In the event of Farage entering No. 10, we now know Robert Jenrick would become the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Richard Tice, meanwhile, will ascend to Deputy Prime Minister — as well as overseeing a new department of Business, Trade and Energy. Given the party’s plans for migration, which would mark a break with the post-war trajectory, it’s little surprise that Zia Yusuf, the party’s logistical supremo, will shadow home affairs. Suella Braverman’s focus, meanwhile, is education. 

Glossy press conferences in London may be part of Reform’s reality. But so too, increasingly, are the efforts of the party’s membership. It’s one thing to read headlines declaring Reform has overtaken Labour to become Britain’s largest party, or seeing Zia Yusuf share a viral graphic on social media. It’s quite another to observe hundreds of party activists making voter contacts and collecting data — the meat and veg of political campaigns. 

And that’s exactly what I saw on a rain-lashed Saturday in Gorton and Denton a few weeks ago. Some of those Reform activists, slogging through the mire, came from far away: I met one group freshly arrived from Shropshire. Others were from the seat itself, or elsewhere in Greater Manchester. Across all of those conversations, I was reminded of an important shift. Reform, for all of its brand recognition among opinion-makers — not to mention the fact that its candidate, Matt Goodwin, is a TV presenter — is now a mass party.

In races like Gorton and Denton, there is typically only one party campaigning in such a fashion. During the Corbyn years, the Labour hope was that deficits elsewhere — such as a generally hostile media — could be countered by mass canvassing, social media and in-person conversations. That approach yielded impressive results in 2017 before failing two years later. Before, and since, the Liberal Democrats mastered the art of flooding constituencies come by-election time. In the twilight years of the last government, they were the bane of the Conservative Party. 

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The dark shadow of the Blairites

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And yet, in Gorton and Denton, I saw something new: not just the rise of Reform as a serious national force, but three parties fighting a strong “ground war”. Labour remains a mass party, just. And besides the emergence of Reform as a genuine expression of popular politics, there is now also the Greens. Walking up a residential street, a little past six in the evening — as several St George’s flags fluttered from lampposts — it was hard to miss the party’s campaign HQ. From a distance it seemed reminiscent of a kebab shop: narrow glass shopfront, fluorescent neon sign, people packed inside.

But rather than jolly punters in search of a late-night doner, here were dozens of activists arriving to collect leaflets for delivery. That isn’t normal — most certainly not for a party which, until two years ago, boasted a solitary MP. Zack Polanski’s outfit, as with Farage’s before the last election, should not be discarded as a social media confection. There is real substance beneath the viral TV appearances.

But while the Greens and Reform are both mass parties, the similarities end there. Because for the latter, not only do connections flow down to activists and members, but also up to powerful figures in the media and civil society, like Jim Ratcliffe, as well as much of the disintegrating Tory party, especially donors. Left populism — think Bernie Sanders or AOC — seeks to juxtapose plutocrats against the people. That’s a powerful frame Polanski has adopted, with the Green leader — in his first speech on the job — contrasting a “nation of neighbors” against the billionaire class. The extraordinary thing about the gauntlet Reform has thrown down to the Left is an ambition to be both. Its members are as likely to own an Audi Quattro as a horse.

Multiple motivations drove Farage’s announcement yesterday. One is to signal how Reform is no longer a one-man band, with different figureheads responsible for discrete areas of policy. The bigger point, though, is experience. Remarkably, there are more politicians from the Liz Truss government in Farage’s top team than in Kemi Badenoch’s entire shadow cabinet. That is no accident. If Reform wishes to form the next government, it must perform the political alchemy of being both the party of change, while having familiarity with the apparatus of the state. After all, how else could it hope to change things? 

While rarely mentioned by its progressive critics, this is Reform’s greatest vulnerability. Polling last year revealed that a looming concern among the party’s “soft considerers” is they have no experience of running the country — even when those same respondents agreed with Reform across multiple policy areas. Though most agree that Farage’s insurgents are driving the national agenda, almost half the public believes the country would go from bad to worse with the former MEP in No. 10, not least because he has no experience in government. To take the top job having never been the Leader of the Opposition or served in a Cabinet would be without precedent in the modern era. It’s almost impossible to imagine.

So it is little surprise that while a frankly astonishing 42% of the public think Reform “understands the problems facing Britain”, they are still more likely to perceive Labour as “fit to govern”. The more data you see, the more Farage’s strategy of embracing former Tories — like Braverman and Jenrick — makes sense. Despite the personal popularity of both figures among the Reform membership, their admission to the party’s ranks at Westminster is intended as a signal to the wider electorate. Having built a mass organization, Reform is now trying to look like a party of government. 

It would be naive not to foresee a tension emerging here. Indeed, that has already come to the fore. Last week, Rupert Lowe, formerly a Reform MP for Great Yarmouth, launched a political party of his own: Restore Britain. Restore is the fully-leaded version of Reform, with one critical addition: its politics are, for better or worse, more heavily inflected by online discourse. Lowe’s virtuoso social media game is a big reason why the party has allegedly attracted tens of thousands of members in under a week, with Lowe himself announcing on X that it had overtaken the Liberal Democrats. But that strength is also a weakness, with the former businessman’s online superfans not necessarily reflective of the wider public. According to one poll, just 8% of voters even know who Lowe is. Perhaps Farage’s greatest strength over the years — whether it was judging public sentiment for a second Brexit referendum, or here — is to appreciate that Twitter (and now X) isn’t real. Besides being more fun, it turns out that going to the pub is a better gauge of public sentiment. 

Could a fragmenting radical Right, partly fueled by Reform’s pursuit of elite credibility, come back to bite Farage? It’s too early to say, but that by-election in Gorton and Denton could provide a clue. Standing for Advance UK, yet another Reform offshoot founded by a one-time Farage acolyte, Ben Habib (reputedly recognized by just 4% of voters), is Nick Buckley. A local campaigner around homelessness and anti-social behavior, Buckley was awarded an MBE in 2020 for his services to young people and the community in Greater Manchester. Intriguingly, his campaign seems more interested in attacking Reform’s Matt Goodwin than either the Green or Labour candidates, with Buckley even attacking academics who enter politics (Goodwin is a former professor of political science). 

Speaking on Tuesday, Farage sounded like one of the Gallagher brothers as he castigated Lowe, insisting that the two had never even been friends, and that the former Southampton chairman is someone defined by crises and needless confrontation. That enmity was tinged with a certain recognition, though. Of all the parties on the Right seeking to steal a march on Farage — from Advance UK to UKIP and the Heritage Party — it is Restore which presents the greatest challenge. 

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By Samuel Rubinstein

It is an inescapable fact that British politics increasingly resembles a proportional representation (PR) system, on both the Left and Right, only without the voting system. Hours after the Reform announcement yesterday, a new poll from YouGov put four parties — Reform, Labour, the Conservatives and the Greens — between 17% and 24%. Suddenly Lowe’s wrecking project feels like it could make the difference, while the need to win wavering Tories becomes ever more critical for Farage and his friends. 

For more than two decades, I’ve heard the arguments against electoral reform. A first-past-the-post system guarantees strong mandates, I was told as a student of A-level politics. It provides stable, competent government, I was informed a few years later as an undergraduate. Most important of all, as I learned in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, it means — in contrast to the Continent — that the extremes can never define the center. Increasingly, none of this makes sense, and it feels curiously similar to the cope pumped out before the Brexit vote in 2016. Nobody believes this stuff anymore, least of all those with any power. If anything, our first-past-the-post system seems to contribute to the abiding sense of permanent dysfunction. 

Lord Hailsham was right when he said that the Westminster system can lead to a form of “elective dictatorship”. It’s just, in the case of contemporary Britain, we persistently concentrate power onto two parties incapable of running the country. They are both, ideologically and in terms of personnel, exhausted. Farage’s job, as witnessed on Tuesday morning, is to convince enough people that he offers a genuine alternative. But it’s a sign of the times — and an important one at that — that the radical Right could be balkanizing before it’s even achieved power.

Only weeks ago, it was received wisdom that neither Badenoch nor Keir Starmer would fight the next election. They were dead leaders walking: chronically out of their depth, surrounded by plotters with a battery of not-so-subtle leadership pitches being fired regularly from their own benches — not least those relentless vertical video releases from a baby-faced liberal Cameroon turned gaunt, camera-stalking national-populist. PMQs had become a reliably stultifying exercise in futility, as our inept, dull Prime Minister batted away tame questions from the limp Leader of the Opposition. While Starmer’s conference was hijacked by Andy Burnham’s premature declaration of frustrated ambition, Badenoch’s was funereal, with stories emerging of the party leader forlornly doomscrolling and writing sad self-help notes. These two hapless captains were going to go down with their ships.

And yet, suddenly, we’re supposedly witnessing what is being optimistically termed the “Kemi bounce” — or, let’s be blunt, a slight nudge upwards for her personal polling numbers. Before yesterday’s surprise suspension of Jenrick, there had already been signs of life in Badenoch. She had given some assured performances in the Commons, even confidently delivering impressions of the flailing Labour Chancellor who had blamed critiques of her dismal reign on latent misogyny. Here, Badenoch was on strong ground: downplaying the platitudes of identity politics is her bread and butter.

