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

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

Suggested Reading

How cavalier is Boris?

By Giles Fraser

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

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

Suggested reading

What's the point of political stunts?

By Lance Price

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

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

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

Suggested reading

Charisma will only get you so far

By Elizabeth Oldfield

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

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

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

More from this author

Let Top Gear be toxic

By Tanya Gold

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

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

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

The current Tory leadership contest is sheer agony – especially for those of us able to call to mind the calibre of some of those who have steered the party and the country in times gone by. There’s one man, in particular, whose influence on Britain and the wider word was – and continues to be – immense. And yet his name isn’t lauded like say, Churchill or de Gaulle. History seems rather to have written him off. But without him, our lives might have been very different. I’m thinking of Harold Macmillan.

Let’s begin with his more trivial achievements – well, relatively trivial. In 1956, Macmillan, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, was looking for ways to dampen down inflation by cutting consumption. In that year’s budget, he introduced a government-backed savings vehicle which paid out no interest but instead offered investors the chance to win a tax-free prize every month. Sixty or so years later, over 20 million people in the UK own well in excess of £30 billion worth of Premium Bonds.

A fair few of those people will also live in a house originally built in the years following the war. Some of those buildings, of course, went up during the pioneering Labour government that led Britain between 1945 and 1951. But even more of them were constructed under the Conservative government that followed it – and which ran the country for 13 years until 1964.

Suggested reading

Charisma will only get you so far

By Elizabeth Oldfield

That government’s first Minister of Housing – the man to whom many believed Churchill had given a poisoned chalice by asking him to achieve the seemingly impossible target of 300,000 properties a year – was (yes, you’ve guessed it) Harold Macmillan. Via some judicious deregulation, he not only helped the construction sector reach the target but helped it do so far earlier than expected.

Before that success, many of his colleagues had written Macmillan off, regarding him, indeed, as something of a political oddity and a personal failure (his impressive military record in WWI and diplomatic role in WWII notwithstanding).

Westminster’s worst kept secret was that his wife had been conducting an affair with his Conservative colleague, Bob Boothby, since the 1930s. And during that decade, Macmillan himself had earned a reputation as a disturbingly unconventional thinker on economic and social policy, writing volumes such as The State and Industry (1932), Reconstruction: A Plea for a National Unity (1933), The Next Five Years (1935), and, perhaps most famously, The Middle Way (1938). All of them championed the idea that governments should take greater responsibility for the economy as well as, more generally, the welfare of the population as a whole.

Meanwhile, Macmillan’s family business, in which he played an active role, was publishing John Maynard Keynes’ General Theory – probably the most influential book on economics of the 20th century. It is credited with helping to convince post-war policy makers that, via the management of demand by fiscal and monetary means, they could prevent a return to the unemployment which blighted Britain (and other countries) in the thirties.

It became increasingly clear after 1945, that the Conservative Party was going to have to reconcile itself to the public’s demand for a more activist state – one that would provide both economic growth and increased social security. And so Macmillan’s long-held beliefs looked rather more prescient. So, too, did his opposition to appeasement, which, along with that of Churchill, Eden and others, later helped to avert the charge that the entire Conservative Party had effectively given Hitler what he wanted.

As a result, and given his successful ministerial record under Churchill, it came as no surprise that, in April 1955, Eden having finally managed to winkle the grand old man out of Number 10, Macmillan was named Foreign Secretary. Later that year, he became Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Macmillan’s elevation to the Premiership just over a year later in January 1957, however, did come as something of a shock to those not in the know. It had a great deal to do with an event that is often quoted nowadays (in the same breath as Brexit) as one of the most disastrous and humiliating episodes for a British government in recent memory – the 1956 Suez crisis.

Suggested reading

How do you solve a problem like Theresa?

By Polly Mackenzie

It might be going too far to assert that, without Macmillan, Eden would never have gone with the idea that Israel should invade Egypt in order to provide a pretext for Britain and France to snatch back the Suez Canal. But Macmillan’s enthusiasm for the plan, and his misplaced confidence that US President Dwight Eisenhower (whom he had got to know well during the war) would tolerate the operation, certainly did nothing to dissuade his colleagues from going ahead with it.

It is undoubtedly true, though, that it was Macmillan’s rapid realisation that the otherwise relatively successful intervention would have to be called off, not least in order to prevent a diplomatic disaster turning into economic chaos, which convinced those same colleagues to stop it in its tracks.

It was also Macmillan who, unlike, his rival Rab Butler, was able to convince his furious fellow Conservative MPs that the government could recover from the affair – one of the main reasons the party turned to him rather than Butler when Eden resigned.

Supermac – as he came to be dubbed – turned out to be right. Not only did he manage to repair relations with the US, later striking up a friendship with the much younger Jack Kennedy, but at the 1959 election – one unusual for being fought in the autumn rather than the spring or summer – he increased the Conservative Party’s overall majority to over 100.

This he did by persuading voters (who he famously said “had never had it so good”) that it was the architect and guarantor of their burgeoning consumer affluence, establishing the template later used to similarly devastating electoral effect by Margaret Thatcher in the loadsamoney 1980s. But he also did it by refusing to countenance the public spending constraints demanded by his supposedly proto-Thatcherite Treasury team, whose resulting resignation in January 1958, Macmillan, with his characteristic ‘unflappability’, dismissed as “a little local difficulty”.

More from this author

Why we all need a share in capitalism

By Tim Bale

In hindsight, this may have been unwise – though not nearly as unwise as his fateful decision in 1960 to commission Dr Beeching to write his report which resulted in the closure of a third of Britain’s rail network, cutting off hundreds of towns and villages from one of the most environmentally-friendly (if costly) forms of transport.

