* * * 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The word “character” can mean a person (as in “he’s a sleazy character”), or someone of unusual probity and integrity, or a printed or written letter. In fact, the word originally meant not a person but the sign or description of a person. Your character wasn’t the kind of human being you were but an image of it, and this image could be either true or false to your inner nature. Your outward appearance could either reveal or conceal your inward reality.

People whose talk and behaviour masks their inner being are known as politicians. They say things like “I came into politics to make a difference”, rather than “I came into politics because I’ve always been an ambitious little sod”, while inserting the phrase “very clear” into every second sentence. If they are asked whether it’s true that they have just been sick all over the Speaker of the House, they point out that there are matters of far greater importance to attend to like the cost of living, or the war in Ukraine. They are meticulously scripted creatures, in a way that dinner ladies and truck drivers are not.

Yet they are not scripted in the way that actors are. It wouldn’t make sense to ask whether someone playing Shakespeare’s Cleopatra is sincere or insincere. The terms simply don’t apply, any more than a plumber could be said to mend a pipe sincerely or insincerely. The actor is just doing a job. Politicians, however, are expected to be sincere, and sometimes they are. The problem is that there is so much they can’t say, such as “You’d be barking mad to vote for us”, whereas an actor says all there is to be said. There is nothing he or she is concealing, such as what their character was doing before coming on stage. Since the character didn’t exist at that point, he or she was doing nothing at all. When an actor asked Harold Pinter what he was doing before making his entrance, Pinter replied “Mind your own fucking business”.

Boris Johnson rose to power largely because he was prepared to ditch the script. When someone remarked in his presence that grandiose schemes tended to collapse, he replied “Ah yes, all flesh is grass”, which is not an appropriate verbal move for a politician to make. You are supposed to be practical, not a cracker-barrel philosopher. Even so, stepping outside the script can be part of the script. The comedian Frankie Howerd got some of his biggest laughs from making sardonic comments on the mediocre stuff he was supposed to perform. Clowns spend a lot of time rehearsing falling over their own feet. Even when Johnson is being serious, he maintains a slight ironic distance between his outward bluster and what with pardonable exaggeration one might call his inner self — a distance which suggests that deep down it’s all a game, “it” stretching all the way from the House of Commons to human existence. The only reality is naked self-interest.

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Boris Johnson is no clown

By Terry Eagleton

Johnson blurs the line between performing himself and being himself. Clowning around, not taking himself seriously, is an integral part of what he is. He blurs the distinction between theatre and reality, rather as the concept of character does. The idea began in the theatre and was then extended to everyday life. The same goes for the word “person”, which originally meant a mask worn by an actor. It then mutated into “personality”, meaning either a celebrity or someone who is lively and engaging. Some persons have plenty of personality while others, like Ant and Dec, have none at all. In fact, you aren’t even meant to be able to distinguish between them. There are also personages, in the sense of people of elevated status, but most of us are just off-the-peg persons.

“Personal” and “individual” are relational terms. There couldn’t be just one person, any more than there could be only one number or one letter. We are human by virtue of the kind of bodies we have, but we become personal only through our dealings with each another. If none of the faces around the cradle actually speaks to the baby, or communicates with it in some way, it will continue to be human but fail to become a person.

Personalities are bouncy, glittering, larger-than-life types, entertaining but potentially overbearing. They aren’t necessarily eccentric, however, which is where they differ from yet another sense of the word “character”. To have character is to be solid and dependable, but to be a character is almost the opposite. It means being amusingly idiosyncratic, as in “Gad, but he’s a character, sir!” Hovering somewhere between the patronising and the complimentary, it captures a distinctively English view of individuals as quirky, off-beat and lovably eccentric. From Falstaff and Sir Toby Belch to Mr. Pickwick and Miss Marple, each of them is his or her inimitable self. The word “singular” means both one and peculiar. If there is something appealing about eccentrics, however, there is also something alarming. Pushed to an extreme, idiosyncrasy ends up in a kind of madness. It is related to the word “idiot”.

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Ghislaine Maxwell had a choice

By Terry Eagleton

It is this which accounts for much of the popularity of Charles Dickens. Dickens’s characters tend to be notoriously freakish, identifiable by some quaint habit or outlandish physical feature. Jane Austen’s characters speak the common language of polite society, but Dickens’s figures each have their own trade-mark mode of speech, whether quick-fire delivery, verbose ramblings, pious cant or portentous rhetoric. Each of them seems locked into his or her own private world, which randomly collide before bouncing off each other again. Like clocks or mechanical dolls, they just keep repetitively doing their own thing, unresponsive to their surroundings. It isn’t clear whether these oddballs are nothing but their appearances, like people glimpsed for a moment in a crowded street, or whether they have a secret hinterland of emotions and experiences which is inaccessible to others. Like rogues, in the zoological sense of the word, they live apart from the general herd; but if this is true of them all, then there isn’t a herd at all, just a host of deviations without a norm. A very English individualism is built into Dickens’s way of seeing men and women, and though it is wildly entertaining it can also be slightly sinister. Coherent communication between characters falters and falls apart. The eccentric moves quickly into the grotesque. The world is vivid but fragmentary, full of delightful bits and pieces but hard to grasp as a whole.

“Rogue” is a word often used of our departure-lounge Prime Minister, both in the sense of wandering from the pack and of being unprincipled but likeable. Rogues aren’t likeable despite being unprincipled but because of it. Because they kick over the traces, they allow us to do the same vicariously, which is always a source of pleasure. Because it is vicarious, we can smash the conventions and rip up the regulations while remaining eminently respectable. The reputable citizen needs the rogue as Wise needs Morecambe or angels need devils. Without devils, Dostoevsky remarks, the world would die of sheer boredom. The angels may play their harps in ecstasy, but the devils have all the best tunes.

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Boris Johnson broke Britain

By Aris Roussinos

Unscrupulous types are said to lack integrity, though it’s not clear what this means. The Oxford English Dictionary defines integrity as having strong moral principles, but also as the state of being whole. What is the connection between the two? Perhaps it’s the idea that being unprincipled corrodes or corrupts your nature so that it’s no longer all there. Or maybe a principled person is consistent, rather than self-divided and self-contradictory. Otherwise there seems no reason why acting morally should mean being complete. Lurking behind this word may be the Romantic-humanist view that we act well when we bring the whole of our being into play, as opposed to being lopsided. But the whole of my being may include an overwhelming desire to murder my hairdresser, which it would be better to repress. Ideas of wholeness, like visions of harmony, are usually suspect.

Boris Johnson is a character without much character. He is a character in the Dickensian sense, but not in the Austenite one. Or, to put it another way, he has too much personality and too little consistent selfhood. It was because he is likely to quote Horace when asked about the rate of inflation that a public bored with plastic politicians elected him. But it was for just the same reasons that he couldn’t govern. It helps to be a character to scramble into power, but you need to have character to stay there.

By ending Britain’s nearly 50-year membership of the European Union (EU), by returning it from being the so-called “awkward partner” of Europe to becoming an independent sovereign nation-state, the blunt reality is that Boris Johnson will go down in the history books as a Prime Minister who can genuinely claim to have fundamentally changed the direction of Britain. Whether positive or negative, the consequences of his premiership will continue to be felt for decades, if not centuries, to come.

Along the way, he also overhauled his party, its electorate, and political geography. It is true that Britain’s realignment was under way long before Johnson entered No 10. The Conservative Party’s invasion of Labour’s heartlands had not only been visible under Theresa May but can be traced to rising levels of apathy among Britain’s workers and non-graduates, during the late Nineties and the early 2000s, many of whom abandoned New Labour because of its support for mass immigration and EU membership. But it was Johnson who, through the sheer force of his charisma, rallied larger numbers of them into the Conservative Party during the tumultuous months of 2019.

As my own analysis of British Election Study data has shown, feeling positively about Boris Johnson was not just one of the most significant drivers of the Brexit vote but one of the most significant drivers of whether somebody switched from Labour to the Conservatives in 2019. “My voters did not vote for the Conservative Party’” summarised one MP at the same time. “They voted for Boris.” It was, ultimately, Johnson who doubled down on the realignment, handing his party an electorate that was and remains demographically and ideologically different from the one that had rallied around David Cameron only four years earlier. Post-Brexit conservatism became far more blue-collar, non-graduate, older, more white, less urban, and far more culturally conservative than pre-Brexit conservatism ever was.

Yet while Johnson willingly reshaped his party around this electorate, he never really knew what to do with it or where to take it. What his loyalists call The Project never became intellectually coherent or ideologically sophisticated. Cake-ism became the inevitable consequence of a premiership that had no serious intellectual roots or overarching philosophical framework. The glaring absence of serious thinkers among his entourage found its expression in a long list of thin, short-term, and at times openly contradictory policies that never came close to reflecting the wishes of his party’s new voters.

While they wanted less immigration, he gave them more. While they prized aspiration and economic freedom, he gave them the highest tax burden since the Fifties. While they were instinctively suspicious of the state; he put it on steroids. While they expected a serious strategy for Levelling Up, he consistently failed to provide one. While they wanted a strong pushback against the illiberalism of radical “woke” progressivism, he appeared reluctant to get involved. While they thought they had elected a political fighter, he too often worried about how he was perceived by cosmopolitan liberals. While they thought he was on their side, he appeared to treat them with contempt. And while they wanted an economy and a system that did more for ordinary working people, he often appeared more interested in building Singapore-on-Thames. Consistently, Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party has leaned more to the Right on economics and more to the Left on culture than many of its new voters.