But then, astonishingly, came her sacking of Jenrick, long a thorn in her side. It is a political truism that the opposition is in front, but your enemies behind. Now Jenrick is safely out in the open.

Badenoch’s revelations of treachery bumped her restive justice man into a precipitous embrace of Nigel Farage, who, let’s not forget, had recently suggested that Reform would soon be viewed as moderate compared with Jenrick’s increasingly hard lines on race and migration. At the hastily arranged press conference to announce the latest recruit to the turquoise barmy army, Farage was left to enjoyably improvise as Jenrick arrived late for his first stage call. After some painfully awkward jokes, the turncoat turned up only to deliver a wooden speech, characteristic of the machine politician Westminster belches out so uniformly and regularly. Here on the stage was the difference between the Tories and Reform represented in human form.

Observers could only ask: why would Jenrick, who has spent the past 18 months positioning himself as a Conservative leader-in-waiting, suddenly decide to defect to the disruptors? We have watched him transform from what Michael Gove identified as a Tory-boy archetype that the public are all too familiar with, into an aggressive and nakedly ambitious attack dog. He’d been on Ozempic, he’d finally got a haircut that didn’t scream “Secretary of the Nottinghamshire Young Conservatives 2014”, and he was suddenly at one with the harsher, meaner, populist zeitgeist, plugged into the Very Online matrix of the New Right’s anonymous shitposters, echoing their grievances. Fueled by Elon Musk’s Twitter, the discourse had moved on from Badenoch’s anti-woke talking points, calcifying into a politics that flirts, at one remove, with old-fashioned, blood-and-soil ethno-nationalism. Against Jenrick’s dynamic, X-friendly communications, Badenoch was yesterday’s woman.

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But Jenrick’s path to Tory leader was never assured, despite him being the bookmakers’ favorite. The 2024 election wipeout left the party a rump organization dominated by the kind of Whiggish, true-blue, free-market social liberals disgusted by what they regard as a dangerously radical populist turn that Jenrick was embracing. Their constituents may force more Conservative Party creep towards Reform-lite positions, as the mood of the whole country sours against small boats, large taxes and visible decline. But deep down, these shire Tories long for the days of their post-financial crisis hegemony, of Dave and George and pasty taxes, for a return to the status quo, before the Leavers and the MAGA-adjacent got their way. They are, though, hopelessly out of step.

And yet Jenrick was one of them not long ago. He was a Remain campaigner, who in 2017 called for a more liberal immigration policy, and who signed a letter denouncing Farage’s “intolerance” and the Brexit “dystopia”. As recently as 2022 he condemned Suella Braverman’s description of small boat arrivals as an “invasion” and warned against using language that “demonizes people”. His Damascene conversion to all the ascendent neuroses of the New Right tribe, with ubiquitous anti-migrant posturing at the forefront, will leave voters wondering whether he really believes anything at all.

Jenrick isn’t the first politician to display a knack for protean transformation in the service of his own career. His political versatility mirrors the intellectual and spiritual shifts occurring on the British Right as old institutions and old ideas collapse under the weight of the past two decades of failure. He managed to keep a straight face as he reeled off the reasons behind his political transfiguration: real wages stagnant since 2007; courts and prisons in disarray; the collapsing state of everyday services; regional inequalities that leave the real England, outside of London and the south east, as a closer equivalent of Bulgaria than competitor nations like France or Germany; and a low-waged, low-productivity economy addicted to consistent and sustained influxes of cheap migrant workers.

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Who comes after Starmer?

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And yet, Jenrick was a member of the government that presided over the deepening of British decline. As a Reform MP, it will be galling for his Conservative former colleagues to watch him campaign so flagrantly against their own shared record. As an immigration minister, he spoke of “ramping up” the procurement of “even more” hotels to accommodate Channel migrants. His handling of migrant housing led one Conservative MP to complain that the part Jenrick played was “so bad and chaotic” that he “should consider his position”.

Jenrick, though, isn’t alone. His former colleague, Nadhim Zahawi, also fled to Reform this week, leaving the insurgents open to the charge of simply being a lifeboat for desperate Tory deserters. The contamination effect of the defections will make it difficult for Farage’s party to continue to identify as a radical disruptor while it welcomes any comers. Nor will it be able to deliver such an effective kick against Westminster’s detested establishment with all the old-guard in tow. Perhaps sensing this, Farage has now set a cut-off date for politicians hoping to cross the floor: May 7, the day of the local elections. For now, Jenrick is “in sackcloth and ashes”, Reform’s leader told reporters, given his serial failures in government, and his involvement in years of slow-motion social collapse. Whether voters will be so forgiving remains to be seen.

He’s not the only one for whom Thatcher’s looming face recalls a conservative adolescence of furtive, Freudian desires to kill Daddy and marry Maggie — of political vigor, economic brawn, Britannia unchained, and memories of happily selling England by the pound in the name of Austrian economists and market efficiency. But all that feels very distant now. For if opposition party conferences are meant to be about rallying the troops, raising spirits for the fight against a woefully unpopular government, the troops today feel demoralized. The atmosphere is of a wake soundtracked by a aging tribute band.

For the Prime Minister’s losses have not been Kemi Badenoch’s gains. The faithful are vanishingly thin on the ground. Conference is empty; any of the sparse activity seems palpably futile. The quintessential party of government is being out-flanked on the Right by a top-down, one-man start-up act with little-or-no governing pedigree, but possessed of an appeal which speaks directly to the public’s baser, zero-sum instincts.

Gawping at ladies’ dresses, meanwhile, the Tories have clearly left the usual party-political state of self-delusion and entered a collective hallucination. Rather than stage a fightback, the foot-soldiers of the modern Conservative Party have retreated into nostalgia, yearning for the last time they were an ascendant force, forging a new national character with brutal efficiency, and taking aim against socialist Britain and the statist blob.

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Britain’s wage slaves are revolting

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Here, at Thatcher-fest, is a world in which 2008 never happened, in which the entire model upon which the Iron Lady and her party built post-1979 Britain hadn’t fallen apart under the weight of an over-leveraged, out of control financial services sector. What’s more, the conditions which allowed the economic offer of Thatcherism to develop are no longer apparent. We’re no longer an energy exporter, enjoying a steady flow of North Sea tax receipts, and we’re not experiencing buoyant growth off the back of Chinese market reforms and Reaganite deficit spending. Nor is there a cross-border trend which allows government to escape the analog economy of coal and steel, instead embracing the services and silicon chips of the late-20th century.

Taken together, the formula the Conservatives pursued for the past half-century has left us deeply vulnerable. We have an economy reliant on global trade flows and inward foreign investment with a yawning balance of payments; the UK recorded a trade in goods deficit of £226 billion last year, only partly offset by service exports. At the same time, we have privatized our assets, and left our infrastructure weak, and prioritized a growth model that concentrates wealth in London and the South East. In the regions, our industrial base withers. This was deemed to be a price worth paying, not only because manufacturing could be cheaply offshored, but also because the decline of industry tamed our once-mighty trade unions, an essential prerequisite of Thatcherite hegemony.

None of these prescriptions suits our era of geopolitical competition. Nor does the Thatcherite policy mix quell the populist backlash fermenting outside the metropolitan citadels. Even in urban areas, the primary beneficiaries of five decades of market liberalism, whereby the service industries and “knowledge economy” prospered, residents now balk at voting Conservative, turned off by the provincial “Little England” aesthetics that offend their more refined, liberal-cosmopolitan tastes. Former industrial powerhouses and factory-dominated monotowns have meanwhile morphed into something we now call “left behind” Britain, now rising in nationalist revolt. There was a brief period where a nascent red Toryism, with an agenda focused on regional investment and industrial revival, tied together a Leave-voting, post-industrial working-class with more affluent voters in the southern shires. But that Johnsonite experiment collapsed after Partygate, and, here, at Tory conference, there seems little interest in reviving a political strategy that conservative opinion writers chide as “neo-Brownite social democracy”.

The Tories, with few exceptions, have no alternative and no response to the questions of the age. Over breakfast, I overhear four delegates discussing their hangovers and fantasizing about abolishing the minimum wage. (It “has killed the service industry”, apparently.) One was giddy about Badenoch sitting behind him during one of Mel Stride’s appearances. Another was buzzing with excitement about the prospect of seeing Robert Jenrick. The shadow justice secretary is easily the most assured and media-savvy of the shadow cabinet. A former Remainer Cameroon, who now seems happier among the very online New Right, Jenrick is nakedly ambitious in a way that is unflattering.

But he is at least aligning himself with an emerging zeitgeist, aware of the scale of public discontent with a tired, failing political class, and the widespread disgust that defines the popular mood. His conference speech was full of Faragist sound and fury — “the collapse of the old order is in sight”, he told the hall, a vivid rebuke to the tradition of Burkean moderation and empiricist skepticism of continental-style ruptures that English conservatism embraced for four centuries.

In the end, though, Jenrick is no Thatcher: and not merely because he lacks her charisma as the political embodiment of Britain as a nation of shopkeepers. Stuart Hall, the Marxist cultural theorist, was in awe of the magnetic power of Thatcherism in its heyday. He was fascinated by its achievements, its construction of a new social bloc, an electoral coalition around a new political and economic consensus. It turned an aspirational working-class, made homeowners under Right to Buy, away from socialism. It united them with anxious suburbanites worried about crime, along with petty bourgeois business owners sick of union militants. In tow came the City of London and the “yuppies”, ready to be unshackled from a regulatory state.

