Today I find the idea of drinking cans of Polish lager to mark the passing of a former prime minister rather pitiable. From a solely political perspective, of course, it is counterproductive, for it tells the general public that the contemporary Left resembles little more than a misanthropic, detached subculture found mainly among the younger, over-educated denizens of gentrifying urban enclaves. But beyond any strategic consideration, it also signifies the strength of Thatcherism, against which my fellow Brixton revelers and I were pathetically impotent.

In contemporary discourse, Maggie’s enduring legacy is taken to be something called “neoliberalism”, a system of political economy apparently dominant for the last 40 years, and now undergoing a critical appraisal, not least because of certain Labour leadership hopefuls blaming it for British decline. In his slick Makerfield campaign video, Andy Burnham says he “saw what Thatcher’s government did to places like this”, citing “deindustrialization” and “the draining away of economic, social and political power” from provincial Britain. As Reform positions itself as the party of the Northern working class, in alliance with small traders and the Home Counties’ petit bourgeoisie, the Left delivers dire warnings of a Thatcherite revival — the better to hold onto those working-class Northerners. Farage and the Reform leadership clique are, after all, longtime disciples of the monetarist creed.

None of this is to say that my opinions on the Iron Lady have altered much. Even from a purely conservative standpoint, she caused a lot of harm to the country, much of it perhaps irreparable. Though her project invoked a parochial conservatism, it nevertheless radically altered our mode of production according to an imported set of continental (namely Austrian) ideologies. It projected a vision of British patriotism that sold off national assets by the pound, exposing a relatively coherent and regionally balanced national economy to all the volatilities of globalized, financialized capital and international trade flows, as well as leaving us dependent on the kindness of strangers and cap-in-hand foreign patronage. And while its libertarian streak was applied ruthlessly to “free market” actors, an authoritarian traditionalism and throwback Victorian morality dominated in the socio-cultural sphere and in law and order — as exemplified by the battle of Orgreave.

More from this author

Cosmic Scallies are radicalising Liverpool

By Jonny Ball

Thatcher, then, is as significant a figure in discourse as she was when she died. In that sense, it is an auspicious time to be putting on a play about her. At Liverpool’s Everyman Theater, an adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s novella, The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher, is nearing the end of its first run. It’s a fitting venue: 13 years ago, as I drank cans of Tyskie in Brixton, groups of fellow Scousers spontaneously emptied out of the dockers’ pub The Casa just yards from the Everyman to mark Thatcher’s death. It’s a fitting time, too, as a famous son of Liverpool promises to reverse the legacy of the city’s — and the play’s — bête noire (Burnham the Scouser has spent around a decade posing as a Mancunian — a rare boon for someone born in the nether regions between the North West’s two great metropoles, with a shifting dual identity that mirrors his political oscillations).

Mantel’s original story attracted controversy at the time of its publication in 2014. For all the brouhaha, one would have expected it to be historical fiction in the philosophical tradition of Frantz Fanon — the French psychoanalyst whose writing on the efficacy and superior morality of Left-wing political violence is still a bookshelf stalwart of many a LARPing student revolutionary. Conservative MPs led the chorus of condemnation, but, in all likelihood, they had never read the text, despite its short length. For Mantel was no frothing-at-the-mouth extremist advocating the progressive or, like Fanon, mentally rehabilitative, qualities of revolutionary murder. Her epic on the French Revolution, A Place of Greater Safety, reveals no sympathies for the cold, utilitarian, socially cleansing properties of the guillotine. Instead it focuses on some of the human costs of political upheaval.

In that vein, the Scouse IRA sniper featured in The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher is fundamentally more melancholic than heroic. He seeks a personal catharsis in his act, as well as political change, but it’s highly questionable whether he will attain either. The play adaptation carries this mood forward — the assassin portrayed more as a sad, disturbed reject than a hardened, cocksure ideologue. The terrorist tricks his way into the home of a single widow, whose bedroom window happens to overlook a hospital entrance on the day of a prime ministerial visit. The widow tries gently to persuade him of the errors of his ways — and it is she who carries the audience’s favor in this two-person performance.

Nor is Mantel’s choice of terrorist surprising. Such is the hold of the Thatcherite decade over the collective Liverpudlian imagination that local politicians still frequently invoke the Toxteth riots along with Maggie’s supposed plans for Merseyside’s “managed decline”. It was, in fact, her chancellor Geoffrey Howe who suggested the policy of allowing a city-wide gradual atrophy, rather than attempting to guide water up a hill in what was known as “the Bermuda Triangle of British capitalism”. Eventually, Howe’s plan was rejected in favor of a Heseltine-branded plan of city-center-focused urban regeneration. But since then, the “managed decline” epithet has stuck — a Scouser never forgets, of course.