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The Tories must capture forgotten England

By Matthew Goodwin

This explains why the reformist, if not revolutionary, premiership that many of these voters expected — one that saw Brexit not as the final destination but as a gateway to wide-ranging reforms of the entire system — never materialised. Establishment liberals, Conservative elites, and the donor class were never aligned with the more radical aspirations of the voters Johnson mobilised. Repeated resets in No 10 routinely prioritised changes to personnel over the more ambitious changes to political philosophy which might have better positioned the party in line with its new electorate. Meanwhile, the widening gulf between the Liberal Leaver vision of Brexit and the far more culturally conservative vision that unites many Conservative voters was never addressed or even understood. Even today, this tension continues to sit at the heart of the party, like an unexploded bomb from the Second World War, waiting to detonate unexpectedly in the face of Johnson’s eventual successor.

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What's the point of Boris Johnson?

By Matthew Goodwin

While many Conservatives will today breathe a sigh of relief that the Johnson regime is finally coming to an end, they will be forced to operate within the context of the realignment that he has mobilised. There is now simply no way forward for the Conservatives, no way they can retain power, that does not involve repairing their relationship with the people who voted for Johnson less than three years ago and who certainly do not want to return to the neoliberal conservatism of the Eighties and the 2010s. Whether any of the potential successors to Johnson can hold and retain this territory remains an open question.

Many of these voters will today be feeling disappointed, despondent, disillusioned, and despairing. And, in the days ahead, it is they who will come to remember Boris Johnson not as a maverick who changed the direction of the country but as the man who was given a once in a lifetime opportunity to fundamentally reshape his party, politics, and the country but who, in the end, squandered it. And for a large chunk of the country, it is that which may yet become the one thing that defines Boris Johnson.

I happened to be standing beside a young man distributing leaflets when Elisabeth Borne, France’s new Prime Minister, and several TV crews approached. You don’t see many TV cameras in Thury Harcourt, in the hills 30 kilometres south of Caen. You don’t see many prime ministers either.

The young man began to berate the PM. Why was she scared to debate with him in public, he asked? Madame Borne put him down politely. “I am very pleased to meet you and I hope that we’re all going to campaign nicely,” she said.

It was only then that I realised that the young man was Noé Gauchard, the local candidate for the Left-Green alliance Nouvelle Union Populaire Ecologique et Sociale (or Nupes for short).

Madame Borne became France’s second female prime minister last week. She is running for election — for the first time in her long career as a public servant — in my home constituency, the sixth circonscription of Calvados. After becoming boss of the Paris Metro, after becoming a regional Prefect in uniform and white gloves, after becoming three kinds of minister during President Emmanuel Macron’s first term, Elisabeth Borne has decided that it is time to get herself elected.

You have to give her credit for that. She doesn’t have to be a member of parliament to be the PM in France. If she wins, she will have to resign the seat and allow her running mate to become the local MP. If she loses, she will have to step down as Prime Minister — not for any legal reason but because Macron has made that the rule for all members of his government who are running in the parliamentary elections on 12 and 19 June. So here, down my way, came an event which could only happen in France: a Prime Minister campaigning for votes for the first time in her life.

How would Elisabeth Borne, a classic product of the French technocracy, take to being a stump politician? She is a fiercely competent and hard-working woman, but is reputed to have little charisma. Her nickname when head of the Paris Metro was “Borne-Out (because she burned out her staff). “She is not a barrel of laughs,” one Macron ally says. “But, then again, government is not the Club Med.”

The Prime Minister spent 45 minutes at the Thury Harcourt Vide-Grenier (attic-clearance sale), which is an occasional opportunity for local people to exchange their unwanted rubbish for other people’s unwanted rubbish. You could buy Johnny Hallyday’s Greatest Hits, Volume 12. Or a casserole with no lid.

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I thought that, for a first-timer, she did pretty well. She came over like a hospital matron of the old school doing the rounds of the wards. She has a lovely smile, which is rarely seen on television. She listened for longer than was strictly necessary to complaints about high pump prices or Emmanuel Macron. She was able to connect with people — especially, it seemed, the women. She allowed selfies to be taken with children.

Borne made one beginner’s mistake, however. She didn’t buy anything. A practiced French stump politician visiting a market would always buy something. It doesn’t have to be Johnny Hallyday’s Greatest Hits Volume 12.

***

Borne’s mother was a pharmacist who came from Livarot, a little further east in Calvados. Her father was a Holocaust survivor and resistance hero who never recovered from his wartime trauma and committed suicide when Elisabeth was 11-years-old.

She was brought up in Paris and rose through the ranks of the French meritocracy. She trained as an engineer at France’s premier engineering school, Ecole Polytechnique, whose students — still almost all men to this day — have uniforms and ceremonial swords. She then worked, in increasingly senior roles, in the private offices of a series of Socialist politicians: the culture minister Jack Lang, the Prime Minister, Lionel Jospin, President François Hollande, the mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoe. She regarded herself as “of the Left” but never joined the Socialist Party.

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She was one of the first women to become a Prefect of a French region, in Poitou-Charentes. During the first Macron presidency, Borne was successively transport, environment and employment minister. She is credited by some (and blamed by the unions and part of the Left) for pushing through two of the most important reforms of the Macron era: the opening of the state French railways to competition and making the terms for unemployment pay tougher (but still more generous than most other EU countries).

Fast forward to Macron’s re-election on 24 April, and she is reported to have been his first choice as Prime Minister. He then spent three weeks looking at other options, all of whom were women. He had decided that, 30 years after the brief and disastrous term of Edith Cresson in 1991-2, it was time for France to have a second female PM.

Macron was torn between choosing a woman with proven experience in national government and one with deep roots in local or regional politics. He is reported by the French media to have almost made another choice, Catherine Vautrin, the centre-right president of the Greater Rheims area in eastern France. But several of his closest aides pointed out that Vautrin had once been a vocal opponent of the legalisation of gay marriage in France. Macron backed away rather than offend his supporters on the centre or the centre-left.

After three weeks, the President returned to his original choice: Elisabeth Borne. This stuttering process — the longest delay before the appointment of a new PM since the present doubled-headed French government system began in 1965 — reveals two things: one about Macron, the other about the changing status of French Prime Ministers.

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The first is that Macron, who appears confident, even arrogant, can be indecisive, especially when it comes to choosing people. He is often torn between doing what he thinks will be the right thing and what will be the clever thing.

The second is more profound. It used to be that the Prime Minister was a disposable front-bumper or a fuse to protect the President from being damaged by random events — especially during domestic crises. All the same, the PM used to have a certain amount of autonomy. They were often senior politicians from the President’s own ideological family. They ran the country while the President presided.

But since the seven-year presidential term was reduced to align with the five-year parliamentary term from 2007, the role of the French Prime Minister has become uncertain, even problematic. The semi-detached status of French Presidents is no longer tenable in the age of Twitter and 24-hour TV news. If the President leaves too much to the PM, he is accused of being aloof; if he takes all the decisions, he is accused of being overbearing.

Macron is frequently accused of both. He resented the popularity of his independent-minded, first Prime Minister, Edouard Philippe. He had a much better working relationship with his successor, the hard-working, unassuming but effective Jean Castex. Any French Prime Minister now risks being Prime Minister only in name. He or she no longer leads the majority party in parliament because French parties have all but vanished and have been replaced with permanent or shifting alliances.

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In theory, Borne — with zero experience as an electoral strategist — will spearhead Macron’s forces in the parliamentary campaign next month: the half-dozen parties and factions which make up his centrist alliance, Ensemble. The campaign will actually be led by a committee of  more experienced stump politicians with Macron (officially banned from campaigning as head of state) directing operations in the background.

All of which means that the French Prime Minister, whatever the constitution may say, has become a kind of Super-Chief-of- Staff or a Grand Vizir. Castex was well-suited to that role. Elisabeth Borne — demanding, tough, intellectually impressive — should also be in her element.

But like her more successful predecessors, she has to find a way of connecting with the French without making Macron jealous. And she has to win her first election in the sixth circonsciption of Calvados. If my own little patch of France rejects her on 19 June, she will be the shortest-serving prime minister of the Fifth Republic. I suspect, however, that it won’t reject her. Macron came first in this area in both the first and second round of the Presidential elections in April. In any case, the words “Prime Minister” may be devalued in Paris but they still mean something in rural France.

In the Thury Harcourt market, I spoke to Patrick, 58, a local beef farmer and village councillor just after he had chatted to Madame Borne. “I was surprised,” he said. “She was easy to talk to and seemed genuinely interested in farming. But even if she is as dull and cold as people say she is, she would win. How often do you see prime ministers in Thury Harcourt? Never. It will be a great and wonderful thing for this area to elect a Prime Minister.”

And as one speaker after another rises to his feet, a consensus begins to emerge. Enough is enough. The man has served his purpose. It is time to be rid of him, and for the Conservatives to rediscover what they really stand for.

That was the scene on 19 October 1922, when Conservative MPs met at the Carlton Club to decide whether they should fight the next election in coalition with the Liberal Prime Minister David Lloyd George. It’s often said that the 1922 Committee, the parliamentary caucus of all Conservative backbenchers, takes its name from that meeting. That’s not entirely accurate: in reality the caucus takes its name from a dining club organised by Tory MPs who won their seats in the election that followed. But the claim does represent a kind of symbolic truth.

That meeting in October 1922 created not merely the modern Conservative Party, but the modern British political landscape. And at the centre of the drama was a man who wasn’t even there that morning. A man with wandering hands and slippery principles; a populist, a philanderer, a crowd-pleaser and adventurer; a clever, showy, utterly untrustworthy man, a proven election-winner whose own friends couldn’t trust a word he said. Yes, it’s Boris Lloyd George!