“As an ideology”, Hall wrote, “Thatcherism addresses the fears, the anxieties, the lost identities, of a people. It invites us to think about politics in images. It is addressed to our collective fantasies, to Britain as an imagined community, to the social imaginary.” Its success lay in articulating grievances, exploiting crises, distilling a feeling, a mood, a collective (sub)consciousness into a political project, uniting disparate and sometimes contradictory strands of policy and political demographics into a unified, coherent whole. Thatcher’s Anglican traditionalism and old-fashioned family values sat awkwardly alongside breakneck industrial modernization that destroyed centuries-old communal bonds, replacing a culture of collectivism with a raucously selfish individualism epitomized by a new “Loadsamoney” social category. But her political skill lay in papering over these cracks.

There is nothing approaching this kind of hegemonic ambition in Jenrick, his fierce rhetoric and frenzied viral posting notwithstanding. He may be assured in his culture war comfort zones, in his diatribes on crime, migration and patriotic renaissance. But he ultimately has no answer to the 17-year economic funk in which Britain still finds itself. Thatcherism, for all its faults, was a renewal project that succeeded in transforming Britain, identifying losers as well as winners, and turning the country away from a spluttering postwar model.

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Where the grocer’s daughter met a crisis of social democracy and the collapse of postwar Keynesianism with a return to Victorian morality and Whiggish, free-trading economic liberalism, the Conservatives look at our own period of secular decline and can only flog the dead horse of her Thatcherite first principles. A financial services boom and the lifting of capital controls won’t save us now. There are few public assets, few national industries left to sell to the highest bidder. The family silver is gone.

Somewhere in the wings, figures such as Nick Timothy pursue an agenda more congruent with the times. His blue-collar conservatism talks about reindustrialization; about productive, well-paid manufacturing work; about an active, interventionist state. Combined with an inclusive patriotism and restrictionist migration policy, that’s a fruitful political positioning for an electorate tired of a libertine Left and libertarian Right. But it’s not where the Conservative Party is as a whole, and certainly not where Badenoch is, nor where Jenrick has dared go before he makes his pitch to a membership of small-state true believers.

Reform is already beginning to pivot away from the politics of the “saloon-bar Thatcherite”, embracing public ownership, aspects of the welfare state, and attacking the banking sector. A Tory activist tells me that many of his comrades are treating this year’s conference as a goodbye party, a final hurrah with the True Blue crowd, before crossing no-man’s land to Nigel’s turquoise army. This is perhaps less down to ideology than personality. Like Thatcher, after all, Farage addresses the fears, the anxieties, the lost identities, of a people. His electoral coalition will constitute a rebuilt version of the short-lived 2019 realignment, uniting left-behind Britain with more affluent, more rural constituencies. Thatcher created her voter base. Who, in contrast, are Kemi Badenoch’s people? Smoking a cig, a senior party member tells me she’s “not a leader”, and siren voices in the party are growing increasingly vocal in favor of yet another change at the top.

But, then, who are Jenrick’s people? His preferred strategy seems to be that of the Farage tribute act, a bandwagon-jump, based on the calculation that if you can’t beat them, copy them. If the shadow justice secretary takes over, he’ll merely be the fifth leader the party has elected in five years, within an organization struggling with its own identity, grasping at the straws of long-past glories but campaigning against their own 14 years of failure. The Tories are left unsure of their purpose in a world that they created but that has moved on, sailed away, leaving them stranded, downing pints in Manchester’s Midlands Hotel, wondering if their best bet is to jump aboard the good ship Reform. The Iron Lady will only sink them.

One obsequious biographer called it the “crunch that was heard around the world”. Elon Musk and Ben Shapiro praised his vim. Poilievre suggested that the Right could make headway in cultures that appeared stacked against them by aggressively rebutting mainstream media. Few Canadians read Urquhart’s Times Chronicle, but hundreds of thousands saw Poilievre’s alpha demolition of him on YouTube and shared it on what was then Twitter. By 2024, he had already put out 3,000 social media videos and amassed 500,000 subscribers to his YouTube channel and a million Twitter followers. He repeatedly promised to “Axe the Tax”, “Build the Homes” and “Stop the Crime”.

This visceral style thrilled the Anglophone Right. Mainstream conservative parties in Britain and Australia wanted to learn how he had won a hearing in a centrist country that usually leans mildly Left. As recently as January, James Heale wrote in The Spectator that “there are few party leaders who excite British Conservatives more. Both Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick have visited Canada to try to learn from his playbook.” No wonder: Poilievre was then 20 points ahead in the polls and preparing for a federal election in which he was an “existential threat” to Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government. Australian conservatives were no less admiring: one explained that Poilievre had forged a “pragmatic working-class conservatism” that had enticed voters from the woke Liberals and socialist NDP. It was a good omen for his Australian counterpart Peter Dutton, a battler championing cost-of-living issues against a Labor government that represented only the affluent.

These discussions of Poilievre’s success now read oddly. Donald Trump’s re-election should have confirmed his passage to power this year as all but inevitable, especially once the President’s posturing on tariffs hastened Trudeau’s resignation as prime minister. Instead, it has been a meteor strike on the platform Poilievre has spent years putting together. Although pollsters in Canada are a fractious bunch, they currently converge in finding that Poilievre’s lead has dwindled to a tie with the Liberals. At the federal election on 29 April, Mark Carney, the newly appointed Liberal leader and Trudeau’s successor as Prime Minister, is set to win enough seats to form a minority or even a majority government.

What explains Poilievre’s sudden implosion? In a scathing but comprehensive recent biography, Ripper: The Making of Pierre Poilievre, the historian Mark Bourrie points out that his thinking on most subjects has not advanced much since adolescence. Poilievre’s energy in content creation, which has naturally impressed the Anglophone Right, may turn out not to compensate for his intellectual rigidity.

As a young activist and student in late Nineties Calgary, Poilievre absorbed from Milton Friedman’s writings the lesson that the state was the enemy of liberty and prosperity. The job of politicians was simply to shrink its demands, then to get out of the way of the market. There was a partisan edge to this faith: Poilievre shared the conviction of many Albertans that the eagerness of Liberal governments to siphon off its wealth for their voter base in eastern Canada explained the wild fluctuations of their prairie province’s economy, which depended heavily on the extraction of oil and gas.

After helping the insurgent Reform Party to absorb the moribund Progressive Conservatives and form a new Conservative Party of Canada, Poilievre entered Parliament in 2005. He served as a minister in Stephen Harper’s government and in 2022 finally became leader of his party in opposition. Throughout that time, he consistently condemned efforts to grow the state. He opposed subsidized daycare (better to cut taxes so one parent could afford to stay at home), benefits for indigenous people (too dependent on handouts in his view), and payouts to furloughed workers during the pandemic.

His libertarianism finally caught on during the cost-of-living crisis that set in after the Covid pandemic, when his calls to “axe the tax” on carbon consumption suggested a sensitivity to the plight of ordinary Canadians. And though he had once written them off as incorrigible progressives, his slogans now resonated particularly with younger people, who polls reveal are disenchanted with and even embarrassed by Canada. As Harper’s minister for electoral reform, Poilievre had stopped the Elections Canada agency from trying to boost voting by the young. Yet the spike in Canada’s already high house prices and the inflation during the pandemic led to a new assessment: the young would now hear the argument that the state was preventing them from enjoying the lifestyles of their parents. Poilievre explained that Trudeau’s tax on carbon consumption generated the “Justinflation” that put independence and homeownership beyond their reach.

In particular, Poilievre tailored his message to men in their twenties, around 35% of whom now still live with their parents. Though in his forties when he became leader of the opposition, he began to resemble the denizens of the transnational manosphere. He ditched his nerdish spectacles, dyed his hair and wore tight t-shirts to emphasize his gym-honed physique. Meme-makers digitally inflated his muscles to turn him into a grinning, tax-cutting chad. He praised and had periodic chats with the psychiatrist Jordan Peterson: their last interview has more than five million views.

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Yet while Poilievre fraternized with culture warriors, he managed to come across as merely “based” rather than extreme: a sardonic opponent of woke follies. In 2022, his defiant backing for protestors who blockaded Ottawa in an attempt to overturn restrictions on travel for unvaccinated people won him the conservative leadership. Poilievre had taken his shots, but argued that “inflammatory” contempt for the truckers was emptying grocery stores and pharmacies. He also attacked “whacko” experiments with the decriminalization of street drugs, which had supposedly turned the downtowns of cities such as Vancouver into open-air drug dens. The Liberals were ideologues who had “broken” Canada, leaving many of its people “just hanging on by a thread”.

His commonsense pitch has attracted conservatives in Britain and Australia because its unapologetic materialism is free of MAGA’s theocratic flourishes. Poilievre’s adoptive mother was a conservative Catholic who took him to demonstrations outside abortion clinics; as a young activist, he mixed with Creationist Protestants. Yet as leader of the opposition, he reversed his earlier opposition to gay marriage and has deflected rote Liberal accusations that his party would restrict abortion rights. His social vision is a trad yet highly generic ideal of suburban contentment: so much so that the stock footage chosen to illustrate one of his speeches on “our home” mainly came from the American Midwest.