More from this author

What the Anglo-Gaullists get wrong

By Jonny Ball

The cultural influence of the era is still broad. The industrial wastelands and mass unemployment portrayed in the Liverpool-based TV series the Boys from the Blackstuff was apparently what inspired Burnham to go into politics by joining the Labour Party aged 14. It is as if our local political elites (all Labour, still, for now) are afflicted by a collective, 40-year hangover induced by the transition from a bustling, Tory-voting, mercantile port (the “Second City of Empire”) into a belligerent poster child of urban decay (“Smack City”). Though admittedly the anti-Thatcher finger-pointing might also help redirect attention from the likes of “Chippy tits”, a recent mayor who awaits trial over charges of bribery and conspiracy to commit misconduct in public office. Many in the audience of The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher will no doubt hope that Makerfield’s Labour populist can prove the final antidote — the acetaminophen and bacon sandwich — to cure the lasting Thatcherite headache.

The rich nuance of the play is undermined by the limited-edition tote bags proclaiming “REJOICE! REJOICE!” on sale behind the theater bar. They will have sold well. But how much can we still claim to live in Thatcher’s world when the tax burden is at a 70-year high? Where is the Thatcherite free market when a bureaucratic welfare state takes ever-increasing tax revenues from productive labor and investment, redirecting it toward the ever-expanding army of the indigent and indolent? Certainly, few business owners will see in today’s stagnant Britain a portrait of laissez-faire nightwatchman governance.

Two political tribes offer opposed diagnoses for the UK’s dismal situation, with each identifying different starting points for the Fall. For the Burnhamite Left, the decline began in 1979, when Thatcher came to power. For the Right, decline began in 1997, on Blair’s arrival. The Right posits that the source of our ills is the lingering effects of too-much-state, of an overbearing, Cool Britannia lanyard socialism. This is a story of radical constitutional renewal and the empowerment of quangos, arms-length bodies, international organizations and the judiciary at the expense of executive ministerial authority and the Crown-in-Parliament. The result is an omnipotent regulatory deep state that hampers individual initiative and state capacity alike.

But what we’re really seeing is a grotesque blend of the worst of Thatcherism with the worst of Blairism: bad aspects of “neoliberalism” coexisting with bad aspects of bureaucratic statism. The result combines top-down statist nitpicking with Thatcherite ownership models; corporate, Whitehall and town hall management structures amalgamating into a public-private-partnership blob, administered and lobbied by armies of LinkedIn-posting hangers-on. Blairism is, after all, a development of Thatcherism, as Thatcher herself recognized when she described New Labour as her greatest achievement.

The consequences of this Frankenstein blend are clear to see. Utilities, critical industries and infrastructure are in the hands of privateers, many of them foreign. Collective bargaining outside the public sector is virtually non-existent, contributing in no small part to a 20-year stagnation in real wages. We suffer from an over-reliance on financial, corporate, and legal services, low levels of public and private investment, and an extremely open, low-wage, low-productivity economy addicted to imported cheap labor and foreign direct investment. But we’ve matched that with a vetocracy that stymies development; with rule-by-NIMBY; with a New Labour-style dispersal of executive power across bureaucracies and professional bodies; and with often excessive meddling in the private sector. Our emasculated politicians are engaging in after-the-fact distributionism, doling out the proceeds of an old, broken growth model without knowing how to kickstart a new one. This is the legacy of Blair: a legalistic, top-down progressivism rather than anything resembling the very British socialism which Thatcher set out to destroy.

It was the One Nation Tory Ian Gilmour who held that Thatcherism had more in common with the free-trading Gladstonian Whigs than with the patrician tendency of his own party. No doubt Britain’s postwar social democracy was in a sorry state by the Seventies, requiring fundamental reform, not least a compromise with the realities of profit and loss. But the grocer’s daughter, steeped in a low-church Methodist ethos, took a polity rooted in the communitarian institutions of mass democracy, million-member political parties, the trade unions, churches, industrial mass production and security in work, housing and therefore family life, and replaced it with a rugged, dog-eat-dog, atomized individualism.

In trying to alter what she called “the object” of man’s soul through “the method” of rigid economism, she initially attempted to model Britain on her native Grantham — a staid Lincolnshire market town full of people who embodied the sturdy, middle-English values of thrift, self-reliance, respectability and quiet, Christian philanthropy. Instead we got the economy of the spiv, the City slicker, the consultant, the agency, with every job outsourced, every project put out to tender, a vast network of email-senders and middle managers vying for a procurement contract, a teat on the underbelly of our swollen PLC state.

Thatcherism’s pivot towards the great circuit of Mammon invited the criticism of even the conservative philosophers, such as Roger Scruton, for whom “the emancipation of the market from the constraints of small communities, territorial loyalty and the jurisdiction of the nation state” had more than an air of deracinated cosmopolitan liberalism.