Since Lloyd George’s admirers are usually found at the liberal end of the spectrum, I imagine many of them will be displeased by the comparison. It’s true that Lloyd George — born in 1863, brought up speaking Welsh, steeped in the Baptist faith of his native land — came from a relatively humble background, never went to Eton, was a brilliantly fluent speaker and had an extraordinary appetite for hard work. And in his early days he exhibited an admirable commitment to all kinds of unfashionable causes — that is, until he sold out.

But more than any other twentieth-century PM, the last Liberal premier embodied the ambition, promiscuity and shameless indifference to rules and conventions that have driven Boris Johnson’s critics mad. Boris might be a mountebank, but Lloyd George was the mountebank’s mountebank.

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By Matthew Goodwin

Had he been prime minister during the Covid pandemic, would he have held parties at Number 10? The answer is obvious. He wouldn’t just have invited you to a party, he’d have sold you a peerage and made a move on your wife while you were still hanging up your coat.

Lloyd George was brilliantly funny. He was patriotic. He had the common touch. He was also, to quote Max Hastings on his modern-day successor, a “cavorting charlatan”, a “bully”, a “rogue” and a “scoundrel”, who “would not recognise truth, whether about his private or political life, if confronted by it in an identity parade”. And like Boris, he never hid it; quite the reverse. “My supreme idea is to get on,” he wrote to his future wife, Maggie Owen, during their courtship. “I am prepared to thrust even love itself under the wheels of my Juggernaut if it obstructs the way.” He meant every word.

According to one of his own aides, Lloyd George was “mental on matters of sex. In his view, a man and a woman could not possibly be friends without sexual intercourse.” That sounds familiar. Like Boris, he could never be entirely sure how many children he had. Within months of his marriage to the stolid and long-suffering Maggie, he had already strayed, impregnating a Liberal activist known only as Mrs J.

Not content with also impregnating his wife’s cousin Kitty, he also had affairs with “Mrs Tim” who was married to his friend Timothy Davies, as well as Julia Henry, another Liberal MP’s wife. He also carried on for decades with his secretary, Frances Stevenson, whom he forced to have at least two abortions. And there were many more — so many that nobody has ever produced a definitive count.

At the time, people joked that Lloyd George had a child in every town in Britain. The story goes that one day his son Dick went into a pub and fell into conversation with a stranger who looked just like him. The stranger eventually confessed that Lloyd George was indeed his father, and was secretly paying him £400 a year. To cap it all, some biographers suggest that Lloyd George also slept with Dick’s troubled wife, Roberta — and this when he was well into his sixties! By these standards, even Boris seems a paragon of fidelity.

Lloyd George’s Conservative coalition partners knew all this, of course. But they tolerated it, because he was a winner. They had first embraced him in December 1916, amid the slaughter of the Great War, when he knifed his own party leader, Herbert Henry Asquith, to get his hands on the premiership. That allowed him to build a reputation as the “Man Who Won the War”, and two years later he led the coalition to a thumping 506-seat victory in the 1918 general election.

Now Lloyd George seemed unassailable, a born winner. Faced with a newly resurgent Labour Party, he had slain the dragon of socialism and reached out to middle-class and working-class voters alike. The electoral map was splashed with coalition blue and yellow, including great swathes of industrial northern England. In Northumberland, for example, Lloyd George’s ultra-patriotic message hit home in seat after seat, including all three seats in Newcastle. The Tories had even roared to victory in Hartlepool.

For a time Lloyd George could do no wrong. There was talk of a historic realignment, a seismic reordering of the political landscape. The Tory leader, the feeble Austen Chamberlain, made no secret of his belief that the future lay in a fusion of their two parties. Yet even at this stage the seeds of Lloyd George’s downfall — both political and personal — had been sown.

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By Paul Embery

Once again, the parallels between past and present could hardly be more striking. Just as Boris Johnson capitalised on Brexit, Lloyd George had capitalised on victory on the Western Front. But the result was an electoral coalition that was much uneasier and shallower than it looked. And as the months passed, the problems mounted.

Lloyd George’s equivalent of levelling up was his promise to find jobs and build homes for Britain’s returning servicemen. Then, as now, there was a lot of talk and not much action. What was even more dangerous, though, was the growing sense that the Tories were losing touch with their low-tax, small-state principles.

By the turn of 1920 Lord Rothermere, co-founder of the Daily Mail, was already demanding that the government slash spending by half and let private enterprise flourish once again. A year later Rothermere founded the Anti-Waste League. Then, in June 1921, an Anti-Waste candidate comfortably beat his Tory rival in the Westminster St George’s by-election.

By now the Tories were becoming seriously worried. Under their populist Prime Minister, what did they stand for? What had happened to their soul?

Next came a wave of scandals — not parties, but peerages. Governments had always rewarded their supporters with honours, but Lloyd George carried it to an extreme. In six years after 1916 he sold a staggering 1,500 knighthoods and 91 peerages, auctioned to party donors by his friend, the theatrical impresario Maundy Gregory. According to Gregory’s critics, he literally had a tariff, pricing knighthoods at £10,000, baronetcies at £30,000 and peerages at £50,000.

Even to the most port-soaked Tory squire, this seemed pretty indefensible. By the summer of 1922 the pressure was almost intolerable. On 2 July more than 200 MPs demanded a parliamentary investigation into the peerage scandal, and five junior ministers threatened to resign unless Lloyd George agreed. Grudgingly he gave way.

But the real trigger for the collapse of his position, oddly, wasn’t spending, or peerages, or even Lloyd George’s sordid personal morality. It was Turkey.

Today the Chanak crisis, which brought Britain to the brink of war with Mustafa Kemal’s Turkey, is almost completely forgotten. In essence it was the epilogue of the First World War, which had left British and French troops in control of Constantinople and ignited a horrifically bloody conflict over the remains of the Ottoman Empire. Right from the start, Lloyd George had enthusiastically backed the Greeks, who had pushed inland deep into Anatolia.

But by the summer of 1922 the Greeks were in headlong retreat. Even as the Tories were getting agitated about Lloyd George’s peerages, his erstwhile allies were falling back towards the Aegean coast. On 9 September Kemal’s cavalry entered Smyrna. Within two weeks the city was in ashes, consumed by a fire that cost an estimated 100,000 lives.

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Now the Turkish commander turned his attention towards Constantinople, still guarded by a British garrison. Backed by the reliably bloodthirsty Winston Churchill, who had learned absolutely nothing from the debacle at Gallipoli, Lloyd George prepared for war — and, crucially, an election. His message to the country, he decided, would be simple: “Keep the Turk out of Europe.”

This, then, was the cue for that famous meeting of Conservative MPs at the Carlton Club on 19 October. And the crucial intervention came from a man who might have been designed specifically as the St George to Lloyd George’s dragon.

Stanley Baldwin, MP for Bewdley, ironmaster’s son, was decent, self-effacing and utterly honest, the very soul of small-c conservative respectability. Baldwin didn’t flog peerages. Almost incredibly, by today’s standards, he had donated a fifth of his family fortune to pay off the national debt — and done so anonymously, without a thought of political gain. As for molesting other MPs’ wives, the thought would never have occurred to him. True, as a boy he had almost been expelled from Harrow for circulating Victorian pornography. But a more faithful and loving husband was nowhere to be found.

Like many other Tory MPs, Baldwin was horrified by the idea of war with Turkey. Indeed, even though he sat in the Cabinet as President of the Board of Trade, he was horrified by Lloyd George in general, calling him a “corrupter of public life”. “I am sick of it,” he wrote privately. “I want a clearer atmosphere.”

And now, quietly, devastatingly, Baldwin plunged in the knife. Lloyd George, he told his colleagues, had been called a “dynamic force, and I accept those words. He is a dynamic force, and it is from that very fact that our troubles, in our opinion, arise. A dynamic force is a very terrible thing; it may crush you.” If they went into an election with Lloyd George as their leader, he said, “the old Conservative Party” would be “smashed to atoms and lost in ruins”.

And with that, political history changed. The Tory MPs voted by 187 to 87 to scrap the coalition. To put it another way, they chose boring competence over flamboyant charlatanry — and it worked. A few weeks later, under the doggedly serious Andrew Bonar Law, they won a massive majority in their own right, condemning the Liberals to perennial irrelevance.

As for Baldwin, he succeeded Law six months later, served three times as Prime Minister and became the unheralded father of modern British politics, which he successfully presented as a straight choice between moderate conservatism and radical socialism. And Lloyd George? He never held office again.

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This is Tolkien's world

By Dominic Sandbrook

So what’s the lesson? Well, it seems pretty unlikely that Boris Johnson’s premiership will end with an argument about war with Turkey. But it will end, and probably sooner rather than later. When a charismatic, unprincipled populist loses his sheen, he has little to fall back on, especially if his colleagues are already questioning his political direction.

And if history’s any guide, the next Tory leader will probably be Boris’s polar opposite. Somebody earnest, dutiful and hard-working, the last person you’d ever expect to throw a lockdown-busting bash. Maybe somebody who, like Bonar Law, has already had a go at leading the party. and fancies another crack. Somebody a bit boring.

What’s Theresa May up to these days?

***

Dominic Sandbrook discusses the politics of 1922 on the latest episode of his podcast The Rest is History — which also features his spectacular impersonation of Winston Churchill.