Poilievre ensured his indictments of the Liberals were never fact checked. He has systematically avoided interviews with journalists from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation or newspapers, shrewdly recognizing that the audience for such legacy media in Canada as in other Western societies is greying and dwindling. Instead of “Justin’s journos”, he favored an archipelago of alternative news organizations. Although Canada’s print media leans center-right and is largely owned by Americans, Conservatives these days like to imagine themselves bucking elite censorship. Websites such as Ezra Levant’s Rebel News, the Post Millennial, and Candice Malcolm’s True North offer their readers the samizdat truths the elite do not want you to read. Although often dismissed as Maple MAGA, a northern outpost of Trumpy misinformation, they are characteristically Canadian. Levant resembles Poilievre in being a rock-ribbed Albertan conservative who has devoted his career to defending the West’s fossil fuel industries against effete greens from eastern Canada. Poilievre promised to reward these truth-tellers by giving them government subsidies and defunding the English-language operations of the CBC.

These sites amplified Poilievre’s view of Canada as a “broken” country and broadcast it to the rest of the world. Musk said that “Canadian truckers rule”; more considered commentators represented them as blue-collar rebels against the “laptop classes” who had clamored for the lockdowns that did not affect them personally. Trump’s belief that Canada is a fentanyl dealer’s paradise owes much to productions such as the film Vancouver is Dying, a safari of drug taking and homelessness on the city’s Downtown East Side, which now has 4.5 million views on YouTube. Its maker Aaron Gunn is now running for election with Poilievre’s Conservatives.

This convergence in rhetoric became a grave problem once Trump started his pantomime campaign to annex Canada, to which Poilievre has not yet found a convincing response. Much of his base in the West admires the President’s politics and is not much fussed by his talk of annexation, given that for years it has flirted with the idea of Alberta’s secession from Canada. That might explain why his comments on Trump have been too muted to please many Canadians outside Alberta, while nonetheless being “negative” enough to annoy him. Doug Ford, the conservative but undogmatic premier of the province of Ontario, has meanwhile stolen his limelight with his theatrical promises to retaliate against American tariffs. Poilievre needs to win many federal seats in Ontario to form a majority government, but Ford has pointedly held back from his forthcoming election campaign.

The other problem was that Poilievre could not stop harping on about Trudeau’s carbon tax — even though Mark Carney reduced the carbon tax to zero in one of his first acts as Prime Minister. Rather than finding a new issue to campaign on, he has salvaged the podium stands and campaign merchandise that promise to “axe the tax” by warning of Carney’s plans to resurrect the tax if elected. His calls for a beefed up military aside, he is still recommending a shrunken state to a public that seeks protection against a foreign menace.

During the years in which he targeted Trudeau for personally breaking Canada, Poilievre apparently devoted little thought to the fact that he might have to fight someone else in an election. The Conservatives have been left to test attack lines on Carney in real time. Perhaps he is a well-heeled “globalist” not truly committed to the fight for Canada’s economic independence. Or maybe he is “Marx Carney”, who helped to craft Trudeau’s socialist policies. The website Juno News reported that one of his children is a “hard-Left” trans activist who had sought treatment at the “discredited” Tavistock Clinic in London. The implication was that Carney — like Kamala Harris — would be more interested in fussing about pronouns than in ordinary folk.

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Poilievre did not authorize these attacks on his rival’s family — although the founder of Juno News is a favorite journalist of his. But they seem likely to hurt the Conservative leader all the same. The tactics of his outriders encourage a perception he desperately needs to dispel: that the Conservatives share the feral methods of MAGA Republicanism. The sneering vigor with which Poilievre pitched into Trudeau online was the making of him, but is easily cast as divisive now that Trump has put the very existence of the nation under threat — rhetorically at least. Although the party has tried to respond by upping the patriotic content of its sloganeering — it is now marching under the resonant but ambiguous banner of “Canada First for a Change” — it has not changed its fundamentally negative approach.

Poilievre’s aggressive style still plays well with angry young men, but is promoting a drift towards a two-party system that promises to benefit the Liberals. That is because Liberals are recovering in the polls not by poaching Conservative voters, who largely remain loyal to Poilievre, but by hoovering up the Leftist supporters of the New Democratic Party, who may reluctantly vote for the banker Carney to keep him out of power. The recent announcement that reporters will not be allowed to travel with Poilievre during the forthcoming election campaign shows he has no intention of changing his preferred style of communication.

Poilievre’s problems should remind his international admirers that a mastery of the medium cannot compensate for a rigid message. It is easy enough to borrow his online playbook. Nothing could be more Canadian than the taut videos in which Robert Jenrick puts on casual but body-conscious clothing to speak fearlessly about his broken country. Yet in modernizing their rhetoric, conservatives need to ensure that it remains true to the distinctive traditions of their own country. Poilievre could not have guessed that a majority of Canadians would come to hear Trump’s voice in the libertarian rallying calls of Alberta. But the furious persistence with which he repeated them probably means it is too late to correct that impression.

In some ways, the relatively slow pace of Lawson’s political career is itself the point. Lawson was chancellor during the deregulation of the City of London in the “Big Bang” of 1986 and it was he, in 1988, who introduced a top rate of income tax of 40% — lower than it had been for many years before and lower than it is now. In short, Lawson achieved more without being prime minister than any recent prime minister achieved during their time in Downing Street. Lawson, in fact, was a rare example of a British politician who had the sense to recognise that his great gifts did not necessarily make him prime minister material. He was never a candidate for the leadership of his party.

One of the problems created by the febrile state of Conservative Party politics in the years since 2016 is that any Tory MP thinks he or she could be prime minister. Shortly after losing his parliamentary seat, Steve Baker gave an interview to Spectator TV in which he seemed to suggest that having read Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People gave him a unique insight into ”leadership”, equipping him to lead his party and his country. Sunak is the last survivor of an age when senior Tory politicians were expected to be substantial and able people. As well as Lawson, the Thatcher Cabinet contained, at various times, Michael Heseltine, Douglas Hurd, Ken Clarke, Cecil Parkinson and Norman Tebbit, all of whom achieved important things in their ministerial positions. All were people who might plausibly have been prime minster, or else have had a successful career out of Parliament. Heseltine, for one, had made a fortune in business. When he resigned from the Cabinet, he took his ministerial driver onto his own payroll — probably offering him more money and a flashier car to drive.

Like Heseltine, Sunak had a successful career in business before he went into politics. His enemies sometimes say that he was well qualified for any position other than prime minister, but the alarming thing about his two potential successors is that they seem unqualified for all jobs as well as that of prime minister. If you were interviewing for a post in middle management and the recruitment agency sent you the CVs for Robert Jenrick and Kemi Badenoch, you would ask for your money back. Many of the most able Conservatives — Dominic Grieve or David Gauke — were driven out of the party by Boris Johnson, and I suspect that some Conservative MPs are beginning to feel uncomfortably like those Red Army soldiers in June 1941 who had to go into battle after Stalin had shot their best generals.

The second respect in which Sunak’s departure marks the end of an era relates to the politics of conviction. Sunak’s enemies portray him as a mere technocrat. They imply that he would be happier in the later stages of Ted Heath’s administration than in the government of Margaret Thatcher. This is an absurd misunderstanding. Having convictions, and being willing to act on them, is not the same as making statements about the importance of convictions. On the whole, the language of the Thatcher government was remarkably moderate. It had a small number of central principles and was usually pragmatic about the means by which it implemented them. Thatcher’s ministers did not, for example, say in public that they wished to crush the National Union of Mineworkers; they probably did not even say it in private until they had decided that there was no other means to get what they wanted. Compare this to the public war dances of senior Tories as they declare their willingness to fight some inoffensive institution — the Office for Budget Responsibility or European Convention on Human Rights — to which leader writers on the Daily Mail have taken a dislike.

Sunak talked soft but did more to implement the policies of the current Tory Right than any other front bencher. He voted for Brexit in 2016. As chancellor, he seems to have argued against lockdown more than any other minister and to have done the most to ease its impact. As prime minister, he did not even pay lip service to environmental policies — incidentally, this last stance would have pleased Lawson but exasperated Thatcher.

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The contrast between Sunak and Liz Truss is particularly marked. Sunak is the urbane Jesuit who turns out to be willing to kill or be killed for his faith. Truss, by contrast, resembles a character in one of the more depressing Graham Greene novels. She believes in belief but does not have it. No one seriously thinks that she believes in anything. Perhaps she hopes that she will be granted the gift of ideological extremism if she goes on talking to Tucker Carlson — just as Greene’s characters hope that they will be granted the gift of faith if they keep on attending Mass and making their confessions.

If we truly want to understand why Sunak’s departure matters, we should think back to a phrase that Lawson coined to refer to the government’s Medium Term Financial Strategy in the early Eighties: “Rules Rule Ok.” It sounds a banal remark until one looks at the context. Lawson’s view was that economics must be governed by predictable and inflexible consequences — people must know that if they contracted debt they would have to pay it back and not see it inflated away. Lawson wanted to escape the notion that the government might suspend what he saw to be the rules of the market when it became electorally advantageous to do so. This meant, by the late Eighties, that Lawson supported the creation of an independent central bank. It was also the reason why Lawson was sometimes, at that time, interested in an alignment of European currencies. He would probably not, even then and even in private, have put it in such blunt terms but, effectively, he liked Europe for the very reason that modern Conservatives dislike it — because it keeps important decisions out of the grubby hands of the British electorate.