After watching The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher, I thought back to 2013, getting too drunk on Tyskie. The futility is obvious now: we’ve had Corbynism, Brexit and much else besides, but none has brought us true deliverance, and the debate on Thatcherism has never been settled, instead congealing into two different tribal mythologies. The Left hope that a charismatic mayor with a warm smile will exorcise Thatcher’s ghost, and with it that of her New Labour successors, while the Reformist Right prays that it will one day complete her unfinished revolution.

Any genuine savior, Burnham or otherwise, will have to topple the mongrel system we currently inhabit, which displays neither the features of efficient entrepreneurialism nor those of state competence and capacity. We have neither the comforts of collectivism nor the dynamism of the market, neither the cradle-to-grave carer nor the sovereign individual. Mantel understood this better than most; her assassin seeks a personal and political redemption through violence, but the lead man can’t find salvation by killing what has already metastasized. There are no easy escape routes. At least in 2013, drunk on cheap lager and high off my own supply, I knew who the enemy was.

My earliest memory of Margaret Thatcher, born a century ago today, was not a photograph or footage but graffiti on the side of Brutalist flats. It was painted rather than sprayed, in those days. Ireland being consumed by Great Britain, with the West coast of Scotland morphing into Thatcher’s face as she gnawed on Ulster with crazed eyes like Goya’s Saturn. I was scared shitless at the time but grew used to the image. And as the years passed, I would see her effigy dragged out and immolated in different places that all shared the common denominator of state callousness. Poll Tax riot sites. Post-Hillsborough Liverpool. South Yorkshire pit villages. Virtually anywhere in Scotland or Wales. Even the soundtrack had a sacrificial quality — Elvis Costello’s “Tramp the Dirt Down” or Morrissey’s “Margaret on the Guillotine”, which earned him a grilling from Special Branch for fear he’d dispatch the Prime Minister with a withering swipe of a flaccid gladioli.

There were any number of reasons for ordinary citizens to loathe Thatcher from the miners to Section 28 to the Belgrano, the third-degree burn catastrophe of deindustrialization and the slow-burn catastrophe of financial deregulation. In Northern Ireland, she somehow eclipsed even the folk memory of the Black and Tans and Cromwell, entering the mythic. Even then, supernatural figures like the banshee, dearg due, the bánánach and the abhartach seemed sympathetic by comparison.

Few would admit it then, or now, in Irish Republican circles, but Thatcher was the demon Sinn Féin needed, and she became one of their greatest benefactors. It had been very difficult, after all, to galvanize total resistance to the securocrats of the previous Labour governments and Ted Heath’s administration. Here was an archetype. In attempting to destroy them, she made them what they are now.

Thatcher’s Northern Irish debut was a horror show. A month before her election victory, her advisor on the province, Airey Neave, was assassinated leaving the House of Commons. Neave had been a war hero, escaping Colditz, personally serving Nuremberg Trial indictments to the likes of Goering, Speer and Hess in their cells, and was known as a force to be reckoned with. The Irish National Liberation Army, a Marxist splinter group and rival of the Irish Republican Army, placed a bomb underneath his driver’s seat with a mercury tilt switch, which activated as he drove his Vauxhall up the exit ramp. As a shot across the bows, it was exceptionally brutal. It would also seem immensely counter-productive if the cause of a United Ireland and/or Civil Rights for Catholics were assumed to be the aims of the Republican movement; but assume, we should not.

More from this author

Say Nothing's empty empathy

By Darran Anderson

Thatcher entered, with her garlands, into a bloodbath. Republican snipers and land mines had been sapping the morale and increasing the paranoia of the security services in the north. Lord Mountbatten was blown apart on his boat, along with his grandson, a fellow aristocrat and a cabin boy. This was followed by the Narrow Water Massacre, where a passing convoy of the Parachute Regiment (the perpetrators of the Bloody Sunday Massacre of civil rights protestors in Derry) was targeted by a massive roadside bomb. The Provisional IRA responded, by remote control, from across the border, with a double-tap blast, beloved of contemporary geopolitical powers, as a helicopter ferried away the injured. Eighteen soldiers were killed, as well as a civilian when survivors began to fire across the border.

If there were a time when it felt like the IRA would win, this was it. Thatcher felt it too, so she attempted to change the framing of the war into simple criminality and a law-and-order issue. “Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom,” she claimed, “as much as my constituency is”, which given Finchley at the time was not a place where civil rights activists were murdered with impunity or one section of the population had been subject to internment without trial or shoppers had their limbs blown off or daily assassinations were commonplace was a misnomer. Indeed, her insistence on normality just illustrated the abnormality of the place and situation — a colonized foothold of an island-nation effectively ruled over by a rheumatic and bellicose police force and a sash-draped organization that were Cargo Cult British. Northern Ireland, to the British and the southern Irish, was Bedlam.

