprochement with the party’s old heartlands. Indeed, it is indisputable that while the rupture unquestionably worsened under Corbyn, it began several years before.

Second, not everything the Corbynites did was wrong or unpopular. True, they took hyper-progressivism to suffocating new levels and, in doing so, alienated huge swathes of provincial and working-class Britain. But they did get some things right. Most notably, in seeking to challenge four decades of neoliberal orthodoxy and shift the dial towards a fairer and more redistributive economy, the party under Corbyn showed a boldness of thought that had, for a long time, been sorely lacking.

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Labour was, for instance, right under Corbyn to declare that austerity was not an economic necessity but a political choice; right to assert that a nation cannot cut its way to prosperity; right to argue for investment-led growth; right to see the role of government in the economy as active participant rather than mere bystander.

This agenda was savaged by critics and pundits. They thought it reeked of the twentieth century and top-down, Soviet-style command economics. They were wrong. Corbynomics amounted to little more than the type of Keynesian interventionist approach which was adopted by every British government for three decades after the end of the Second World War, and has long been the hallmark of the Nordic economies. As Keynes’s most prominent advocate and biographer Robert Skidelsky argued, Corbyn deserved praise for confronting what had become the entrenched conventional wisdom and seeking to reassert the proper place of government in the economic life of the nation.

And while it is de rigueur for political pundits to now claim that “Corbynomics” were in large part responsible for the party’s annihilation in 2019, the reality is that much of the agenda was popular —  far more so than the man after whom it was named. People like the idea of an increase in the minimum wage; they frown upon huge disparities in wealth and income; they are sympathetic to progressive taxation and public ownership of key utilities and services; they want regional inequalities addressed and boardroom excesses tackled; they support the concept of worker representation on company boards.

That is why, with a cost-of-living crisis now taking millions of families to the brink, and the prospect of the biggest drop in living standards since the Fifties, Labour must not shy away from offering a healthy dose of radicalism now. They must contrast themselves with a flailing chancellor. Rishi Sunak was happy to splash the cash during the pandemic. But at the moment, all he offers voters desperate for a recovery are the failed Thatcherite policies of the past.

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So while Labour has been right to call for such measures as a windfall tax on the oil and gas companies and the scrapping of the national insurance hike, it must not limit itself to arguing about particular tax and benefit rates here and there. Instead, it needs to set out a bold vision for a complete reordering of economic priorities. That means — and I can’t say I’m holding my breath here — agitating for an approach that would see the government assuming full control over macroeconomic policy and opposing any further ceding of authority to technocrats with no democratic mandate. It would mean elevating the needs of our long-neglected productive sector — the real economy in which most people live and work — over those of finance.

Why should a party with such a radical tradition resign itself to the defeatist belief that there is no alternative to the dominance of the market over vast areas of our national life; that bankers and business leaders always know best; and that, in the end, government intervention in the economy should be seen as nothing more than an occasionally necessary evil?

The public are ready for Labour to be audacious once more. A decade of austerity has impoverished millions. The pandemic revealed dangerous flaws in globalisation — from supply chains and Britain’s missing industrial base. Our over reliance on global markets was utterly exposed. Voters understand all of this. Labour must make the case for the self-governing nation state, untethered from fragile markets and exploitative multinationals. But Labour rarely speaks in these terms.

If the party wanted a truly bold idea to express a new economic philosophy, it might embrace the “family wage” — a concept designed to ensure that families are able to enjoy a decent quality of life on the wages of one earner. This really would signal a revolution, as many across the Labour movement bristle at the proposal whenever someone is brave enough to float it. They often argue that it would serve only to reinforce the patriarchy, but such a reaction demonstrates how far the movement has retreated from its historical purpose.  It seems large numbers within Labour’s ranks would sooner see both parents be forced to go out to work than entertain any suggestion the economy be reordered to grant them the flexibility to allow one, should he or she wish it, to be a full-time home-maker.

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In any event, Labour must seek to use the current crisis as a springboard to set a new economic narrative. But, in doing so, it must not strive to exorcise every demon from the years 2015-19. While ridding the party of the worst elements of Corbynism is certainly no ignoble ambition, an indiscriminate blitz would be injudicious and counter-productive electorally.