 A Conservative Party that revolved around rules had implications that extended beyond economics. Thatcherism was, above all, a response to the disorder of the Seventies — street crime and violent picket lines played a large role in the evolution of Conservative thought. It is interesting, incidentally, to note how often British Conservatives in the Seventies saw the United States — with its drugs, student protest and the dystopian chaos of New York in that decade — as a kind of anti-model for their own politics. More than anything else, Thatcher believed in the rule of law. It was, admittedly, an easy belief for a Conservative to sustain when so many judges made no secret of their own Right-wing opinions.

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What has changed since then? One simple answer is that Thatcher won. Rules matter most to those who are weakest, and the British middle classes often felt weak in 1979. Ten years later, it was the organised working class which felt the need for protection — hence the increasing enthusiasm of trade unions for Europe and its myriad regulations. Anti-Europeanism became both a cause and effect of changes in the Conservative Party during the Nineties. The journalist Hugo Young noted that Eurosceptic Tories moved away from a belief in sound money as the desire to control their own currency became a feature of their case against the European Union.

Lawson, of course, became a Eurosceptic himself, as did his admirer Sunak. But this was partly because both men thought that the disciplines that they valued would be imposed at national level — particularly, of course, by the independent Bank of England that was created by Gordon Brown in 1997. Sunak’s case against Truss in the 2022 Tory leadership campaign was partly about fiscal discipline and the need to observe rules associated with the Bank of England, as well as the simpler and more brutal edicts issued by Her Majesty the Bond Market.

But the end of Sunakism is about more than economics. Sunak stands for personal qualities that would once have been valued by Conservatives. He is courteous and disciplined — one cannot imagine him referring to the Tory party as a “cuntocracy” which is, according to Boris Johnson, what another former minister did. Sunak’s enemies reproach him for not concluding a tacit or explicit alliance with Nigel Farage’s Reform Party. But, as the personal attacks on Sunak during the electoral campaign and the riots after it showed, Reform is intertwined with a violence and vulgarity that can easily slip into mob rule, a prospect that terrified the Thatcherites during the Seventies. Thatcher would have been stunned to hear Conservatives denouncing the police or expressing sympathy for rioters.

The truth is that the social groups which gained most from Thatcherism have little to fear now. Their privileges are safer than ever — the Labour government is obviously shaken at the prospect that its policies might cause the rich to leave the country or even that it might make the slightly less rich send their children back to state schools. Perhaps indeed, as a Marxist might suggest, the problem with the Conservative Party is precisely that it has ceased to be a useful instrument for the social class that was once behind it.

Oddly, the one group among the English bourgeoisie who look scared are Conservative front-benchers. Theirs is a miserable life. They may win the election in five years’ time but if they do, it will be back to the faction fights and plots of the last few years. Constituency parties are controlled by people who make the Trots at the grassroots of the Labour Party in 1978 look tolerant; all the while, the threat of Reform looms over party leaders. Perhaps the mystery is not that no talented person wants to lead the Conservative Party but rather that any sane person would even consider the prospect.

From a shortlist of four candidates, two of whom came from the solid, “sensible” Left of the party — Tom Tugendhat and James Cleverly — and two from the more radical Right — Robert Jenrick and Kemi Badenoch — Conservative MPs have whittled down the choice to the two Tory ultras proposing a more fundamental break from the past. By making this choice, the contours of the next four years in British politics have been shaped, regardless of who is ultimately chosen.

For most of the Conservative Party’s post-war history, it should be remembered, the desire for a quiet life has been the pre-eminent instinct, especially among Tory MPs. In 1955, the party replaced Winston Churchill with his reassuring deputy, Anthony Eden. In 1957, Eden was replaced by his reassuring Foreign Secretary, Harold Macmillan, who in turn was replaced by his reassuring Foreign Secretary, Alec Douglas-Home. From Douglas-Home the crown was then passed to Edward Heath, the candidate best suited to continue Macmillan’s “Middle Way” politics.

The one candidate who broke with this, of course, was Margaret Thatcher, though it is largely forgotten now that she was not the most Right-wing of the candidates in the 1975 leadership election, challenged from the Tory Right by the aristocratic romantic Hugh Fraser who saw in Thatcher just another shade of Heathite grey. Since Thatcher’s defenestration in 1990, the desire for solid conservatism has once again largely held sway — at least among Tory MPs.

In every Tory leadership election from 2001 until Boris Johnson’s victory over Jeremy Hunt in 2019, Conservative MPs as a whole have chosen candidates from the solid Left of the party over the radical Right: Ken Clarke over Iain Duncan Smith in 2001; David Cameron over David Davis in 2005; and, finally, Theresa May over Andrea Leadsom in 2016. Even in the two leadership elections between Thatcher’s victory in 1975 and Boris Johnson’s in 2019, when the candidate of the Left was not backed by a majority of MPs, the winner still offered a form of reassuring continuity: John Major in 1990 and William Hague in 1997. Even after Boris Johnson, the instinct returned with Rishi Sunak beating Liz Truss among MPs in 2022.

There are two crucial lessons to draw from this record. The first is that since William Hague carried out his ill-conceived “modernisation” of the Conservative election rules to give members the final say in the leadership, the party has been beset by a fundamental structural problem. This may fatally undermine the victory in this election.

British parliamentary democracy is governed by the simple rule that whoever controls a majority in parliament is prime minister. In his wisdom, however, William Hague changed the rules so that the Conservative leader can theoretically be someone who does not even command a majority of support among their own MPs. On both occasions when this possibility came to pass, the result was disastrous: Duncan Smith in 2001 and Truss in 2022. This is now a real possibility once again.

The final tally of votes for the three remaining candidates saw Kemi Badenoch receive 42 votes, Robert Jenrick 41 and James Cleverly 37. In effect, each candidate had the support of just a third of the parliamentary party, with two thirds opposed to them — often viscerally. No matter how Cleverly’s supporters break over the coming days and weeks, the decision is no longer theirs, but the membership’s. Based on the conversations I have had with pollsters, Tory MPs and party aides over the past few weeks, there is every chance that Jenrick will now secure enough of Cleverly’s supporters to declare himself the choice of the parliamentary party, only for Badenoch to claim the crown regardless.

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Should this happen, irrespective of her attributes, Badenoch will be forced to build her leadership on fundamentally unsafe foundations, a Tory tribune on top of an uneasy parliamentary party. This would be disastrous.

The second lesson is yet more crucial. The only two instances when MPs opted for a Right-wing ultra over a moderate opponent came in moments of perceived national crisis, when the desire for a quiet life was no longer tenable. In 1975, Thatcher was chosen as a counter-revolutionary candidate to put the post-war social-democratic state out of its misery — at least as she and her supporters saw it. The failures of Ted Heath and Harold Wilson, IMF crisis of 1976 and Winter of Discontent of 1978/79 had created a sense of national emergency, requiring a different response from what had come before. In 2019, something similar was true after three years of parliamentary stasis following the EU referendum of 2016. When presented with the choice, the Conservative Party concluded — reluctantly — that radicalism was its only option for survival.

What is so striking about the ballot today is that it appears the Conservative Parliamentary Party has once again concluded that the crisis it and the country faces requires revolution. And so, the two candidates who will now go before members offer different forms of radicalism: Badenoch offers an instinctive form of modern Toryism which rails against the spread of Left-legalism and its catch all partner “wokeism”, whether in the form of equalities legislation, trans-laws or DEI requirements. Jenrick, in contrast, offers a more traditional critique of Britain’s immigration policies with promises of returning sovereignty, though with a contemporary analysis of the failure of the British state. Both are promising forms of counter-revolution, Jenrick’s of the Blairite state and Badenoch’s of the progressive zeitgeist itself.

If either is going to succeed as a truly counter-revolutionary Tory in the image of Thatcher, they will need a good dose of what their opponent is offering and more. Jenrick lacks the Jacobite dash of the true Tory radicals: Bolingbroke, Disraeli, Churchill and Thatcher; Badenoch the broader analytical frame that made Thatcher successful. And what both still lack is the ideological army committed to a cause that any upheaval needs. In 1975, Thatcher had her own think tank, the Centre for Policy Studies, plus the trailblazers that came before, including most notably the Institute for Economic Affairs. Today, it is hard to see the same kind of intellectual energy anywhere in Westminster.

That Conservative MPs have chosen this moment to gamble the party’s future on their harder instinct for counter-revolution has already raised the stakes of British politics for the remainder of this parliament. The exact form of Tory radicalism the Conservative Party membership chooses in three weeks’ time may define British politics for much longer than that.

So Shakespeare, with his practically clairvoyant ability to sympathetically channel vying perspectives, is a fox; Dante or Nietzsche, high-ranking hedgehogs. Plato, Dostoevsky and Proust are all, to varying degrees, hedgehogs, says Berlin; Erasmus, Montaigne and Aristotle, foxes.