In reality, the Lady was for turning. Declassified records from 1983 reveal that Thatcher raised the idea of a “tactical withdrawal” to the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland Jim Prior, and it was only, seemingly, turned down because Prior argued that it would lead to all-out civil war. It is still hard for Unionists and Loyalists to accept such orphan judgments, but equally it is of cold comfort to magical thinking Republicans who are not going to conjure away a million or so Unionists/Loyalists when our day comes. At that point, escalation from an already horrific state of affairs was a likely possibility and the Republic government knew it. Yet it shows how close the IRA came to a United Ireland. At the same time, the high-profile attacks that had raised Republican morale had soured Irish American relations enough for the US to begin to stop the pipeline of support, forcing them to seek assistance from the nefarious enemies of my enemies.

This demonstrates a privately practical Thatcher, as well as the basket case of Northern Ireland. And yet she clung. Perhaps it was Airey Neave or doubts about her role in a world of old boys and hard men. But Thatcher made it personal and ultimately misjudged and lost. Her aim was not peace but unconditional surrender, with a degree of humiliation. For all the inevitable whataboutery, the British state was the only force that could have dialed down, if not turned off the violence, killing the civil rights issue with kindness for example, and yet Thatcher dialed it up.

At the same time, the comment by Sinn Féin’s Danny Morrison that she was “The biggest bastard we have ever known” was canny. There was no love lost, yet there’s a sneaking sense of  “We could do something with this”. Thatcher’s intransigence and militarism would eventually radicalize and galvanize the Irish nationalist community and ultimately spelt the decline of the moderate SDLP. She escalated the prison protests and hunger strikes into a battle of wills, locking horns with Sinn Féin, which made the latter seem totemically powerful to the Catholic community and then, because of the deaths of the hunger strikers, this spread to the international media. It also made the battle a sacred affair, with the saintly starving neo-Catholic martyrs versus the satanic Thatcher. Having made her name as the no-nonsense grocer’s daughter, she was ill-equipped for the irrationalism of Celtic eschatology.

So, Thatcher provided the devil that the faceless bureaucrats of the pre-Thatcher era could not. Her Iron Lady ego forced Northern Ireland out of multiple possible paths and into a binary where the citizenry had to pick for or against. This played into Sinn Féin’s hands, though they would never admit it, and is actually a strategy that the activist Saul Alinsky advocated in Seventies America — find or create a common enemy to centralize and radicalize opposition and push out other more ameliorative or alternative voices. I saw this in Derry where the SDLP, who had bravely had their heads cracked open on civil rights marches for years and largely came from trade union and teaching backgrounds, become overnight, thanks to Thatcher, the Stoop Down Low Party in the eyes of the community.

It all crystallized with the Hunger Strikes. Her insistence that the Troubles was criminal rather than political was self-defeating, inadvertently showing Sinn Féin, via Bobby Sands, the power of the ballot box. Their “Armalite and ballot box” strategy being an evolutionary device. She unintentionally gave them a way forward that has since proved immensely profitable. It was in both directions an exercise in cynicism. Thatcher was onto something when she said: “It would seem that dead hunger strikers, who have extinguished their own lives, are of more use to PIRA than living members.” At the same time, her insistence that the “PIRA have put the Catholic Community on the rack” during this time is abject, given everything the British state had put the Catholic community through.

More from this author

Kneecap are the future of Northern Ireland

By Darran Anderson

In hindsight, it seems two factors made armed struggle untenable in the long run. The first, in sort, is the role of MI5 and informers or touts. It is still unclear to what extent Sinn Féin were riddled with double agents, how high it went and how it directed policy in the long term. Thatcher can take some credit for this, if anything positive can be salvaged from it, given she increased the intelligence services’ role in the conflict (their involvement with Loyalist death squads is still a pressing but taboo issue). The second was Ulsterization, initiated not by Thatcher but by earlier governments, who sought to contain the conflict within the borders of Northern Ireland, tacitly believing the population to be expendable and accurately believing the IRA could only really make an impact on the mainland (the high-profile bombing of which — Canary Wharf, for example — ultimately intensified negotiations). Both were incredibly cynical and effective.

Though Thatcher claimed as her mentor the wily Dubliner Edmund Burke, her ego meant she failed to pay heed to his wisdom, “It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.” Her opponents suffered from the same hubris as she did, dining out still on how close they came to taking her out in Brighton, endlessly repeating “Today we were unlucky, but remember we only have to be lucky once — you will have to be lucky always”, a quote that ultimately proved untrue and indulgent. Had they succeeded, there is every chance their actions would have resulted in martial law and more suffering for northern Catholics, along with more bolstering of their positioning. One more boost to the ascendancy of Sinn Féin, perhaps the true aim rather than a United Ireland or civil rights equity.