Starmer, in his defence, inherited a sinking ship from Jeremy Corbyn. He was handed the lowest number of seats since 1935, a bitterly divided party and a Labour brand that even today remains thoroughly discredited among a large swathe of the country. Corbyn did not cause all of these problems but he certainly entrenched them.

Labour’s fracture with the working class, its loss of credibility on crunch issues such as the economy and immigration and its growing dependency on social liberals who congregate in areas where the party no longer needs votes were all decades in the making. This is why any recovery — if such a recovery is even possible — will be generational rather than cyclical.

Starmer made a good start, or at least appeared to. Over the past year, Labour picked off low-hanging fruit, winning back voters who were repelled by Corbyn. In the polls, Labour’s average support jumped from below 29% to 35%. At the last election, Labour trailed the Conservatives by 12 points; today, they trail by 8.

How much of this improvement is due to Starmer remains unclear. While his supporters point to his strong leadership ratings relative to Corbyn, the fact remains that even today Starmer’s “net satisfaction” score still lags behind Boris Johnson — while 33% of voters are satisfied with him, 42% are not. Leaders only ever have a short period to make an impression. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Starmer, a year after becoming leader, has now blown his.

Ask someone on the street to describe Starmer and they’ll probably say he opposed Brexit, is a lawyer, took the knee for Black Lives Matter and is better than Jeremy Corbyn but still doesn’t represent “people like them”. This might explain why, when the country is asked who would make “best Prime Minister”, Johnson still leads on 37% while his nearest rival is not the leader of the opposition but ‘Not Sure’. Starmer trails in third, ten points adrift from the man who has been in power for a year and is criticised on a daily basis.

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There are, of course, many who argue that Covid-19 dealt Starmer an unlucky hand.  But it is during moments of crisis, when the glare of public attention is strongest, that leaders are made. Indeed, it won’t be lost on Starmer’s team that it is precisely at the same time as the entire country has been sat at home, watching the news and paying attention to politics, that Starmer’s ratings have fallen not risen. To put it simply, the more people have seen, the less impressed they have been.

Starmerites might respond that his ratings are better than Mr Corbyn’s. But that is like saying Michael Howard’s ratings were better than Iain Duncan Smith’s. In the end, neither saw power. And it appears that the British people can sense that, too. More than half of them told YouGov last week that they simply do not see Keir Starmer as a prime minister in waiting.

Even if you put the question of leadership aside, there remains little evidence that Labour is dealing with the deep-rooted structural problems that arguably make it impossible for the party to win the next election. To do so would require a swing close to what Tony Blair and New Labour achieved in 1997 – with a leader who is nowhere near as popular as Blair was and a party that is nowhere near as popular as it needs to be outside of London and the university towns.

As the 2019 election and today’s polls underline, amid the “realignment” of British politics Labour is stacking votes where it does not need them while failing to win votes where it desperately needs them. Labour will probably cheer Sadiq Khan’s easy victory in London next month, while struggling to hold its historic blue-collar fiefdom of Hartlepool. It is cruising in its stronghold of London with a 20-point lead, but across the rest of the south it is 25 points behind. No party can win power with these numbers.

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This reflects how Britain’s new political geography, the first-past-the-post system and earlier Labour leaders have made life harder than it ought to be for Starmer. Over the past two decades, the Left essentially walked into the casino of British politics and put all of its chips behind social liberals whose support is concentrated in liberal enclaves rather than spread across the country. Much of that was entrenched during Corbyn’s tenure and by the dismal reaction to Brexit, and now Starmer is paying the price. Ask the working class today who should lead Britain and Boris Johnson holds a 19-point lead. Starmer might win a few more seats around London, but he should remember that there are still many more Red Wall seats that could fall. The assault on the Red Wall might just be starting.

There is a broader point to be had, too. At the heart of recent political commentary has rested a fundamentally flawed assumption: that once Brexit was over and done with life would return to the traditional “Left versus Right” fault line that governed politics during the twentieth century. We would get back to debating the economic issues that play to Labour’s strengths and that would clear the path for the party to repair its relationship with workers and return to power.

But I was never convinced. For a start, this narrative completely ignores the extent to which the Conservatives have also leaned towards the Left, variously promising to “level-up” the most regionally imbalanced nation in the industrialised world while moving institutions, civil servants and banks north.

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It also underplays the extent to which culture, rather than economics, has come to dominate national life — as reflected in our intensifying debates over cancel culture, freedom of speech, the Royal Family and racism in British society. Only last week, voters looked on as Keir Starmer and a number of his MPs rejected a nuanced report on racial and ethnic disparities and instead implied that Britain, and by extension the British people, are inherently racist. Every day that radical left Labour MPs Clive Lewis and activists like professor Priyamvada Gopal are in the news, screaming about racist Britain, is a good day for Boris Johnson.

But as Ronald Reagan reminded Jimmy Carter, nobody wants to be told over and over again what is wrong with their country and its people, especially when much of it is not true. Nobody wants to hear about the malaise. They want to be inspired and led to the sunlit uplands. They want their leaders to believe in the country as much as they do. Yet as much research over the past year has shown, it is precisely on these questions about culture, identity, race and history where Labour MPs and activists are completely detached from the rest of Britain.

Put all of this together and it becomes extremely difficult, if not impossible, to see how Starmer charts a path to No 10. While he might have steadied the ship, too many gaping holes remain. Labour’s broken bond with the working class, its perceived lack of economic competency, the cultural isolation of its MPs from the average voter and an increasingly radical “woke” Left that is cheered on in seats that the party already holds, but loathed in those that Labour actually needs to win — these are all major obstacles that Starmer has yet to tackle.

And unless he does, then he might find himself going down in the history books as the Labour Party’s Michael Howard  — the man who brought “stability” but ultimately failed to win power.

Who hasn’t stopped to think about the alternative universe where the novel coronavirus first reported in Wuhan just fizzled out in late 2019? What would 2020 and the first year of the Johnson premiership have looked like then?

The flight of fancy that follows from that question is not to minimise or trivialise the real experience of Covid-19, which includes more than 60,000 dead in the UK alone. But by imagining what might have been, we can sometimes see more clearly the things that are in front of us, hidden in plain sight.

*

The club at 67 Pall Mall was heaving with happy Tories, drunk on good champagne and opinion polls. When Boris Johnson finished his brief speech to the faithful, there were chants of “ten more years”, not all meant ironically.

The PM himself withdrew to a small private bar reserved for his nearest and dearest, where alone he munched a plate of manchego and chorizo with a large glass of Clos de la Roche. Carrie’s joke about his waistline soon exceeding his approval ratings still rankled a bit, but what’s the point of being world king if you don’t enjoy it?

And enjoy it he had. As he’d recently told Cameron Minor on WhatsApp, this prime ministering lark was actually pretty easy when it came to it — “Can’t understand how you made such heavy weather of it all, Dave.”

Of course, the critics — many of them his former Fleet Street colleagues — were forever whanging on about him not understanding the difference between campaigning and governing, but he took no notice. Likewise the whining from Lobby journalists given ever less information by a Downing Street operation they described as aggressive and dysfunctional. A career in newspapers had taught him exactly how much the good opinion of hacks matters.

Instead of the papers and the Lobby, Johnson had spent his first year communicating his government’s record directly to the people who put him in office. Every week he was in another Red Wall seat, talking about “getting Brexit done” and “levelling up”.

The pundits, sometimes kindly but generally not, compared this approach to that of Donald Trump: a permanent campaigning operation built around the appeal of “Boris” and often largely detached from the actual record of his government. And as that first year since the 2019 election ended, that record was patchy. The UK economy had crawled through 2020, growth barely breaking 1% amid uncertainty about Brexit and what was looking increasingly like a full-blown trade-war between the US and China — Trump himself having decided that America First was his best bet at re-election in November.

Probably the most significant thing the Johnson government did in that first year was unveil its March Budget, which was heavy on spending promises and a programme of income tax cuts aimed at lower earners. Economists fretted about the deficit and the new young Chancellor “let it be known” that he too had wanted a more hawkish approach to the public finances. But with no real public profile, Rishi Sunak had little chance of resisting the economic cakeism demanded by his far more prominent and powerful boss.

Johnson’s decision to hold a 5pm press conference on Budget day to talk about the package in time for the evening bulletins only confirmed No 10’s dominance over No 11. “It is my great honour to serve Her Majesty as First Lord of the Treasury,” Johnson grinned when asked if he was stealing the Budget.

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Domestically, there wasn’t a great deal else of substance to report from that first year — the deliberately skinny 2019 manifesto was far from an agenda for government, and for all its dominance and aggression, the No 10 team didn’t have much in the way of detailed reform ready to roll out. Instead, they revelled in charges that they’d started a “culture war” by organising repeated attacks on the BBC and “woke” universities. Both of those went down well with the Red Wall group of Tory MPs, whom some commentators described as the most Right-wing cohort of Conservative Parliamentarians in a generation.

In May, a pamphlet co-written by Red Wallers called for “welfare conditionality”, which would deny benefits to people without a clear record of work; the reintroduction of prison ships; and the construction of detention camps for asylum claimants. The pamphlet was, eventually, disowned by the Prime Minister for being at odds with “my One Nation principles”. Despite that disavowal, when it later emerged that the pamphlet had been strongly encouraged by advisers in No 10, no one was surprised. Especially since its publication caused journalists to repeatedly ask Sir Keir Starmer if he agreed with the proposals: his answers spawned dozens of Facebook memes, made by the ongoing Tory campaign operation, depicting the new Labour leader as a north London human rights lawyer who backed welfare cheats, yobs and illegal immigrants. The most effective of these was a crude photoshop of Starmer wearing Jeremy Corbyn’s beard.