It is a classic piece of high-table repartee from Berlin — often damned with faint-praise as the champion “talker” of his era at Oxford — which also owes something to the “ordinary language philosophy” of his day, which invested great importance in identifying subtle variations in meaning between apparent- or near-synonyms (if your dentist is readying his “instruments” you may rest easily, though somehow less so if he tells you he is fetching his “tools”).

The game of Berlinian binaries still has life in it. Tom Stoppard is a fox, Alan Bennett a hedgehog. Tarantino is a hedgehog, much as he might resist the label, Kubrick a fox. Part of the fun consists in casting people in ways that run counter to their own self-image.

Of course, Berlin’s game only works well if applied to people who are in some sense accountable for their own philosophic or aesthetic vision. Party politics calls for different instruments (or should that be tools?). At the Tory party conference I toyed with sorting the delegates into swivel-eyed loons, fruitcakes and closet racists, but ran into teething problems. The binary format turns out to be quite important: “closet racists” collapse too easily into “swivel-eyed loons”, leaving “fruitcakes” to pick out a more heterogenous residue than it really should. The tripartite structure was good for the cadence the Cameron became lumbered with allegedly making, but bad for heuristic purposes.

But how should we group the four remaining leadership contenders, who are to be whittled away to two this week? The great tribal binary of recent years, Brexiteer or Remainer, took on quasi-Berlinian contours after a few years of attrition in the public imagination: more dependent, in the end, on impressionistic assessment than how an individual actually campaigned or voted. Notoriously, Liz Truss, a remainer, came to be outlandishly Brexit-coded, while Rishi Sunak, who swung behind Leave much earlier than it made career-sense for him to do so, lost that credential. Today, the tired and too-contested binary does little to distinguish the four remaining aspirant leaders of the opposition.

Instead, it is tempting to frame the decision the Tories face as one between an everyman and an ideologue: pitting Badenoch and Jenrick, comfortably in the latter camp, against Cleverly and Tugendhat in the former. To give a quick lay of the land: in their different styles, Cameron, Johnson and Major were everymen; Gove, Osborne and Rory Stewart ideologues.

The ideologue is marked by his possession of a theory, the everyman by his possession of a disposition. At the conference last week, candidates were clearly marking their territory. James Cleverly used his big set piece speech to chastise his party for its lack of “normality”. Meanwhile, a series of increasingly incautious remarks by both Badenoch and Jenrick, far from being ordinary gaffes, seemed more likely part of a brinkmanship playoff in which the pair revealed the more daring consequences of their ideological priors.

The Tory party conference, though, is most probably an ecosystem in which the ideologue enjoys an inbuilt advantage. Within the safety of the conference centre, conventional standards of political sanity can be temporarily forgotten. The Conference is a place where Mark Francois is stopped for selfies with unironic enthusiasm by young men and women. It is a place where delegates queue up to have novelty tattoos of their preferred candidates’ faces inked onto their own. It is a place where Peter Bone is able to show his face (though, in the presence of so many Tory staffers, perhaps we should just be grateful he didn’t show more). In defeat, the Tories seem to have entered a decadent phase — excitable, speculative, drawn away from the sobering responsibilities of power toward less worldly styles of ideological reflection. One popular Centre for Policy Studies event was titled simply, “What would Maggie do?”.

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The ideologue’s challenges begin on the national stage, though, where their dogmatic allegiance to theory construction can alienate public feeling and be a liability in office. Truss was the ne plus ultra of the ideologue in living political memory. Of the current four, Kemi Badenoch seems most susceptible to being tripped up by her own ideological luggage. At the Conference, she pressed into my hands an inscribed copy of her 22,000 word pamphlet (“based on a forthcoming book”), Conservatism in Crisis: Rise of the Bureaucratic Class. It has four A4 pages of endnotes, and a runic pair of diagrams on page 16 involving triangular figures, with the words “right” and “left” written in them and bisected by lines at various angles. Such outward symptoms of crankishness are a gift to one’s political opponents. Ideologue-bashing is one of the shameful past-times of lazier elements of the media class. The flat-out dismissal that there might be any unifying diagnosis to be made of Britain’s long-term structural shortcomings is obvious and complacent anti-intellectualism. You can only discover the first-order merits, if any, of such diagnoses by actually looking.

The ideologue’s standing problem, then, is that he or she forgets that political success depends on appealing to people far less interested in ideas than they are. A more subtle obstacle is that sweeping political ideologies are not the sort of thing that should be perfected in advance, but instead evolve in tandem with the actual exercise of power. Many of the enduring tenets of Thatcherism were not established features of her political repertoire till her second term.

The everyman faces different challenges. He is famously discriminated against by the Conservative Party membership, who, like all party memberships, place a high premium on ideological purity. The more pressing danger this time round is that content-light normality can seem like an underpowered reaction to the scale of the electoral defeat the Conservatives suffered in July. These are activities better suited to the ideologue, but the everyman must engage the pretence as best he can.

The Tories are conflicted: torn between their interest in the diagnosis and their desperation for the cure. It has become a truism that electoral defeats are occasions for “soul searching” and radical course correction — as opposed to, say, brute manifestations of predictable cycles in electoral politics. While the ideologue wilfully indulges the urge for diagnosis, the everyman must artfully quell it by example. That is a hard role to play. Projecting a powerful sense of normality is not a normal thing to be able to do. It is a rare political gift; none of the remaining four possesses it. If the coming years are the Tories’ years in the ideological wilderness, it will be because the best way to avoid electing a weird ideologue is to elect someone weirder.

The Government knows who its enemies are: Housing Minister Robert Jenrick has attacked the “woke worthies and town hall militants” trying to remove statues, while Jacob Rees-Mogg has criticised the “woke brigade”.

But what do they mean by this very overused four-letter word? I imagine most people, when they hear the word “woke”, rather feel like King Théoden after a day of Wormtongue whispering in his ear. It’s a boring, overused, culture-war term used to denote people arguing over nothing. Even the Prime Minister doesn’t seem to know. When asked if there was “nothing wrong with being woke”, his spokesman said: “I’m not sure what you mean specifically.”

Some Tories certainly don’t see being woke as a problem. Lord Vaizey, once MP for Alfred the Great’s home of Wantage, has labelled the whole War on Woke “pathetic”, adding for good measure: “Maybe I’m not good enough or noble enough to be woke. I want to be woke.” Rather than getting excited by statues, Vaizey said, the Government should “lean in” to issues of social and racial justice, and be more like Joe Biden — “woke in the best way” — by celebrating both tradition and diversity.

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Because it isn’t clear what it means, woke has become synonymous with either “leftie”, “liberal” or just “nice”. And that is why it will win – just as happened with its ideological forerunner in the 1990s.

One of the reasons that “political correctness” eventually proved successful, or at least overcame the initial disdain and contempt it inspired, is that a less important aspect of it was more attention-grabbing than its central component. PC was, in one respect, a form of political politeness, the desire to use language that was more inclusive and forgiving. But it was also — more importantly — a way of enforcing political orthodoxy, a belief that certain ideas should and could be made unsayable, even unthinkable, with enough social pressure.

Theodore Dalrymple called PC “communism writ small”; it emerged out of radical left American academia in the 1960s, and had certain similarities with the stifling orthodoxy of Soviet Russia. But it might better have been described as a mutation of Christianity, another successful form of behavioural enforcement with a long history of intolerance towards unbelievers, especially heretics.

Woke is not “kindness”, nor is it even “political correctness” — although it is rooted in that ideology. To be woke is to believe particular things about human society and human biology, and with a zeal that is often described as religious. One of the most useful definitions was made by the brothers Bo and Ben Winegard, who identified some of the main credal points of the woke Left, including the idea that “bigotry is pervasive” in America (and the West), that “almost all disparities among demographic groups are caused by bigotry”, that “if we all work really hard, we can create a more just, multicultural society” and that “diversity is almost always a good thing.”

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Unlike political correctness, however, woke — originally an African-American term to mean “awake” to social justice — is primarily about race, although gender is a secondary issue. To be woke in particular means to believe in “equity” rather than equality, that is equality of outcomes rather than equality of opportunities between groups.

The term has been around since at least the 1970s but grew in use and salience during the “Great Awokening”, the name for the seismic, radical shift in American upper-middle-class opinion from around 2013. The link between the smartphone and the Great Awokening is as clear as that between printing and the Reformation – and, thanks to social media, this period saw a dramatic shift in attitude towards racial injustice, diversity and immigration.

Social media encourages conformism, which was most visible last summer when huge numbers of people around the world displayed black squares on their Instagram pages following the death of George Floyd. Yet most people know fairly little about US homicide rates and statistics; they imitate the belief systems of their friends, colleagues and people they look up to, and will adopt beliefs if they appear socially desirable or moral.

This can include some quite implausible beliefs that would not survive rigorous scientific analysis and, if the roles were reversed, would resemble conspiracy theories. It is now taken as given that “systemic racism” prevents some minorities from achieving equity in terms of education, income or imprisonment rates, while the fact that other minorities far exceed that average is left unspoken. Indeed, some of the most vocal supporters of the idea that the United States is overwhelmed by systemic and systematic racism come from groups who outperform white Americans on any metric.