Today Sinn Féin are adjacent to the blob, and more equivalent to Sturgeon-era SNP — albeit with concrete-filled weapons bunkers and piles of bodies as unavoidable as the Brits’ or the Loyalists’. They talk of a United Ireland, only one under their tutelage and for their benefit. If it happens, and almost a million Unionists will require accommodating, it will, given the dire state of the south and the north, be an unrecognizable Ireland to that which we dreamed and to the one we must start dreaming afresh, with a knowledge of yesterday’s victims and without yesterday’s ghouls. Their day has come, and, like Thatcher’s, it has passed.

After four resignations in little more than a decade, the Sky camera crew outside Sajid Javid’s London home have become friends of the family. Rebellious backbenchers look to Michael Gove to wield the dagger; as always, he remains inscrutable. Television pictures show Steve Barclay emerging from Number 10 with his 27th Cabinet job in barely a decade, while the disgraced Matt Hancock is reportedly eyeing a fresh comeback. On Radio Four, the 99-year-old Lord Heseltine is talking about Brexit. On Twitter, Foreign Secretary Nadine Dorries pledges her loyalty to the PM. Everything is safe, solid and unquestionable. Everything will be the same for ever and ever.

Is that, perhaps, how Boris Johnson’s remaining loyalists imagine the future? Alas, I have news for them. David Cameron may have compared his Old Etonian rival with a greased piglet, forever wriggling away from the most excruciating scrapes, but even the most sebaceous porker ends up on the breakfast table eventually. And even by Boris’s standards, to lose a Chancellor and a Health Secretary in a single evening, as well as a gaggle of parliamentary aides and trade envoys, represents a sensational and surely fatal humiliation.

True, Harold Macmillan lost his entire Treasury team in 1958, but he was riding high in the polls and few people knew who the Chancellor was anyway. (Peter Thorneycroft, if you’re wondering.) And yes, Margaret Thatcher soldiered on for another year after losing Nigel Lawson in 1989. But in retrospect, it’s obvious she was doomed. So even if, by some miracle of escapology, Johnson clings on until the end of the week and then through the summer, before defying his backbench critics to soldier on to the party conference and beyond, it’s almost impossible to imagine him lasting to the next General Election.

And what if he does? Electoral oblivion, surely. Divided parties very rarely win elections, and it’s hard to see Tory England voting once again for a man whom Jeremy Hunt, Rishi Sunak, Sajid Javid, David Davis and Steve Baker, to name but five, have explicitly told them is not up to it. So why bother? What’s the point?

For his critics, Johnson’s fall has been coming from the first. In the summer of 2019, before he had even laid hands on the crown, his former editor Max Hastings predicted that his premiership would “almost certainly reveal a contempt for rules, precedent, order and stability”. Johnson, he wrote, would surely “come to regret securing the prize for which he has struggled so long, because the experience of the premiership will lay bare his absolute unfitness for it”.

Suggested reading

Boris can't keep a story straight

By Kathleen Stock

Was this just a patrician Tory Remainer talking? Not really. That same summer, another of Johnson’s old newspaper colleagues, the Brexit ultra Simon Heffer, warned that Tory party members would soon tire of his “indolence, casualness, monstrous selfishness, lack of attention to detail, incompetence and monumental dishonesty”. And even if Johnson won an election, wrote Heffer, “no one should bet on him shaping the destiny of Britain and her people for much more than a brief, and possibly deeply troubling, interlude”.

There is, perhaps, another side of the picture. Detached from the hurly-burly of our present arguments, future historians may well be struck by Johnson’s formidable, if ephemeral, strengths as a communicator and campaigner. His roguishness, his showmanship, his patriotic populism may have enraged the bien-pensant — as well as his own former colleagues — but they clearly struck a chord with millions of ordinary Britons who had little interest in the niceties of politics.

In a thoughtful analysis after his crushing General Election victory in 2019, the Cambridge academic Helen Thompson wrote almost approvingly of “his willingness to enter the realm of risk, his eagerness to trade his dignity, his indifference to conventional pieties and mundane detail”, all of which she traced to his “pagan energy”. And in another acute profile, published last year, Tom McTague argued that Johnson “understands the art of politics better than his critics and rivals do”. Johnson was right, he wrote, to see that politics was “a battle to write the national story, and that this requires offering people hope and agency, a sense of optimism and pride in place. He has shown that he is a master at finding the story voters want to hear.”