Of course, any approach that is seen to run counter to the demand for economic retrenchment will be met by the usual vested interests protesting, as they did when Corbyn ran the show, that “There is no magic money tree”. But not only does such an objection demonstrate a misunderstanding of the nature of money — it can, in fact, be created out of nothing — it would, in the wake of the billions suddenly conjured up to get us through the pandemic, surely ring hollower than ever.

The perfect storm of a government in disarray, a forbidding economic landscape and an increasingly disaffected electorate presents Labour with an open goal. This is not a time for timidity or tinkering at the edges. It’s a moment for the party to display again its historical radical impulse.

This is the true politics of wartime: battling with your political enemies (always on your own side), fighting your political opponents (the invariably smug, self-satisfied opposition parties), and wrestling with the media. As Tony Blair’s Political Secretary during the cash-for-peerages scandal in 2006 — the last time the Met investigated Number 10 — I know this well.

From time to time, I find myself wondering what I would advise Boris Johnson if he asked Switch, the legendary Number 10 switchboard which can find anyone the PM wants to talk to anywhere in the world, to get me on the line. What I would say today, with a bit of help from Ronald Reagan, is that the answer is simple, but it’s not easy.

First, Prime Minister, take it on the chin. Great leadership involves making the final decision, and that is balanced by taking full responsibility for it, even if it appears only tangential to you. So accept the judgement of the Met in full — don’t quibble with it. No-one recalls whether Jeremy Corbyn had a case to make about the EHRC investigation into the Labour Party. They remember his grumbling with the report — something which he had no authority to do. When you are being investigated, no matter how high your rank is, the authority always lies with the investigator. No equivocation. Be true to your brand, Boris. Be the Anti-Corbyn.

Next, make an apology. I know you have made them before, but new circumstances require fresh words. And contrition. You can do that, as you showed the first time you went to the House of Commons to say sorry. Today we need a performance of the same power, but one that also shows generosity and selflessness. Again, you have to take this on the chin.

You could say something like:

“The verdict of the Metropolitan Police is clear. I will not contest this judgement. I accept it unreservedly. I will not contest the facts. I broke the rules, and I have been fined. I paid the fine immediately. I will not seek to blame others, whether civil servants or advisers. As a great man once said, the buck stops here.

“This is the greatest country in the world. It is a privilege to lead and I have fallen below the standards you expect of me. I cannot change what happened in Number 10 in the past, but I promise you that my failure, when so many sacrificed so much, will spur me to deliver for each and every one of you, in every corner of our great nation.”

Apologise once, deeply, sincerely, profoundly. But don’t repeat it again and again. That undermines the impact. Just look at how Labour’s constant attempts to disavow Jeremy Corbyn and all his works has made them seem obsessed with him, as if they have something to hide.

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Then, take your punishment like a man. The local elections were always going to be rugged. Now they are going to be your version of Tony Blair’s “masochism strategy”. These elections were never going to be politically important from your point of view. The ballot four years ago culminated in a pretty high tide which was always likely to ebb. Now voters can have a major political outburst – the moment when they vent their pent up anger. When you’re out campaigning, don’t ask what they are angry about, let alone argue with them. Just let them get it off their chest. Far better they scream at you this May than at the next General Election.

Finally, show you’ve changed, don’t just keep saying you will. Move swiftly after the local elections to have a mini-Budget. Use it as an opportunity to abandon the cuts in your Spring Statement. No voter will care that it’s a U-turn, so long as it gives them what they need. And what they need is cash, and quickly. Stop pandering to the Treasury orthodoxy. Indeed, there will be no better time, given the Icarean fate of your once-illustrious neighbour. This is politics. What’s good for the voters is good for the government.

Perhaps most importantly, do this fast: speed kills, in politics too. Don’t be distracted from the simple strategy. Apologise, take your medicine, give the public what they want.

There will be bumps in the road. There will be endless talking heads droning on about “convention”. Others will parse Hansard. There will be an obsession with processology: who said what to whom, who did what when, and who knew what. But don’t get involved in relitigating the past. That, after all, is the point of taking full responsibility.

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Instead, briefly remind people that you took full responsibility and rapidly pivot to delivering real help to the punters. This should be genuine help: don’t just have a mini-Budget. The iron law of government communications is that you can have one multi-billion pound announcement, or billions of one pound announcements. I know which suits your style.