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Diversity is a central part of the Creed, and while it clearly has some benefits, especially in restricted settings — such as science — there is also a vast literature on diversity’s negative impact on trust, political stability, corruption and various other social ills. But the mainstream conservative movement has largely given up on this issue, partly because the social cost of debating such a sacred idea is too high. A few narcissistic show-offs on the Right like to be hated; most of us don’t. And when conservatives are no longer willing to fight for their beliefs, they launch wars over symbols instead.

It seems bizarre for a government to flag up the issue of statues and street names while over 1,500 of its citizens are dying each day from a virus they failed to control. But statues and street names don’t actually matter. They are a proxy for the far more important issue of diversity and demography; perhaps people worry about statues of dead Englishmen disappearing from city centres because they worry about Englishmen disappearing from those cities.

America’s iconoclastic spasm is certainly related to the country’s transformation from an overwhelmingly European country to a multicultural liberal caliphate, a bold experiment which is yet to produce its end results. African-Americans, though small in number and in relative overall decline, are a totemic group for the multicultural “Blue Tribe”, and their all-American narrative of slavery and redemption echoes the country’s Christian ideals.

What we call “woke” has become the court religion of that Blue Tribe which, despite or because it is led by wealthy whites, has become obsessed with “whiteness” as a form of original sin. But this strange, apparently masochistic tendency also, perversely, acts as a form of elite justification, distracting from more material injustices and allowing the privileged to present themselves as part of the moral vanguard, protecting society from the bigoted masses. Beliefs can be genuinely held and at the same time be manifestations of class interests; it’s happened throughout history.

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When conservatives liken current Left-wing ideas to religion, they are not doing so to undermine faith, only to point out progressivism’s power to create a strong belief-community — religio means “to bind” — glued together by rituals and creeds and without the need for empirical facts. The mostly peaceful protests we saw last summer, with white protestors washing the feet of black protesters, contained a goldmine for anthropologists studying the binding power of religious ritual — well, they would, if there were any conservative anthropology professors left.

The most obvious religious echo is with Calvinism, which holds that humanity is divided between the saved and the damned. In the 17^th century, Calvinists would agonise over this issue, and in many cases it caused acute psychological distress, just as the desire for moral purity in the social media age does today.

Calvinists also believed that some people were more morally righteous than others, and that these Godly folk should make laws for the betterment of others. Overthrowing the natural hierarchy was an extremely alarming idea to more traditionally-minded Englishmen — and it was in response to this that the political philosophy of conservatism was born. As historian Jerry Z Muller put it:

“Conservatism arose in good part out of the need to defend existing institutions from the threat posed by ‘enthusiasm,’ that is, religious inspiration which seeks to overturn the social order. The critique of religious enthusiasm, which was central to [David] Hume’s conservatism, was later extended… into a critique of political radicalism.”

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By Aris Roussinos

It is this “enthusiasm” that makes woke politics dangerous, because to its adherents their opponents really are bad people and, because there will always be inequality, this is a forever war. Equality of outcomes, a doctrine now so all-encompassing that it even enters the vaccine debate, might be theoretically desirable, but by definition it is also a zero-sum game. One group’s success is another’s failure, or injustice, and so it inevitably sets some minorities up against the weakest, poorest and least educated members of the majority, who have nowhere to turn except to Right-wing populists.

This is not just about things like censorship or quasi-blasphemy laws, although these are concerning; the American homicide rate increased 20% after the George Floyd protests, and an additional 3,500 are now dead as a result. These are real-world consequences.

Nothing that spectacular will happen in England, but the underlying ideas behind the Great Awokening will lead to endless bitterness and division, often ostensibly about the pettiest of issues but, deep down, about everything. And conservatives will lose because our own thought-leaders will convince the world that this is about well-meaning kindness vs the performative toughness — vice-signalling — that characterises so much Right-wing politics.

I’m not “anti-Woke” because I care about statues of slave-profiteers, or because of people using their pronouns in emails. I object to it because I think its ideas are fundamentally untrue and dangerous, just as our forefathers believed that “enthusiasm” was untrue and dangerous, as they did of Jacobinism and all the utopian ideologies of the 20^th century, too. That is what conservatives believe — and if our own prime minister cannot even agree on that, then we really are damned.

Ed West’s Tory Boy: Memoirs of the Last Conservative is published by Constable

Hence the drama of the post-election reshuffle, back in February. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sajid Javid, was told to sack his advisors and make room for a team of Downing Street heavies. Honourably, he refused — and so he was forced out too.

The message was unambiguous: the whole Cabinet, from the Chancellor down, would have to submit to central control — or else. Henceforth, the relationship between Number 10 and every minister, no matter how senior, would be modelled on that between Matthew Corbett and Sooty.

And yet the puppet show has not gone to plan.

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By Peter Franklin

Last month, the chief puppeteer — Dominic Cummings — lost the battle for Downing Street. While he’d eliminated all resistance in the Cabinet room, he hadn’t accounted for the upstairs flat. Big mistake.

And then there’s the Prime Minister himself — who these days looks like a ghost at his own feast. All leaders fade away eventually, but the pace of events has accelerated his career trajectory. To sink from conquering hero to yesterday’s man in a space of a year is going some.

Finally, and most tellingly, there are the puppets. The supposedly synchronised Cabinet is all over the place. Their individual performances range from stellar to abysmal. So, as it turns out, who you appoint to the top jobs still matters, no matter how centralised your style of government. Eight examples prove the point:

1. Rishi Sunak

Two years ago, Rishi Sunak was the Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Local Government — just about the most junior of junior ministers. Now, he’s Chancellor of the Exchequer and the favourite to succeed his boss. There was never any doubting his potential, but he owes his meteoric rise to Boris Johnson’s model of government.

It’s an age-old trick: ensure loyalty by promoting those who haven’t earned it. Appointees are indebted to their patrons; and the principle of ‘easy come, easy go’ means it’s straightforward to dispense with them. Look down the list of Secretaries of State and you’ll find one example after another.

With Sunak, however, the cipher turned out to be a star. Which is just as well, given events. As a competent manager and reassuring communicator, he’s implemented crisis socialism without freaking out the markets, the public or his own party.

We’ve also seen some hints of creativity. He’ll need more, though, because you can’t recover from an unprecedented crisis without new ideas. His proposal for a National Infrastructure Bank is a key test. If it can raise and lend money like a real bank (instead of just being glorified government fund), we might just be able to ‘build back better’.

2. Dominic Raab

The idea of a politician ‘rising without trace’ has become a cliché, but it’s a fitting description of Raab’s CV. As Foreign Secretary (and, before that, Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union), Brexit should have been the making or breaking of him. But Brexit policy consists of two kinds of decision — the really big ones made by the Prime Minister and the excruciatingly fine detail handled by the negotiating team. There’s nothing much in between for the Cabinet minister.

The fact is that Raab is in the wrong job — appointed to the FCO not for what he can do, but for what he represents (i.e. the Eurosceptic Right of his party). For the Cabinet’s tough guy it’s a mismatch — like putting Chuck Norris in charge of a Swiss finishing school. Raab needs a big spending department to run; and though that would technically be a demotion, it would be the best thing that could happen to him.

3. Priti Patel

The Home Secretary was also appointed to make a point. A hardliner on both Brexit and immigration, her elevation from the backbenches to one of the great offices of state was a clear signal of the government’s intention to get Brexit done and control our borders.

Of course, she was only on the backbenches because she’d resigned from the Cabinet in 2017 after unauthorised meetings with the Israeli government came to light. Few people expected her to return to office so soon, or indeed at all; but salvaging a capsized career is another way in which Downing Street can ensure the loyalty of its appointees.

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By Stephen Pollard

Since her return, Patel has again fallen foul of the ministerial code — this time in regard to bullying allegations. Despite the official enquiry into the matter, she escaped unscathed. Two things protected her: first, the self-defeating nastiness of the Left — which loves to target women and people of colour who dare to have the ‘wrong’ opinions; and, second, the fact that Patel, despite her obvious limitations, is stubbornly pushing forward on the immigration reforms that were promised in the Conservative manifesto.

Of course, it’s one thing to tighten border control in theory, another to maintain it in practice. As with all Home Secretaries, Patel’s fate ultimately depends on upholding the law as it stands.

4. Matt Hancock

The Secretary of State for Health gives every impression of being another rapid riser. In fact, he had five years in junior ministerial roles before making it to Cabinet — which is an eternity these days. This year, he’s had to draw on every scrap of his experience.

It’s unclear how Hancock will be judged by history (and the inevitable public enquiries) — because the record is so mixed. Will he be remembered for the various test-and-trace fiascos or the triumphs of vaccine policy? How does one balance the failure to protect our care homes from Covid with the fact that the NHS has not been overwhelmed by the greatest challenge in its history?

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Matt Hancock is wrong about herd immunity

By Sunetra Gupta

Secretary of State for Health and Social Care is a big job at the best of times. But in 2020 it grew too big for any one incumbent. A Government that understood the importance of ministers would have carved out special Covid-related roles at Cabinet level (a test-and-trace minister, for instance) — leaving the Health Secretary to focus exclusively on the core issues.

Churchill’s wartime Cabinet was reshaped around the demands of the war effort — and something similar should have happened in this war too.

5. Michael Gove

Michael Gove is by far the most experienced member of the Cabinet. Apart from a brief period of exile following the Brexit referendum, he’s been a senior figure since 2010 — serving three Prime Ministers.