These articles have an ironic ring today, amid the risible chaos of the fin de régime. But they weren’t necessarily wrong. Much as his critics loathed Johnson’s populist persona, he won elections. But that shouldn’t be a surprise. British political history, even at the highest level, is littered with rogues and showmen, from Palmerston and Disraeli to Lloyd George and Blair. They weren’t just rogues and showmen, of course: that was why they were so successful. Energy, optimism, a gift for storytelling, a sense of humour: these are hardly negligible qualities for somebody hoping to become prime minister.

No less an observer than Karl Marx once called Palmerston “an exceedingly happy joker” who “ingratiates himself with everybody”. “When unable to master a subject, he knows how to play with it,” said Marx. “If wanting in general views, he is always ready to weave a web of elegant generalities.” That sounds pretty familiar. Yet plenty of ordinary voters adored Palmerston as the bluff incarnation of British patriotism, forever sticking it to the priggish and prissy Macrons and von der Leyens of the mid-19th-century world. One observer spotted him visiting the Great Exhibition in 1851. “The moment he came in sight,” he wrote, “throughout the whole building, men and women, young and old, at once were struck as by an electric shock. ‘Lord Palmerston! Here is Lord Palmerston! Bravo! Hurrah! Lord Palmerston for ever!’’”

Suggested reading

Did Boris kill conservatism?

By Robert Saunders

The problem is that in the 21st century, merely playing Lord Palmerston — or even Johnson’s supposed hero, Winston Churchill — can never be enough. The scope of government has widened far beyond what either man imagined possible, and a modern Prime Minister is responsible for a bureaucratic machine that touches almost every aspect of seventy million people’s lives.

Johnson’s government didn’t get everything wrong: when his defenders point to the vaccine rollout or his support for Ukraine, they have a point. But surely, alone with his confessor, even Jacob Rees-Mogg would admit that the conduct of affairs inside Downing Street has been an utter, utter shambles. Britain has had plenty of inept and sleazy governments before, but very few with such a palpable lack of ideological direction and such a basic indifference to organisational competence. Even those infamous parties, judging by the photos, had a forlorn and hapless look, unworthy of a venue that has seen some pretty heroic drinking in its time. A glass of cut-price Chardonnay with the Big Dog and his teenage groupies, or a double Scotch and a tirade about socialism from the Iron Lady? I know which I’d prefer.

It really didn’t have to be this way, though. Recent history offers some excellent examples of political showmen who ran competent, efficient administrations, largely by standing back and letting the professionals deal with the nuts and bolts. When Ronald Reagan became President of the United States in January 1981, his critics derided him as a mere Hollywood has-been. They mocked him as a know-nothing, an airhead, coasting to disaster on clouds of his own optimism and good humour.

Even his closest international soulmate, Margaret Thatcher, sometimes despaired of his spectacular inattention to detail. Her Foreign Secretary, Lord Carrington, once recalled that after they had endured Reagan’s thoughts about South Africa during their first visit to the White House (“Well of course, the South Africans are whites and they fought for us during the war. The blacks are black and they are Communists”) she left the Oval Office, pulled him aside and pointed at her head. “Peter,” she whispered in horror, “there’s nothing there!”

But Reagan was no fool. He surrounded himself with some of the biggest beasts in the Republican jungle: George Bush, Al Haig, James Baker, George Shultz, Caspar Weinberger, hard-nosed operators who knew how the machine worked and how to get things done. That took a degree of psychological security, even humility: it often meant Reagan was the least bright and least well-informed person in the room. But he didn’t mind. It left him free to play the part that came most naturally: the jolly, sunny, patriotic father of the nation, always ready to disarm his opponents with a rousing story, a Hollywood anecdote or — in private — a dirty joke. And it worked. He won elections — and even his adversaries secretly liked him.

Has Britain ever had a politician like Reagan? Well, I can think of one obvious example: another good-humoured, amusing, patriotic fellow, who liked nothing better than to make voters laugh and put them at ease. He too was dismissed by his critics as a mere screen performer, a charismatic joker who knew nothing of economics and was indifferent to details. But ordinary voters, whether diehard Tories or traditional Labour, liked him, and twice elected him to run their capital city. And while he rolled out the crowd-pleasing rib-ticklers, he had a team of serious, professional operators to keep things ticking over behind the scenes. His name, of course, was Boris Johnson.

More from this author

Stop pretending Britain is America

By Dominic Sandbrook

Why didn’t Boris Johnson learn from Boris Johnson? Why didn’t he run Britain as he had once run London? For me, that’s the really baffling question. Why didn’t he play the British Reagan? Why didn’t he surround himself from the first with genuinely seasoned, clever, ruthless people, as Reagan did — or as Thatcher, Clement Attlee and his hero Churchill did? Why employ Gavin Williamson? Why associate with Nadine Dorries? What can possibly explain the Cabinet career of Jacob Rees-Mogg? An elaborate bet? A practical joke that got wildly out of hand?