Meanwhile, “Levelling up” was a popular slogan and tended to go down well on the PM’s weekly tours, even though the critics kept pointing out that the Government didn’t seem to have a clear plan for actually doing it. By the late summer, there were even whispers starting to emanate from the Treasury that the Chancellor himself had doubts about the “economic blueprint” his team had been given by their line manager in the Spring. “Setting up BARPA and re-arranging the furniture in No 10 don’t constitute an economic strategy,” one Treasury source was reported as saying in September.

This had not gone unnoticed and Dominic Cummings was stepping up his efforts to have the PM move Rishi in the New Year, possibly under the cover of the New Deal with Europe.

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Mind you, Dom had problems of his own to worry about. To the surprise of many observers, the Prime Minister’s Senior Adviser was widely seen as the decisive force behind Johnson’s decision to strike a deal with the EU in October.

That deal went down well with business and allowed Johnson to give some speeches about a new era beginning and looking forward to an early trade deal with what he privately expected to be America under a re-elected Trump Administration. But it also saw the first stirrings of unease on the Conservative benches. The day after Johnson announced his deal with the EU,  Steve Baker and Iain Duncan Smith were spotted by a passing hack arriving at No 5 Hertford Street in Mayfair. The MPs later insisted they were there for a “private lunch” but a persistent — and accurate — rumour suggested that they dined on rare roast beef with several of the financial backers of the Vote Leave campaign. At a table where the diners’ collective net worth was measured in ten figures, one red-trousered guest cheerily christened his meat “Dom” before driving the knife home.

But then… not much. For all that Baker and a few other Tories enjoyed some TV hits lamenting the deal as a “betrayal of Brexit”, not many colleagues followed them over the top. Yes, that dysfunctional Downing Street operation annoyed MPs, but they were mostly quite circumspect about it. When you have an 80-seat majority, who really cares that your staff aren’t very nice to backbenchers? And as usual, promises of a reshuffle just over the horizon worked their magic.

Still, not everything was tranquil. As he swilled the wine in his glass and listened to that talk of a decade in office, Johnson found himself thinking again of a conversation he’d had with Carrie a month earlier. On 4 November, the day after Trump’s narrow re-election victory, she’d asked him flatly: “Do you want to go down in history as that man’s sidekick? You might get your statues, but don’t be surprised if Wilf and his friends want to tear them down when they grow up.”

For all that he enjoyed the applause he got on his weekly visits to the new Tory heartlands, that shook him, because he knew he wouldn’t get the same warmth closer to home: liberal Londoners who’d embraced him as one of their own just a few years earlier had closed their doors to him, and it hurt.

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Stung into action, Johnson startled aides by announcing he would fly the next day to Glasgow to take over the chair of the COP-26 summit that had started earlier that week. He would spend the next week in Scotland ignoring Nicola Sturgeon and SNP protests to give daily updates on Britain’s leadership in what he called the new battle of our times.

Diesel-petrol cars and vans would be banished. Gas boilers would be banned. Green jobs would proliferate. And the real news: Britain would support the development of new geo-engineering solutions: “Huge machines to suck the deadly carbon out of the skies. Oceans seeded with iron to trigger an explosion of carbon-munching algae. Reflective particles in orbit to reflect back the heat of the sun.”

Closing the COP, Johnson reached for his favourite wartime metaphors:

 “To win this battle, we must work together to build an impregnable shield around our climate and that can only be achieved by developing and mass producing airborne sulphate to ward off deadly radiation.

“The more we pull together and share our expertise, the faster our scientists will succeed. The race to build the shield  is not a competition between countries but the most urgent shared endeavour of our lifetimes. We are in this together and together we will prevail.”

The speech led news bulletins around the world.  The intro to the New York Times report called it “a vaultingly ambitious claim to global leadership whose questionable practicality was eclipsed by its brio and stark moral clarity”. The BBC led on the speech for three days running and even the Guardian leader column praised the PM for taking “global heating” seriously.

Not everyone was quite so impressed. In late November, Baker announced that he had been elected chair of the new Climate Research Group of Conservative MPs, said to have more than 40 members. “We don’t deny the science of climate change or the need to act,” he said. “We just want to know why British workers and taxpayers and motorists should have to make the biggest sacrifices when countries like China and India are responsible for 37 times more carbon than us?”

Meanwhile, a leaked paper from the Treasury’s Net Zero Review talked darkly about the loss of low-wage jobs in carbon-intensive industries, “distributional trade-offs” and even new taxes on carbon. Questioned about the paper in the Commons, Sunak failed to deny any of its details, or to confirm that he believed the PM’s “moonshot” plans to re-engineer the planet were practical or affordable. “Those are questions for the First Lord of the Treasury,” he said with a thin smile.

Dom wasn’t helping much either, always going on about how the focus groups showed that even though people say they care about the planet, they care a hell a lot more about jobs, wages, schools and hospitals. And Carrie had started saying she didn’t like the way Dom and Lee stopped talking when she entered the room, and the looks they gave her sometimes. It all made for a less than jolly atmos in Downing Street sometimes. Sooner or later, Johnson thought, something will have to be done about all that.

But settling back into his set, he considered more immediate matters: his glass was at least half full of good red wine and Carrie had gone home early so he could have another helping of cheese. After a year in power, Boris Johnson thought, life could be an awful lot worse.

She was told that she would die. Instead, she produced Illness as Metaphor, a polemic that argued against viewing the sick body as an incubator of significance. Sontag hated how illness was attended by the language of war and battle. She wanted to render it meaningless. She wanted to purify it of symbolism. And yet, she began her essay with one of the most memorable metaphors in American literature. “Everyone who is born,” she wrote, “holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.” Illness, for her, was a country of the night. Even if we rarely visit, we all enjoy its “onerous citizenship”.

This week, Covid-19 obliged the British Prime Minister to take up residence in that country. It was a migration that shocked and troubled the nation with its speed. The virus is present in Boris Johnson’s body, his body is present in the national discourse, and the language that Sontag so despised is now attached to him like hospital wires and tubes. His designated sub, Dominic Raab, declared his boss “a fighter”, as if he could fell a virus with a strong right hook. The Prime Minister’s father said his son was “optimistic” and “determined”, as if viruses took these attitudes into account as they deform the proteins in the cells of their hosts. “A lot of my son’s character,” Stanley Johnson told the Mail Online, “was formed here and in the local village of Winsford.” (Viruses know about Somerset, too.)

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By Matthew Sweet

Boris Johnson is the most corporeal of Prime Ministers. We know his appetites and frailties. He drinks, and sometimes ruins sofas when he drinks. He fucks. He touches himself. He’s always touching himself. It is his most visible form of promiscuity. His fingers thresh at his hair. His belly resists the restraint of the trouser belt and the tucked shirt. His torso struggles inside his suit, like the Rhinoceros in Kipling’s Just So stories who can’t rid his itchy skin of cake crumbs and burned currants. This discomfort may be confected: it is mysteriously undetectable in that young man in the Bullingdon Club photo, lounging on the steps in Peckwater Quad.

The bulletins from his colleagues insist on the idea of his comfort, but we know this is a medical euphemism for the absence of any immediate mortal crisis. The Prime Ministerial body we now picture is in a state of genuine discomfort. We are not his family — we are, particularly, not his pregnant fiancée — and cannot know the painful intensity of their experience, but we are thinking about the temperature of his skin, the depth of his breathing, the condition of his lungs and throat. We all know the symptoms, because we’ve been checking ourselves for them for weeks.

There’s a difference, however, between our bodies and his. The Prime Minister’s body has a metaphorical dimension. He is in intensive care, and through mechanisms that are hard to imagine in any detail, he is also running the country. If Dominic Raab sounds hesitant and uncertain when discussing this process — he has sometimes resembled John Cleese in that episode of Fawlty Towers in which Basil cannot admit to his friends that Sibyl has left him — then it’s understandable. He is trying to explain an idea that is, in essence, mystical.

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By Maurice Glasman

Johnson is an elected statesman with an interest in the classical past. (His great hero is Pericles, killed by plague in 429BC.) The doubled nature of his position has its origins in the political culture of the ancient world, but it’s also present in a concept from English law that was codified during the Early Modern period. The classic study on the subject was written by the German-American academic Ernst Kantorowicz, a refugee from the Nazis who also suffered in his adopted country when he refused to sign a loyalty oath disavowing any association with Communism. In The King’s Two Bodies (1957), Kantorowicz traced the theological and legal traditions that identified the monarch as simultaneously a person and an embodiment of the realm.

The ruler possessed a Natural Body — one made of flesh and bone and sinew — and a Body Politic, a more mysterious entity that linked him with the power of the state. It is a relationship registered in the strangeness of the declaration, “the king is dead, long live the king,” and in the discussion between Macbeth and his physician, in which the ruthless, blood-slaked usurper of the Scottish throne dreams away the difference between his own health and that of the nation.

“If thou couldst, doctor, cast
The water of my land, find her disease,
And purge it to a sound and pristine health,
I would applaud thee to the very echo,
That should applaud again.”

The chief theorist of this political theology was Sir Edmund Plowden (1518-1585), a lawyer who used the idea to serve a somewhat ignoble cause — securing the rights of Edward VI to the Duchy of Lancaster, which the king had leased before reaching legal age. Plowden asserted that the king’s two bodies were “annexed” together, but that this was not an equal relationship. The body politic was more “ample and large”. It could also correct the weaknesses of its fleshy companion. “The Body politic wipes away every Imperfection of the other Body,” argued Plowden, citing earlier cases on the record. “[It] takes away the Imbecility of his Body natural.” He also proposed an alternative definition of the body politic, under which the monarch was the head of a collective entity composed of all subjects of the crown.