Yes, this is undoubtedly a brutal moment to be in Number Ten, but politics is, and always has been, a contact sport. As an adviser you spend a lot of time stopping bad things happening. If you doubt that, just ask former advisers about their proudest achievements — they will reel off a list of averted disasters. (Like the time John Prescott wanted to abandon the “right to buy” scheme: technocratically neat, politically disastrous.)

Well, the worst has happened now for the Prime Minister. A Metropolitan Police investigation isn’t unprecedented. (Though in the case of ”cash for peerages”, we were cleared.) What is unprecedented is the world we lived in during lockdown. We are all relieved that it is over, and hope it will never come again.

The challenge for the Prime Minister is if the FPNs bring back that pain, and wash away the gains of our recent freedom. The challenge for Number 10 is to allow the anger and pain an outlet, while harnessing the feeling that we have turned a corner. Battered and bruised, but still standing, should be their ambition for Boris Johnson.

Johnson may not actually have much blue blood in his veins, but he is certainly a toff. Shakespeare’s Falstaff is both the greatest clown in English literature and a knight of the realm. Lord Byron was nobleman, rebel, daredevil, libertine and criminal (he had an incestuous affair with his sister), all of which made him more popular in his day than Billy Connolly is in ours. And though people detest the arrogant kind of patrician, they are ready to give their vote to the kind of high-class eccentric who shambles around with a parrot on his shoulder, even if he lives in Downing Street.

Dukes and Viscounts are powerful in one sense but marginal in another. As marginal figures, they have an affinity with the crook and the nonconformist. The landowner has a soft spot for the poacher, but not much sympathy for the petit-bourgeois gamekeeper. Some aristocrats see life as a game, playing it with one ironic eye on its arbitrary nature. In this, they are like the medieval Fool, who sees that all social roles are reversible, including his own.

The Fool is wiser than the king because he knows he is playing a part, whereas the king takes himself for real. The Fool thus speaks a subversive kind of truth, for which, as in King Lear, he risks being beaten up by his employers. Fools know that they aren’t up to much and so are more canny than their masters, who aren’t up to much but don’t know it. Playing the fool is a matter of playing the fool, making a performance of one’s folly which requires art and intelligence. The wisdom of foolery shows up the foolishness of the wise.

The strength of the clown, then, lies in his weakness. Because he is one of the lowliest forms of social life, he can’t fall any further and thus assumes a strange invulnerability. It is dangerous for ruling classes if the common people have nothing to lose. Fools and clowns are “all-licensed”, as one of Lear’s daughters complains of his jester, but this doesn’t matter much because they have no real power beyond mockery and wordplay. They are free in proportion to their impotence.

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By Terry Eagleton

The trouble begins when the jester, like Johnson, is really a king in disguise, falling over his feet as a useful ploy for landing in Downing Street. Shakespeare understands that maintaining a pact with failure and frailty is the only basis for genuine power, which is different from arsing around in order to charm the electorate. The jester plays with the truth in a way which reveals some acute insights, whereas Johnson simply lies through his teeth.

Breaking the rules isn’t always to be censured. Great artists do it all the time. Even if you are a Schoenberg or a Beckett, however, you have to grasp the conventions well enough to sense when you should throw them away. Sometimes it’s the conventions themselves which will tell you this, or allow you to intimate it. You may need a textbook to learn Malay, but you are fluent in the language only when you can put the book aside. You incorporate the rules rather than ignore them, just as you don’t need to make an agonising act of choice every time the little green man, frozen eternally in the act of stepping forward, turns suddenly to red. Doing things without thinking about them is part of social existence. It shouldn’t be confused with not thinking about them because you don’t give a damn.

How do clowns become kings? The clown’s problem is how not to be a cynic. If he pushes his mockery too far he can end up deflating not this or that value, but value as such. All that remains to be believed in is his own ego. Shakespeare’s Iago, who has a touch of the jester about him, is ruthlessly self-interested, just like our dear leader. Like a whimsical monarch, the only reality that exists for the cynic is his own appetites. These can be gratified all the more easily if human life is a game, since if things are insubstantial you can manipulate them better. This applies especially to women. The cynic may not be a rake, but almost all rakes are cynics, convinced that women exist purely for their own pleasure. It isn’t accidental that Boris Johnson is a philanderer.