Ask people who know Johnson well, and you get different answers. Some suggest that deep down, he has always been intensely insecure — something that’s true of many politicians, but wasn’t true of Reagan or Thatcher — and that he dreaded surrounding himself with rivals and potential successors.  Others point to the breakdown of his marriage to Marina Wheeler in 2018, insisting that she was his rock, his anchor, his source of psychological stability and political sense.

But perhaps there’s a simpler explanation, less grounded in amateur psychology, but none the less thematically satisfying. It may be that Boris Johnson’s capacity to play the British Reagan vanished some time between midnight and dawn on 24 June 2016, as it became clear that Britain had voted to leave the European Union. For as the sun rose that morning, just under half of the country vowed that it would never forget and never forgive. They blamed Gove, they blamed Farage, but above all they blamed Johnson. And with that, the part of the national conciliator, the amiable patriotic showman, was lost to him forever. He tried out for other parts, of course: the Brexit deal-maker, the Whitehall party-planner, the East African travel agent. But none of them really worked out. All his life he had been preparing to play a single role — and in the very act of securing it, he lost it forever.

So perhaps, in the end, he was just another victim of Brexit. As a former classical scholar, he might appreciate the irony.

But her card wouldn’t work at the cashpoint either. She tried another one. With the same result.

Laura opened the banking app on her phone. It said only ‘error’, then automatically closed.

She finally abandoned her shopping and went into the nearest branch of Santander. There, the counter assistant seemed just as mystified. After about an hour of waiting, though, Laura was called through into the manager’s office.

“I’m going to read a statement out for you,” the manager said. “But I’m not going to be able to answer any of your questions after that.”

He read out:

“We have locked your bank account. We can’t give you any more information. We might be in touch in future with more information. But we don’t know when that might be.”

Could she have her money? No.

But how was she supposed to get home? After all, she lived eight miles outside of Leeds, and now she had no bus fare. Apparently, this was not the bank’s business.

This low-rent version of The Trial went on for another three weeks. Frequently, Laura would phone up Santander customer services. She’d be put on hold for ages. Then the phone would just go dead. She wrote to Santander to complain. They wrote back: they weren’t interested in her complaint and wouldn’t be taking it any further. Meanwhile, her rent, standing orders and Direct Debits stacked up, the late fees and penalties mushroomed around them, as life tumbled towards chaos.

Nearly a month on, she received a letter from Santander:

Under the terms and conditions… we can withdraw banking facilities at any time, and in line with company policy we don’t give further details.

The account had been closed. Without apparent irony, the balance had been appended as a cheque.

‘Laura’ could be any of us. But she is also Laura Towler, one of the founders of Patriotic Alternative. Towler is a sort of next-gen BNP type, a net-savvy white identitarian who campaigns against mass-migration, and occasionally winks to her Telegram followers about ‘you know who’ (they know alright: The Jews). It would seem that Towler had been expelled from Santander for her views. But in line with the bank’s conditions, this has not been made clear.

By a strange coincidence, in the same month, the same thing happened to Mark Collett, her Patriotic Alternative co-founder. Only, Collett doesn’t bank with Santander — he is with HSBC. Somehow, the same thing also happened, in different countries, to Europe’s leading young white identitarians: Brittany Pettibone and Martin Sellner.

Coincidence abounds in the modern world. Last year, on the other side of the Atlantic, various alt-ish-Right figures who banked with JP Morgan Chase woke up on the same morning to find that they no longer banked with JP Morgan Chase. They included the chair of the Proud Boys Enrique Tarrio, former InfoWars staffer Joe Biggs, Project Veritas associate Laura Loomer, and Martina Markota, a Trump-supporting performance artist.

Suggested reading

What Antifa and the alt-Right have in common

By Mary Harrington

Of those four, it’s the other Laura whose case drives home the full capriciousness of corporate power in a networked age. Loomer styles herself as the “most banned woman in the world”. In addition to Chase, she is banned from PayPal, from VenMo, from The Cash App, Airbnb and Instagram, from Lyft, Uber and UberEats, from the blogging monetisation platform WordAds and the t-shirt print-to-order site TeeSpring, from Twitter and Facebook — obviously — and from any one of a half dozen other platforms for digital congress.

Some of these bans are strongly self-inflicted; controversy is her currency. She got booted from Uber in 2017 after ranting about being unable to find a taxi driver who wasn’t Muslim in Manhattan, in the hours after the NYC terror truck attack. Twitter banned her in 2018, after she laid into Ilhan Omar, the Muslim Congresswoman, claiming, scandalously, that Omar was part of a religion in which “homosexuals are oppressed”, and ”women are abused” and “forced to wear the hijab.” Later that month, wearing a gold ‘Juden’ star (Loomer is Jewish) she handcuffed herself to Twitter HQ, to protest the decision.