Suggested reading

It's make or break time for Boris

By Matthew Goodwin

To modern ears, these concepts may have a faintly disgusting, Human Centipede quality. But they have persisted. They played their part in the English Civil War and the Glorious Revolution of 1688, and they continue to echo in our own times. Boris Johnson deployed them last November, when he characterised an uncooperative Parliament as “a blocked artery at the heart of the British body politic”. Last March, when he was best known as the head of Vote Leave, Dominic Cummings argued that Jacob Rees-Mogg and his colleagues in the European Research Group “should be treated like a metastasising tumour and excised from the UK body politic”.

How archaic these exchanges now seem. Parliament is suspended. Cummings is ill. Rees-Mogg has vanished from public view, as if removed by some unseen scalpel. Did someone at Conservative Central Office diagnose him as something malignant? Or are such figures now simply too decadent and unserious for the present moment, as the wartime generation concluded of the Bright Young Things?

Susan Sontag wanted to purge our sick flesh of metaphor. She recognised the sometimes lethal danger of viewing the body as a moral space. But freedom from symbolism is a privilege that cannot always be extended to our leaders. It is one of the duties they discharge for us, and in this historical moment, it is one that the Prime Minister might be wise to embrace. The language of combat and character need not be invoked. They are inappropriate and absurd. But if he declares his body a site of crisis, it might prove one of the most valuable and public-spirited acts of his career.

Suggested reading

Plague and the comforts of history

By Tom Holland

It would require the relinquishment of the power he has pursued with a sometimes unseemly hunger. It would require the acknowledgement of a disarray more genuine than the one he assumes when he messes up his hair before going on camera.

It would require a humility and seriousness that he has often lacked — particularly at the beginning of last month, when he was boasting about shaking hands in a Corona-struck hospital, and spreading the message of business as usual.

Does Boris Johnson possess the courage to be ill? We wait by his bedside for news.

Become an adrenaline junkie
Says Polly Mackenzie, chief executive of Demos think tank

Tomorrow, Theresa May will probably have a lie in. Clean out some cupboards. The day after, she’ll go for a walk. Pop to the shops. She’ll tell herself she’s reconnecting with herself. Taking some time to heal. All of us who’ve lost a job in politics have told ourselves the same story.

By Saturday morning she will be crushingly, blunderingly, exhaustingly bored.

There is no job as fast and all-consuming as politics, and no job in politics faster or more all-consuming than being Prime Minister. In Number 10 if you haven’t made eight decisions before breakfast then you’re doing it wrong. Theresa May has been criticised for being slow-moving as PM, and yet she’s still working at a pace most people would find dizzying.

So my advice to Theresa is to refuse to slow down. Speed up. Don’t pootle in the garden or amble through the South Downs: go cliff diving. Learn to snowboard. Jump from a helicopter. If you want to be really brave, you could try taking out the bins. Find that political adrenalin in a daredevil lifestyle, and – like Ed Balls – you could find a future as a national treasure, after all. Maybe even as the next presenter of Top Gear?

Stay in the Commons
Says James Kirkup, Director of The Social Market Foundation

The first thing Theresa May should do is commit to standing for re-election in the next general election. The recent precedent of former PMs cutting and running away from the Commons at the first opportunity should be reversed. The Commons needs the experience and perspective of those who have held the highest office rather more than the lucrative international lecture circuit does. Stay in the Commons, Mrs May.

What to do there, though? A former PM has a platform and the ability to put things on the political agenda that few others can promote. Mrs May should dedicate herself to tackling domestic violence.

This isn’t really about legislative or administrative action. What she should seek is cultural change.

The furore over a late-night row at Boris Johnson’s flat revealed something grim about Britain: an awful lot of people still subscribe to the idea that domestic strife is no-one else’s business, that someone calling the police because they worry about a neighbour’s safety is to be pilloried not praised.

In the Johnson case there is no suggestion of any wrongdoing, but in too many other cases, where women are abused and killed, there is a history of neighbours, onlookers and even the police deciding that the preceding turmoil was “just a domestic” and looking the other way. That indifference helps get women killed.

Perhaps Mrs May’s finest moments as Home Secretary came when she confronted that attitude among the police. Once she’s free of high office, she should return to that territory, and deliver the same blunt message to the country as a whole.

Confront the realities of her ‘hostile environment’
Says Bidisha, broadcaster and author of Asylum and Exile

It’s patronising, sexist and ageist to suggest that a professional, ambitious woman with a lifelong political career should shut up, pack up, move on and tend her garden or get back in the kitchen. So I’m not going to suggest that Theresa May books a few countryside hikes of a lifetime, makes jam or sets up an allotment alongside that of her supposed opposition, actually Brexiteer ally Jeremy Corbyn, where they can toast the English sunset together with some elderberry cordial.

But I do think we’re in danger of over-sympathising with May, simply because of the political trials of the last few years. She certainly looks much more relaxed and relieved now. But before she was Prime Minister, she was the Home Secretary who introduced the (I believe) racist, sadistic and punitive ‘hostile environment’. She is one of the powerful chief architects of the divided, hate crime riddled England we live in now, not some innocent dupe who was left holding the baby.

I think Theresa May should live out her professional days working in a detention centre for asylum seekers, to see the pain she’s caused up close. Maybe it will humanise her approach somewhat. One can only hope.

Write her memoirs
Says Iain Dale, host of LBC 

We’re not very good at knowing what to do with ex Prime Ministers in this country. In America the country calls on the experience of ex-Presidents from time to time – and they enjoy a special place in the country’s affections and respect. Here? Not so much.

Theresa May would be well advised to take some time out to think about her future. It would be a big mistake to take the first thing that comes along. If Russell & Bromley or Christian Louboutin offer her an ambassadorial role, she should resist the temptation, even if it could lead to the delights of a lifetime supply of free footwear.

She should and must write her memoirs, even if they might not prove as financially lucrative as  those of other former prime ministers. It’s her duty to history to write them, even if the process would no doubt prove painful, rather than therapeutic.

My prediction is that she will set up a charitable foundation to promote women’s participation in politics and the protection of women against domestic violence, slavery and FGM. My further prediction is that her former chief of staff, Fiona Hill, will run it.

Become a councillor for Maidenhead
Says Marie Le Conte, author of Haven’t You Heard? Gossip, Power & How Politics Really Works

After three years in Downing Street, it is still unclear why Theresa May ever wanted to become Prime Minister. She clearly did not enjoy the constant media attention or the endless mingling, and it became very obvious very quickly that managing the expectations of several warring factions was not her forte.

What she has always obviously liked, however, is being an MP. From stuffing envelopes for her local party as a teenager to risking the integrity of the United Kingdom to keep her MPs together, she has consistently proved that she is more dedicated to the Conservatives than even most of her colleagues.

Another area close to her heart is Maidenhead; unlike several of her predecessors, she seems genuinely attached to her constituency, attending church there whenever she can and working as a marshal for the annual Easter race even when she was running the country.

So, what now? She could stay on the green benches as a devoted local champion, but she probably has had enough of Brexit wrangling for several lifetimes. Still, politics is in her blood, and going from No10 to retirement surely is a recipe for madness.

Instead, she could do worse than become a councillor in Maidenhead; attending village fetes, tending to neighbours’ hedge-based dilemmas, and staying well away from the national press.

In a way, it feels like the life she has always yearned for; she just took the long way round.

Do some volunteering
Says Julie Bindel, journalist, broadcaster and feminist campaigner

Theresa May, the sexists might say, should devote her time after retiring as Prime Minister to attending dance classes, and flying to NYC to look at shoes. I would far rather that she did volunteer work with asylum seekers and desperately poor migrants in this country, bearing in mind that she has spearheaded many of the heartless policies that have had a terrible effect on these populations.

May is responsible for the Windrush scandal, which wrecked lives and caused huge distress, and has also stood behind legislation that makes it impossible for asylum seekers to earn a living, whilst at the same time taking away their meagre benefits.

She might also like to spend some time taking calls on a crisis line for the victims of domestic violence.  The Tories, under her leadership, have not only close down refuges by removing resources, but are also responsible for the destruction of the criminal justice system which should be providing protection for the victims, and incarceration for the perpetrators that are a danger to women and their children.

May might benefit from a few days at a Rape Crisis Centre to see how the services operate on a shoestring, since her government took away the majority of funding for these support groups. The majority of Tory politicians do not live in the real world. May’s retirement could be the perfect opportunity for her to dip a toe in the water.

Play to her strengths
Says Tanya Gold, freelance journalist

Theresa May does not have a gift for joy – she wanted to be leader of the Conservative Party – so I cannot see her gambolling in the Isles of Scilly like Harold Wilson or sitting in a Farrow & Ball shepherd’s hut like David Cameron.

Prime Ministers used to stay in the House of Commons after they stepped down – or were ousted by a shrieking mob of wankers – but parliamentary democracy no longer has anything like that kind of lustre. So they skulk off, sulking, often to lament and too often to write a bad memoir.

My suggestion is that May should look to her gifts, which are bullying immigrants while pretending not to (the Windrush scandal should be a real stain on her conscience) and being shouted at by infantile men. She should become the head waitress at the awful London restaurant School Dinners, which serves school dinners to men too old to be at school, and like a good caning. It is as despairing as Brexit: “without a doubt the worst meal I have ever had in a London restaurant,” is an average review. It was as awful as the Paddington “fellatio cafe” which never actually opened. She could refuse to admit ethnic minority boys until they show her their papers.