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The emptiness of Evil

By Terry Eagleton

Britain is one of those rare nations in which not being serious is thought to be a virtue. Seriousness is for shopkeepers, not for rogues and roués. The middle classes have character, whereas the upper classes are seen as characters. The Roundhead is grim-lipped and high-minded, while the Cavalier makes light of things in order to show his superiority to them. This is the kind of sangfroid which helped to build the Empire, and in the form of a certain slapdash amateurism helped to lose it as well. Giving the debonair Lord Mountbatten a colony to rule over or a battleship to command was like giving a machine gun to a gorilla. The word ’amateurism’ means doing things because you love to, not because you have to. Check-out assistants have to turn in for work each morning, but gentleman farmers occasionally heave calves into land rovers because they rather fancy the idea of mucking in.

As the oldest capitalist nation in the world, Britain has long been a breeding ground for individualism. Each individual is a quirky deviation from the norm, in which case there isn’t really a norm in at all. Everybody, like Dickens’s grotesque figures, is a law unto themselves, which means that the law doesn’t exist and society is essentially anarchic. The irony is that the very disdain for convention which endeared Boris Johnson to voters who were tired of plastic politicians is what threatens to bring him down.

There are two other social groups which have traditionally played the Fool. The first is the long tradition of Irishmen who were jesters to the English court. One thinks of the 18th century writer Oliver Goldsmith, who hailed from the Irish midlands and seemed to exist in London simply for the amusement of Samuel Johnson and his circle. The Dubliner Edmund Burke, one of the finest orators the House of Commons has ever witnessed, was said by some English MPs to smell of whisky and potatoes. His scorching rhetoric, which once caused some gentlewomen in the public gallery of the Commons to faint away, could easily be dismissed as blather and blarney.

Some decades ago, the resident Irish jester to the English nation was the bibulous playwright Brendan Behan, who graduated from the IRA via Borstal to the London TV studios. He once described himself as a drinker with a writing problem. Television producers would wait until late in the evening, when Behan was bound to be drunk, and then haul him on their show to be interviewed. Not long ago, the Northern Irish poet Tom Paulin inherited this dubious honour, loudly berating all and sundry on late night television. He did so, however, in a thick Belfast accent which signalled that he wasn’t really one of us, and so was not to be taken too seriously. You could savour his idiosyncrasies while overlooking his opinions. As Olivia remarks in Twelfth Night, there’s no harm in a licensed Fool.

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By Aris Roussinos

The other traditional group of clowns is old-style Oxbridge dons. Seriousness for them, too, is a vulgar affair fit mainly for traffic wardens. Only nerds talk shop. A medical colleague of mine who spent much of his time plucking bits of helmet from the brains of dying motorcyclists would saunter into college dinner and recount a few amusing anecdotes about golf. I was also acquainted with one of the world’s experts on black holes, who was as silent on the subject of astronomy as if he was a bouncer in a night club. As a young don still wet behind the ears, I once asked a senior colleague how many children he had.

This was an unforgivable move, since it made it almost impossible for him not to give a factual reply, and facts were for oiks. He did, however, sidle out of it superbly. “Oh, thousands and thousands,” he sighed. This is the background from which Boris Johnson emerged. No wonder he can’t tell the truth.

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

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

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

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

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What's the point of Boris Johnson?

By Matthew Goodwin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Boris is our sin-eater

By Mary Harrington

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

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

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

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

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

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Covid could still save Boris

By Freddie Sayers

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

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

Partygate comes just as general support for restrictive Covid measures is dramatically running out. Already in early December, as the Omicron wave arrived and various scientists and experts began to call for the usual kinds of restrictions, the customary majority in favour of another lockdown was evaporating. A massive 68% of people opposed closing pubs and restaurants; 64% opposed stay at home orders.

Since then, the trend has only accelerated. New YouGov polling, seen by UnHerd, reveals a dramatic shift in opinion since before Christmas: support for every one of ten different restrictions tested has fallen even further, and none of them now commands majority support (not even “encouraging companies to allow people to work from home”, the most popular at 49%). Fully 75% of people on December 16 felt that Covid was getting worse in the UK and only 9% felt it was getting better; by January 11 it had swung completely, as 37% felt it was getting worse and 38% felt it was getting better. Public anxiety is falling away as fast as the Omicron wave itself.