Paradoxically, he’s survived for so long by embracing unpopularity. He’s the political equivalent of a sin-eater: the outcasts who were once paid to take on the sins of others through the consumption of a ritual meal. Of late, these meals have been substantial — with Gove sent out to defend the Government through its imperfect improvisations of lockdown policy.

Allied to his knowledge of the inner workings of the Whitehall machine, Gove has become indispensable. And yet his talents could be better deployed. He is, at heart, a radical — willing to pursue reform in the face of entrenched opposition. As soon as the Covid crisis is over, he should be put in charge of solving another problem that’s been left unsolved for the last decade or more: housing.

6. Robert Jenrick

This would be a good point at which to examine the record of the latest Secretary of State who hasn’t solved the housing crisis. Robert Jenrick is the sixth Cabinet minister in this role since 2010. Some have been real talents, others not so much, and none has been left in post long enough to sort out Britain’s single greatest structural problem.

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By Peter Franklin

Indeed, none has been allowed to state the obvious, which is that rampant house price inflation is a bad thing. If the Conservatives want to rescue Generation Rent and revive their vision of a property-owning democracy, then house prices must fall relative to wages.

A generic placeman such as Jenrick is incapable of true reform. His atrocious planning white paper maintains the fiction that the planning system is to blame for the housing crisis — instead of the land bankers. If Boris is serious about building back better then he needs to set Gove loose on the vested interests standing in the way.

7. Gavin Williamson

Oh dear, what can one say? Any politician capable of a media performance like this one has no business being a minister, let alone a Cabinet minister.

In any case, Williamson is unlikely to survive the next reshuffle — not after the results debacle earlier this year. He wasn’t to blame for the closure of schools during lockdown and the cancellation of exams. However, he did oversee the grade allocation algorithm that caused such upset and fury.

His department made the classic mistake of targeting one objective — i.e. the prevention of grade inflation — without considering the wider ramifications. In particular, the downward adjustment of grades based on the past performance not only of the pupil but also the school could not have been more contrary to the principle of levelling up. If you want to succeed as a government’s minister, then best not to drive a coach-and-horses through its domestic agenda.

Robert Jenrick’s housing target algorithm is a similar fiasco — and a further lesson in the foolishness of entrusting policy to mindless robots.

8. Liz Truss

Liz Truss isn’t exactly my kind of conservative. Her infamous tribute to a generation of “#Uber-riding #Airbnb-ing #Deliveroo-eating #freedomfighters” didn’t just make me cringe, but evoked a soul-crushing void.

But, fair’s fair, she’s done a decent job as Secretary of State for International Trade. It’s still early days, but to rebuild a long-abandoned function of sovereign government (i.e. trade diplomacy) is a painstaking task that she’s diligently got on with.

It remains to be seen what purpose this new capacity will be put to — especially when it comes to the looming trade deal with America. The fate of the British countryside hangs in the balance and I hope that Truss makes a stand for the things that matter more than the bottom line. You wouldn’t want to feed chlorine chicken to those Deliveroo-eating freedom fighters, would you Liz?

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By James Rebanks

Nevertheless, she’s had a good year. While she bombed at DEFRA and as Lord Chancellor, she’s undoubtedly found her niche. Which goes to show that getting the right people into Cabinet is only half the struggle. The other half is getting them into the right positions.

Perhaps Downing Street should stop appointing people to roles that they haven’t actually asked for. Instead they should invite applications from candidates who actually want to do each job. They’d thus be able to prepare for the position, think about what they want to do with it and then present their case to the appropriate decision-makers.

I know, it’s a crazy idea — but it seems to work for well-run organisations.

The demolition of Wrexham Police station, a distinctive and assertive 10-storey concrete tower dating from the mid-Seventies took place at 08:30am on Sunday 1 November. Online footage shows the building tumbling over as if swatted by a giant hand. The event will feature in next year’s season of Scrap Kings, a TV show in which “the nation’s kings and queens of destruction . . . bang, blow, smash and crunch their way around the UK.”

Let’s hope that together with local politicians everyone in the Welsh market town is happy when, after the crunching rubble is cleared, a new Lidl supermarket, a drive-through coffee shop and 151 car parking spaces emerge from the ashes.

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It's the end of the line for Britain's industrial heritage

By Jonathan Glancey

One Westminster politician in particular may have relished the banging, smashing news from Wrexham. In October, Robert Jenrick, Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, said that the Government’s new planning reforms will create a “big opportunity to demolish some of the mistakes of the recent past . . . empty derelict buildings in town and city centres that were put, often poorly constructed, not within the character of those places, particularly in market towns in the Sixties and Seventies.”

Although unlisted, the Wrexham Police headquarters was an interesting building. Designed by a team led by the Denbighshire County Architect Eric Langford Lewis and opened in 1975, it fitted into a canon of British civic buildings of its era labelled “Brutalist”, its offices spreading up and out from a central concrete pillar — the tower’s service core — to reach a height of 140ft. This was the tallest new building in Wrexham since the completion of the tower of St Giles, the town’s glorious Tudor parish church 500 years earlier. The police headquarters ought to have been fashionable by 2020, as such Seventies architecture can be, and converted, perhaps, into a hotel or workspaces and laboratories for hi-tech start-ups or whatever the collective local imagination might have in mind for Wrexham’s future.

A local petition hoped to protect the nine-acre building site from becoming the home of just another supermarket — Wrexham is brimful with them — but the prevailing official view was evidently Jenrickian. Will, though, the new Lidl supermarket be a better and more beautiful building than the smashed Seventies police headquarters?

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By Peter Franklin

Aside from an unease about the lack of imagination shown in Wrexham, my wider concern here is with politicians and cultural commentators who find the architecture of the generation or two before them hard to understand, much less to like, and thus to protect and renovate for the future. Much the same is true, of course, of music, fashion, art and design.

There is though an irredeemable arrogance at play when it comes to the fate of buildings when a new generation takes against previous architectural styles it feels it has the cultural competence and a kind of divine right to dismiss and destroy. In 1961, Harold Macmillan, Conservative prime minister and arch moderniser, ensured the demolition of the Euston Arch. This monumental Greek Revival propylaeon, or triumphal gateway, designed in a severe Doric style by Philip Hardwick, fronted what had been the London terminus of Britain’s first long distance passenger railway, the London and Birmingham. Opened in 1837, this was the 19^th century equivalent of a Roman road, the scale of its engineering epic, its architecture noble.

When Jim Richards, editor of the Architectural Review, went to 10 Downing Street with fellow ‘Save the Euston Arch’ campaigners, “Macmillan listened, or I suppose he listened as he sat without moving and with his eyes apparently closed. He asked no questions; in fact he said nothing except that he would consider the matter.” With official apathy over the matter on the parts of the government, the London County Council and the British Transport Commission, Macmillan let the wrecking balls get to work.

What, though, could have been going through the Prime Minister’s mind? This, after all, was the same Harold Macmillan, who as a wounded young captain on the Somme waiting in a foxhole for rescue, read Aeschylus in Greek for comfort. Why the tragic gap between Aeschylus and the Greek Revival Euston Arch? Because, I think, Macmillan and those of his generation, especially following the destruction caused by two world wars, wanted to escape at least part of their Edwardian and, at root, Victorian hinterland.

It was Macmillan’s Conservative government that championed motorways, high-rise mass housing and tall commercial buildings on the London skyline alongside the destruction of unfashionable 19^th century architecture.

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By Niall Gooch

St Pancras station and that great Victorian dragon of a building, the Midland Grand Hotel that fronts it, only just escaped demolition after determined battles by conservationists resolute after their failure to protect the Euston Arch. However, even John Summerson, the distinguished architectural historian, refused to support St Pancras. Why? Because, I think, St Pancras was a reminder of what, in spirit, had been a coal-fired Victorian childhood. The old order needed to change yielding place to the crisp, rational, white and new.

While John Summerson was making his mark, at the same time as John Betjeman who helped lead the fight for the Euston Arch and St Pancras, Harold Clunn wrote The Face of London (1932) in which the author praised the ambitious new commercial architecture of the capital. As for Nicholas Hawksmoor’s early 18^th century Baroque church of St Mary Woolnoth this was little short of a modern scandal. How could such a building out of keeping with the style and scale of modern streets be allowed to occupy a City of London site worth a million pounds and ripe for redevelopment?

If, as Robert Jenrick argues, new buildings will have to comply with design codes “so that local people this time around can decide what they want these buildings to look like which are so central to their lives”, there will be no contemporary equivalent of daring Hawksmoor churches, much less soaring Gothic cathedrals nor, of course, police station’s like Wrexham’s.

Sometimes, just sometimes, there are balanced outcomes. The 1960s Preston Bus Station — cinematic, sculptural, heroic — designed by Keith Ingham and Charles Wilson of the Building Design Partnership, survived prolonged attempts to have it demolished to make way for more shopping. Between 2016 and 2018 it was renovated by John Puttick Associates. Against Wrexham’s and Jenrick’s grain, local people truly like this Sixties adventure in concrete.

I wonder what if Wrexham had followed Preston’s path, realising that architectural fashions change but tend to return to favour. In the meantime, we should think much harder than politicians seem to have been able or willing to do in recent decades and not so much to demolish what we don’t like at one particular moment, but to build more intelligently and caringly than we tend to do in the first place.