School Dinners has closed down, but that only adds to the pathos.

Nothing
Says Peter Franklin, Associate Editor of UnHerd

What should Theresa May do next? Hmm, let’s see now… how about… nothing? Nothing at all, in fact.

One of the best things about May is that she became Prime Minister at a sensible age: 59. The trouble with young, energetic leaders of the Emmanuel Macron and Justin Trudeau variety is what to do with them afterwards. You don’t want them haunting public life like the spectral Tony Blair or hiding in sheds like the sheepish David Cameron. It’s unseemly.

However, a mature leader – having done his or her last big job – can retire just like normal people do.

Having bungled Brexit and a general election, Theresa May is out on her ear slightly ahead of schedule; but a couple of years on the back benches and she’ll be good to go. There’ll be the inevitable memoirs of course, some charity work and such like, but other than that we need never hear from her again.

One would like to think that our ex-leaders would become wise elders, drawing upon their experience at the pinnacle of power to think deep thoughts about the system of the world. It says something about the shallowness of our politics (or perhaps the omertà of the establishment) that they have so little to share. Even Barack Obama, that most cerebral of ex-Presidents, hasn’t had much to say so far.

Therefore, let’s not demand too much of Theresa May. She’s only had three years in office, but it must have felt like thirty. She’s earned a long, happy and peaceful retirement.

Johnson was introduced by Liz Truss in blood red, as hard as he is soft, promising enforcement of the dream. Then he wove narratives in the air. His narratives, which I think he cannot help, are shameful and multiple. Sometimes they are not even ambitious.

“The fantastic ExCeL building!” he shouted, waving at the interior of this massive shed, as if it were the Royal Albert Hall at the Last Night of the Proms. He can gild ExCel, is his message. He can gild anything, even darkness: it is always darkest, he reminded us, before the dawn. He meant: Brexit is the dawn.

Suggested Reading

How cavalier is Boris?

By Giles Fraser

He looked clean this time at least, and unfrightened. He used to look quite frightened when power approached – and he has the tidiest hair of his life. Boris’s hair is his spirit animal; it tells you the state of his mind. Iain Dale, the grumpy MC, who moaned at the stewards struggling to get microphones to Tory members’ mouths, asked him if he dyes his hair. That is all the lobby is talking about, Dale said, which gives you an idea of the state of the lobby, who are required, these days, to analyse the subconscious yearnings of voters; to rationalise what is insane. Boris refused to answer. For him, personal questions are a short road to hell.

He waved a kipper around instead and said that the EU demanded it be posted to customers with an expensive “plastic ice pillow” which will harm British profits. Brexiteers love to invoke fish. It reminds people that we are an island. The next day the EU said this was not their regulation; they have nothing to say on smoked fish, only fresh fish. But that is Boris’s way: build straw men, and then dismantle them, or not.

Suggested reading

What's the point of political stunts?

By Lance Price

He talked about the non-existent threat to Mars Bars – Remainers say there will be no Mars Bars, or water, after Brexit.  Then he asked: do you think this great country is incapable of making Christmas dinner? It is not really a joke, even if people laughed. It is an insinuation: does it follow that Jeremy Hunt thinks this great country is not capable of making Christmas dinner, and is therefore not a great country at all?

When asked about the Brexit Party’s threat to the Tory Party, he admitted he once met Nigel Farage in a pub for a “cold war summit”. (Always look backwards in time. His constituency does). Why? “I was then a journalist,” he said, with mirth in his eyes. He is still a journalist, and this is his greatest column yet.

He used the old tools though. He gave the stripping look – I would love you if I could – to a woman who asked about debt management. Does he save money? “I’ve certainly spent a lot,” he said. He might have said: “I’ve earned a lot”. It is more Tory. “I’ve spent a lot” is more Trumpian. It says: live through me, for I am a scruffy faux-aristocrat who has known hot women. I am effortless.

Suggested reading

Charisma will only get you so far

By Elizabeth Oldfield

If Great Britain is his Christmas tree, he hangs progressive baubles on it: the dream is yours. Just touch it. The introductory film saw him smiling at Muslims and Jews, lord of a nation whose founding myth belongs to a time when such people were rarely admitted. He is, of course, pro-choice. He praised the idea of a carbon neutral Britain by 2050. He reprimanded Trump for his most recent racist comments, and looked pleased with himself.

Against this necromancy, Hunt is powerless. He looks small and damply middle-class. He doesn’t daydream, or flirt. He can’t speak, as Johnson does, to a national Id. He can’t speak to the hunger, because he doesn’t feel it himself. It doesn’t help that he talks like David Brent from the Office and looks like Nick Clegg: at best, a technocrat. Isn’t that what we are fleeing from?

Brexit has exposed Britain’s devotion to class; many things are exposed by the tide of Brexit. Boris the faux aristocrat could conceivably arrive by horse. Hunt might own a small SUV, and where is the glory in that?

More from this author

Let Top Gear be toxic

By Tanya Gold

Hunt was introduced by a 21-year-old girl, who had fled from Johnson like a spurned lover. I’m still not sure why. She called Hunt the modern Ernest Shackleton. Does that make Johnson the ice? His hands were on his hips; his jacket was off like Call Me Dave [Cameron] in 2006; he looked like he might burst into song. He tried to be funny. He mocked his name; he wondered if his personal hashtag should be #TakeaPuntonHunt; he wondered if he should call himself Hunty McHunt Face. I think he should. Even so, jokes are Boris’s battle-field and Hunt does not belong there.

His pitch is that he is a serious man, and he requires serious questions. Soon Hunty McHunt Face was bogged down in questions about mental health, hospices and tax. He responded reasonably, with some terrible flourishes. He wants to land an economic jumbo jet on Europe’s doorstep. He feels democracy in his gut. He wants to abolish literacy. (That was a mistake).

I sensed that he has already conceded: he said that the Back Boris and It Has To Be Hunt signs should merge at the end. “That is what our country deserves.” He said he would serve at the pleasure of the prime minister, and everyone leaked away.

Overlooking the overlooked

James Bloodworth, journalist and author of the Orwell Prize nominated book Hired

If only May had acted upon those promises she made in that first speech as leader – the one that has become reduced to her ‘citizens of nowhere’ dig – things could have been so different.

In that keynote, delivered to a conference just after the Brexit vote, she surprised all the complacent neo-liberals in her party by lamenting the “division and unfairness all around”.

“Our society should work for everyone,” she told conference delegates, before running through a list of areas in which it wasn’t.

“If you can’t afford to get onto the property ladder… if your pay has stagnated for several years in a row… if you’ve been trying to say things need to change for years and your complaints fall on deaf ears, it doesn’t feel like it’s working for you.”

May took digs at fat cats, tax avoiders and “citizens of nowhere”, pledging to tackle the injustices of low pay and precarious work.

The rest is history. All these promises fell by the wayside as her premiership progressed. Sure, the Taylor Review of Modern Working Practices – which May’s government commissioned – did come up with some interesting and proactive suggestions. And the government promised to at least consult on all but one of Matthew Taylor’s recommendations. But then… nothing.

This was her great opportunity. This is where she could have made a difference to the lives of so many of those people who had voted in the referendum for change. But like so much else, workplace reform was gradually subsumed by Brexit.

So Brexit created Theresa, then destroyed Theresa. And it also contributed to her greatest failure as PM: that signal failure to significantly improve the lives of the ‘left behinds’ she pledged to serve back in 2016.

Her intransigence

Polly Mackenzie, director of Demos

Theresa May’s failure is all Ken Clarke’s fault. He accidentally gave her a brand identity when he was caught on camera calling her a “bloody difficult woman”. She loved it. Her team loved it. Conservative MPs who spent their teenage years pining over a Margaret Thatcher poster loved it. Bloody difficult woman, Mrs May thought: that’s who to be if I want to be loved.

She was always intransigent, as Home Secretary. But once “bloody difficult” got hung around her neck, she revelled in it, sticking to positions as rigidly as the Tin Man in the Wizard of Oz, who got rusted into paralysis by unexpected rainfall.

She fought and argued, unblinkingly, for her withdrawal agreement long after it was dead, long after the body was rolled through the crematorium and the ashes were scattered.

I can understand why she clung to the belief that intransigence would, in the end, pay a political dividend. It seems to be the path to popularity in politics today. The No Deal Brexiteers refuse to budge, even if that risks no Brexit at all – and yet their tribe love them. Jeremy Corbyn built an entire political career out of never changing his mind and young people chant his name at festivals.

The problem, Theresa, is that intransigence only works for ideologues. You can’t be rigidly pragmatic, any more than the Tin Man could start dancing without having his joints oiled. In your resignation speech, you stressed the importance of compromise: the whole point of compromising is that you have to bring people together. If no-one will join you on the dance floor, you need to find a different song. We can only hope the next Prime Minister will do so.

The hostile environment

Bidisha, writer, broadcaster and film-maker

Theresa May’s biggest failure was as Home Secretary, not as Prime Minister. In 2013, she gave a now-notorious speech at the Home Office, introducing the central tenets of the ‘hostile environment’. To me – and this is just my opinion – it was a racist, aggressive, inhumane and sadistic warning. The hostile environment has persisted since then, unabated. It has fanned the flames of (what I see as) an increasingly openly racist, xenophobic and insular England. It has worsened with Brexit – for which it laid the groundwork.