But many of those bans are mere cascade effects. TeeSpring works with PayPal. PayPal had already declared Loomer an unperson, and thus they informed TeeSpring that they would have to stop supplying her. Ditto Venmo and The Cash App.

You don’t want to mess with the people who make the widgets that undergird the financial system. In 2018, in response to activist pressure, MasterCard began choking off various far-Right and internet Right figures. That in turn meant their often lucrative Patreon accounts were cancelled: YouTube ‘Classical Liberal’ Carl Benjamin lost $12000 a month. Now, in a post-Covid world, where we’re often being told that cash is no longer acceptable, some are also being told that electronic banking is no longer for them. It’s an interesting crossroads.

The likes of Towler might be distasteful. But if that alone is the bar for the arbitrary exercise of power by, say, the PR department of NatWest, then all kinds of people — from Cat Bin Lady down — stand to be unpersoned.

Right of admission is always reserved — we all know this — and you might say that these examples are just the market at work. Except that some things are so fundamental to our everyday lives that they’re not so much markets as the thing that you need in order to use a market.

In the dying days of Gordon Brown, an attempt was made to guarantee every citizen’s right to a current account. It was quickly shot down by the Big Five banks (after all, it wasn’t as if they owed the government any favours). A decade on, that tide is further out than it has ever been.

In the banking system’s capacity to disable the individual without pro-actively doing them harm, there’s an echo of the elegance of the Chinese government’s social credit. “There was no file, no police warrant, no official advance notification. They just cut me off from the things I was once entitled to. What’s really scary is there’s nothing you can do about it,” was how Liu Hu put it — a Chinese journalist, who ran afoul of social credit in 2019. But perhaps Black Mirror’s ‘Nosedive’ episode would be a more apt comparison. In our hemisphere, that kind of deletion is done more cheerily, coated in the veneer of freedom of choice and association, by PR and HR, not by the grey monolith of The Party’s star council.

Suggested reading

How we bend the knee to our HR overlords

By Aris Roussinos

Increasingly, we allow our corporations to police the soft boundaries of acceptable speech and thought, from Sainsbury’s rejection of ‘racist’ shoppers to the Yorkshire Tea wars to Tampax’s latest bloodbath.

Ironically enough, the license that companies now take as part of their remit is a perfect mirror image of the Cake Problem: the oft-rehashed libertarian thought experiment, over whether a fundamentalist Christian cake-maker should be forced to bake a cake for a gay wedding. When US Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson was posed the question in 2016, he said that they should — and added that he would equally require a Jewish baker to make a Nazi wedding cake. The underlying principle is one of neutrality. Where two belief systems clash, if they remain polite and cooperative, shouldn’t the public still retain an underlying right of service?

Evidently not.

Another great thought experiment dawned in August of last year, when Laura Loomer stunned the Republican establishment by winning the GOP primary for Florida’s 21st Congressional District. The 21st is West Palm Beach, where Mar-a-Lago lives. Trump himself has already cast his vote for her.

Suggested reading

The cringe of Right-wing celebrity-worship

By Daniel Kalder

Clearly, Loomer’s campaign has been adversely affected by her various bans. At the time of her deletion, Loomer’s tweets were getting 150 million impressions a month. As she puts it: “They just assume that people can afford TV, and that they’re not going to get all their information through social media.”  She might have wingnut tendencies, but Loomer is also half of the choice for voters in the 21st District.

This year, “in the interests of transparency and fairness”, Twitter has given every single candidate standing in the US election a blue-check verified account. So, when she won her primary, she applied to have her accounts reinstated.

No dice. She can’t get on Big Social, the broadcast networks are ignoring her, and her opponent, Lois Frankel, won’t even say her name, let alone debate her.

Should she win — still a long shot — Loomer has sworn to spend her time on Capitol Hill breaking up the tech giants’ monopoly. So couldn’t it be said that they’re acting to titrate their own legislative environment?

F.A. Hayek, and his prophet on earth Margaret Thatcher, saw the market as the best bulwark against tyrannical state power — that by pulling lots of little levers every day with our cash, we’d effectively be voting, in a constant dialogue of mini-democracy. It was only towards the end of their regime that the Thatcherites began to realise that some things — from trains down — remain public utilities in spirit, no matter who runs them.

As the Hunter Biden story still freezes the New York Post’s Twitter feed, it seems the power of the corporate lever-pullers to mould the outer edges of democracy is as strong as it has ever been. We can vote with our wallets, sure. But what if the scope extends way beyond a single product line, into an entire kind of product, or the social architecture that makes products possible? What if the lever-pullers are our wallets?