Meanwhile, the cohort of scientists who projected disaster without a Christmas lockdown has been humiliated, as their disaster spectacularly failed to materialise. It has left people with the lingering question: what about the previous restrictions? What about all those months we spent trying to navigate those byzantine regulations — how many of them were really necessary?

Into this atmosphere the stories about No 10 parties started to break. They couldn’t have been better designed to reinforce the suspicion that some of the past two years’ exertions might have been a waste of time. If they weren’t taking the rules seriously in Downing Street, was that because they knew they were partly theatrical and that some of them were pointless? The one-way systems in pubs, the daft signs outside on the street, the endless barked inanities on loudspeakers… were they taking us for fools? The public went along with it and gave the authorities their trust, despite coming face to face with absurd scenarios every day. It’s possible the current rage towards Boris is made more acute by a sense of embarrassment — maybe even shame — that everyone went along with it for so long.

So Boris Johnson has a choice. Either he accepts the role as sacrificial cow of the Covid era, soaking up all its insecurity and anger, and allowing himself to be ritually slaughtered so that we can all move on. Or he can acknowledge the role he has played over the past two years, and show us the way out of it.

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Did Sweden get Covid wrong?

By Freddie Sayers

England is now uniquely positioned to lead the world out of the Covid era — and this alone could save the Johnson premiership. The fact that his government managed to restrain from imposing freedom-curtailing restrictions over Christmas against the advice of Whitty and Vallance, Gove and Javid, an array of activist scientists and the Labour Party, was a decision of global consequence.

Across Europe, lockdowns returned in response to Omicron, and did little to prevent huge surges in cases. In the Netherlands, the lockdown was justified by the same bogus claims from Imperial College about Omicron that nearly scuppered England; meanwhile, the UK case rate is crashing to the bottom of the European league table. From Italy to California, the obsessive focus on vaccine passports — more pointless and divisive than ever in the face of Omicron — has intensified in the past months, while England has all but steered clear of them, save for occasional use at larger events. Many Western countries have managed to create a new underclass of the non-vaccinated from previously law-abiding citizens, who will now be alienated and radicalised for years to come. England has mainly avoided this; our society is strained, but it will hold.

Historians may yet conclude that this was the Johnson government’s biggest achievement. It stands accused of being both over-reluctant and over-keen to introduce lockdowns but in an international context, the UK has shown a laudable moderation. It managed to avoid the hotheadedness of the US and the divisive police-states of much of Europe; travellers returning home are hit by how normal things seem here in comparison. Given the initial disadvantage of being a global hub, our Covid fatality outcomes (27th in the world, 13th in Europe) could have been an awful lot worse.

This is the final card Boris Johnson has to play. Even his most vehement critics would agree that he possesses the dubious gift of giving the impression of being two different things at once: at the last election, he was one thing to a Red Wall Brexiteer, another to an affluent Southern Tory. In the Covid era he is similarly associated with opposing poles: to some he is the dithering libertarian, obsessed with freedom and herd immunity; to others he is the timorous face of endless lockdowns. As always with Johnson, there’s an element of truth to both.

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Why Plan B is a mistake

By Freddie Sayers

The only way he can save himself politically also happens to be the most useful thing he can do for the country: stitch together these contradictions and help us move on. When the ‘Plan B’ restrictions expire next week, he should use the opportunity to call time on Covid’s dominance over our lives and announce that England is going back to normal life. Rescind the remaining ineffective mandates and order the signs and visible detritis of Covid to be removed. He cannot promise no new risks or variants but public attitudes are always a decisive factor in the start and end of an emergency, and leadership is an important part of that. Now is the moment: 97.5% of people in England have antibodies; 63% have been boostered; cases are coming down fast, hospitalisations and deaths will follow.

For Johnson, the political prize is more than just survival. As well as getting unhappy backbenchers back on side, it is a chance to be forever associated with this moment in history — as a winner not a loser. He should acknowledge the imperfections of his Covid response — inadequately decisive at certain points, overly fearful at others. He could even point to the Partygate stories to concede, with humility, how they demonstrate the impossibility of micromanaging every human being in society by diktat, alongside a vow never to return to that approach. Whatever your view of his moral worth, there are few politicians as opportunistic, as able to alchemise anger into joy, as Boris Johnson. The end of the pandemic is his last, best hope.