I’ve reminded myself of that Home Office speech when, over the last three years, I’ve started feeling sympathy for Theresa May as Prime Minister. Well – not sympathy, exactly, but a kind of wonder at how she manages to get up every morning, put together an outfit and get through her day of work. She inherited the ultimate ‘glass cliff’ job: cleaning up a man’s stupid mess. David Cameron’s opinion poll on Brexit was callous and dangerous.

May might have convinced herself that she should and must and could ‘deliver Brexit’. She might have shown a steeliness, and an impressive poker face, in calling a snap election that caused her to lose her mandate – and in repeatedly forcing votes on the same unsatisfactory deal. But she does not have the fine shrewdness and responsiveness of the true political survivor – and neither did her predecessor.

May’s resignation speech showed, finally, an awareness of her own isolation and powerlessness. But ultimately, this is a mess of Cameron’s making. Brexit is a mistake and a catastrophe that poisons anyone who touches it, be they Tory, Labour or anything else. May’s departure is simply another inevitable episode in an unpleasant and unnecessary crisis – one that reflects the growing darkness of the political landscape.

The backstop

Helen Thompson, professor of political economy at the University of Cambridge

Theresa May’s departure was probably inevitable from the moment she lost her gamble to establish a Conservative majority big enough to get her withdrawal agreement through the House of Commons.

But she made one crucial misjudgement after the general election. In December 2017, she accepted the EU’s demand that the terms of the UK’s departure include a commitment that nothing would change on the Irish border. After an uproar, she redefined her backstop so that it applied to the whole of the UK, rather than just Northern Ireland – but this alteration left unaltered the commitment to prioritise the Irish border.

Whether the move was justifiable or not, in subordinating Brexit to another claim, May damaged the supply and confidence arrangement with the DUP; gave her ERG critics a permanent line of attack; fuelled the concern among part of the Leave coalition that she was pursuing Brexit in name only; and gave those in Parliament who want to stop Brexit reason to think it could be abandoned. In this political environment, she needed considerable good fortune.

The Commission President, Jean-Claude Juncker, tried to help her with the concessions made before the second meaningful vote, but did not reckon on Geoffrey Cox’s intervention. John Bercow repeatedly tried to thwart her – and managed to, right up until his refusal to take Gareth Snell and Lisa Nandy’s amendment on the third meaningful vote. But Cox was articulating the backstop’s legal logic, and the Speaker had his opportunity because the backstop gave anti-Brexit MPs a justification to keep fighting.

She chose in December 2017 a way of delivering Brexit that had little chance of success and has now paid the price.

Her empty words

Paul Embery, firefighter and trade union official

Theresa May’s finest two moments as prime minister were her inaugural and valedictory speeches. The rest was abject failure.

Her maiden address on the steps of Downing Street in 2016 hit the sort of unifying note that appealed not just to traditional Tory voters but also to those in the working-class Labour heartlands. She spoke of leading a One Nation government, tackling poverty and putting the interests of working-class families before those of the rich and powerful.

This was buttressed by her first Tory conference speech as prime minister, in which she railed against the international elites, untrammelled markets and the concept of being a “citizen of nowhere”. It was a pitch towards those who were, let’s say, not entirely sold on the idea of a liberal, cosmopolitan, borderless world dominated by global corporations.

She had parked her tanks squarely on Labour’s lawn – and some of us inside the Labour party saw danger ahead.

But the rhetoric didn’t match the reality, and her premiership quickly reverted to stale Tory dogma. Most destructively, she continued David Cameron’s programme of austerity, which had always been as needless as it was damaging, and caused suffering to the very people she claimed to be standing up for.

In her departure speech, she mentioned the tragedy of Grenfell Tower and the need to ensure that such a disaster never happens again. These words will ring a bit hollow to those, like me, who work in the fire and rescue service and have witnessed the savage cuts that have been inflicted on our industry over recent years.

On Brexit, she made all the right sounds early on. She had no choice but to affirm that the UK would leave the EU, if necessary, without a deal (frankly, no prime minister could do otherwise without handing an effective veto to the EU). But when the time came, she bottled it. And from that moment, her credibility was shot.

Her final address emphasised the value of compromise. It has its place, of course. But in trying to please everyone, you sometimes end up pleasing no-one. As, in the end, she discovered to her cost.

Her untruthfulness

Tim Bale, professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London and Director of the Mile End Institute

After the initial surge of sympathy provoked in my sentimental old soul by Theresa May’s tears at the end of her speech in Downing Street, all I could think of Oscar Wilde’s words on Charles Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop: “One must have a heart of stone,” Wilde wrote, “to read the death of little Nell without laughing.”

It was a speech of epic self-delusion and self-justification, followed by a veritable flood of hypocrisy from many of those who had made her life – indeed, all our lives – a misery for the last two years. Ultimately, though, they aren’t to blame for the mess the country and the Conservative Party is in today. She is. Where, then, did it all go so terribly wrong?

It was as soon as she stepped through the door of Number Ten Downing Street. Instead of turning round and telling people, particularly in her own party, the truth – namely that the referendum was a close run thing, that people had voted Leave for a myriad of different reasons, that the Irish border was bound to prove problematic, and that, more generally, the EU-27 weren’t going to allow the UK to have its cake and eat it – she decided to present herself as Brexitier-than-thou.

Quite why we can only guess. There are a number of possibilities, even leaving aside the temptation to cast her erstwhile adviser, Nick Timothy as the serpent.

Perhaps it was pure partisan opportunism – the thought of the Tories pulling off Brexit and pulling in many of the four million voters who had supported UKIP in 2015. Perhaps it was the need to prove her personal bona fides after playing the role of reluctant Remainer in the referendum campaign. Perhaps it was her tendency, after five years as Home Secretary, to see everything through the prism of immigration: Vote Leave stressed it; therefore the referendum was won on it; therefore free movement must end; therefore hard Brexit.

From that initial decision everything else flowed.

Her lack of persuasiveness

Jenny McCartney, Journalist and Author

I do not doubt that Mrs May loves her country, as she avowed this morning, and has a strong conception of duty and public service – why else would she have so stoically endured the vitriol constantly poured upon her? The trouble was that the country did not feel as if Mrs May loved it. In that she resembled one of those parents who find themselves tragically estranged from a child for whom they had a powerful internal affection, but seemed unable fully to translate that affection convincingly into words or, often, deeds. 

It was Mrs May who, in 2002, warned that the Conservative Party was in danger of becoming ‘the nasty party’. Yet, in the immediate aftermath of the Brexit vote, her delay in assuring EU nationals of their secure future in the UK indicated a lack of emotional intelligence at a time when the country badly needed such direction. So too did the human distress caused by the Windrush scandal, which stemmed from policies put in place during her time as Home Secretary.

The ‘precariat,’ despite her post-referendum assurances, have felt no more secure under her time in office. Her task of enacting Brexit was a thankless and fiendishly difficult one, but under her direction the UK, at key points, has also seemed an unnecessarily ungenerous place. 

May has great doggedness – an important quality in political life – but an absence of persuasiveness. That proved a dangerous combination. The doggedness repeatedly drew her back to preferred solutions – but without the ability to persuade others of their merits and absorb their concerns, repetition did not improve the outcome. Yet if May’s flaw has, in large part, been sincerity without communication, we must guard now against falling into the opposite trap, and possibly a worse one: a Prime Minister who can communicate without sincerity.

The system

Peter Franklin, editor of UnHerd’s UnPacked column

The political obituaries have already been written: Theresa May was a terrible Prime Minister.

Well, they’re right about that – but for the wrong reasons. Her mistakes and weaknesses, though many and significant, were not crucial mistakes or fatal weaknesses. They did not make all the difference. Rather the most obvious failure of her premiership is a failure of the entire political system: government, opposition, media, every bit of the machine – all the way up to the EU itself, whose collective, history-changing decision it was to make an example, not an ally, of Brexit Britain.

Our own politicians have made that pathetically easy for them. There is not a single faction of any size in this parliament that has shown genuine leadership on Brexit – and precious few individuals. They have wilfully confused compromise with betrayal, and principle with their own self-interest.

Together they made Theresa May’s job an impossible one. It’s hard to look back over the flowchart of her decisions and identify an alternative pathway that would have produced a different result. Given the system she was operating within, she was doomed from the moment she lost her majority – and she’d quite possibly have been doomed if she hadn’t called the snap election.

But this is not to absolve her from all responsibility. Rather, what she’s to blame for is not primarily the decisions she made, but those she didn’t make. The original sin of her premiership was not doing anything about the system that made her downfall inevitable.

There were attacks on the previous regime, but they were petty ones – from the very public humiliation of George Osborne to the ‘not invented here’ abandonment of promising policy initiatives like the Northern Powerhouse and the Life Chances Strategy. At the same time, she left in place many of the worst policies of the Cameron era – such as the counter-productive ‘Help to Buy’ scheme for aspiring homeowners (which is in fact a subsidy for the big developers); the sinking student loan system; and the white elephants of Hinkley Point C nuclear power station, HS2 and Heathrow expansion.

Despite promises of “an economy that works for everyone”, there was no obvious sign of any fundamental shift in the priorities of the system – not in infrastructure investment from London to our other great cities; not in education spending from the bloated university system to the under-resourced technical education sector; not in the tax burden the parasitic rentier class places on those struggling for a stake in the productive economy.

From Whitehall and Westminster, where the power-hoarding and hucksterish culture of politics became more entrenched than ever, to the still left-behind communities that Theresa May imagined would swing behind her insubstantial rhetoric, it became obvious that, in her words, “nothing has changed”.

The failure to deliver Brexit is both a symbol – and ultimately the result – of that much bigger failure.