But it was surely in defence and foreign affairs that Macmillan made his biggest and most lasting contribution. He played a role in Cold War efforts to ban the testing of nuclear weapons but also secured the Polaris weapons system for the UK’s independent nuclear deterrent. He effectively admitted that Britain’s imperial game was up and then set a course firmly for decolonisation with his ‘Winds of change’ speech in February 1960.

And, of course, after trying to establish the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) as a counter to the EEC, Macmillan swiftly came to the realisation that the UK had no alternative but to join the bigger bloc, initiating its first of three eventually successful accession applications to what is now the EU.

Whether that 40-plus years of membership is about to end – and end in tears – who knows? What we do know, however, is that without Harold Macmillan, Britain and the world might well have looked very different.

It proposes to withhold payments to the EU, slash overseas aid and scrap HS2 high-speed rail in order to deliver £200 billion of investment to regions outside London, improve transport links and broadband across the country and scrap business rates for new firms outside the capital. It is casting itself, as Freddie Sayers noted, “as the party of the regions, pitted against an over-dominant capital”.

Suggested reading

Farage has found Boris's weak spot

By Freddie Sayers

The Brexit Party’s tilt towards regional grievances is the latest example in Western democracies of how a sharpening divide between what the French geographer Christophe Guilluy calls the “metropole and the periphery” is rapidly being politicised.

It’s a familiar enough refrain now. On one side are those who can afford to live in the big cities; they are strongly liberal and have little interest in rebalancing the settlement. On the other, are those who are stuck in the periphery and outer regions – or who choose to live there – who have seen life sucked out of their once thriving communities. Left behind and left out, these voters know that our ‘open’ cities are actually among the most ‘closed’ places on earth.

The problem for the main parties is that this narrative resonates. Whisper it quietly: the Brexit Party’s offer is not a bad reply to the referendum result. The Leave vote was always anchored as much in regional inequalities as conservative Euroscepticism.

Such policies are also not a million miles away from proposals that have been put forward by think-tanks such as IPPR North, the Social Mobility Commission and former prime minister, Gordon Brown, who rightly suggested that we should have a royal commission to think more seriously about those regional divides. So why is it the populists and not the main parties who have translated this discussion into concrete proposals?

Suggested reading

Where's our ambition for the North?

By Phillip Blond

The pivot suggests that Farage and the Brexit Party have realised that their future lies not in affluent southern Tory seats but in blue-collar, left-behind Britain. “There are many seats in the country”, Farage told his supporters last week, “especially Labour-held seats, where we are the main challenger”. The Brexit Party will contest every seat at the next election and it looks like those Labour redoubts scattered along coastal England, in the Midlands, the struggling north and Wales will be key targets as a result.

The seats most conducive to the Brexit Party can be identified by using data that I compiled with Caitlin Milazzo for a book on UKIP, which turned out to be an extremely good predictor of how Farage’s party performed in 2015. We have subsequently demonstrated how there is a strong relationship between support for the two, and so the data paints a pretty reliable picture of where the Brexit Party will strike a chord.

The picture highlights peripheral, unheard Britain – towns, communities and neighbourhoods which have been neglected and ignored for decades. There are typically larger numbers of working-class residents, pensioners, white voters and people with few or no formal qualifications. Most have been sidelined by the economic transformation of Britain over the past 30 years and battered by the winds of globalisation. There has been very little inward investment.

They include coastal communities such as Clacton, Great Yarmouth, and Boston and Skegness, and then pass through struggling communities in Wales like Blaenau Gwent and Merthyr Tydfil, up to Ashfield in Eastern England and into Blackpool and Sunderland in the North. Spend one-hour in these seats and the question of why so many people turned away from the main parties to vote for UKIP, and then Brexit, is not a hard one to answer. These are the areas that are suffering from a ‘double whammy’: few people with skills and qualifications but also few local opportunities.

Suggested reading

The town that should shame our politicians

By Paul Embery

Many of the Brexit Party’s most favourable seats are currently in Labour hands. Of the 20 most favourable, no fewer than 16 were won by Labour in 2017; of the 50 most favourable, 36 are held by Labour. They include seats such as Yvette Cooper’s seat of Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford and other northern Labour seats such as Stoke-on-Trent North, Wentworth and Dearne, and Easington. In many of these places, Labour’s MPs have large majorities, which have been built up over many years. But this is not the case in all of them.

There are also seats where the margins are closer and where a strong Brexit Party vote could easily make life far more complicated for both Labour and the Conservatives. There are, for example, northern and more marginal seats that should normally be in Conservative sights, such as Ashfield, Great Grimsby, Scunthorpe and Dudley North. Even if the Brexit Party were to only poll around the 10% mark this would seriously complicate the Tory task of capturing these Labour seats.

Nor is Farage starting from scratch. He is already well-known in these areas. Only four years ago, at the 2015 general election, UKIP won only one seat (in Clacton) but finished second in 120 constituencies, 44 of which went to Labour. UKIP easily surpassed 20% of the vote in lots of Labour seats without really trying or targeting them, seats such Barnsley East, Don Valley, Doncaster Central, and Houghton and Sunderland South.

Farage’s relationship with these places was rekindled when, at the European elections this year, many of them put the Brexit Party well ahead of Labour. His party humiliated Labour in its oldest heartlands – Ashfield, Redcar, Merthyr Tydfil, Bolsover and Hartlepool. It won all but a few of the 39 districts in England’s northwest, every district in the northeast and more than doubled Labour’s share of the vote in Wales.

Suggested reading

How long will the Brexit Party last?

By Peter Franklin

This is not to say that the Brexit Party is about to capture dozens of Labour seats – but the challenge to Labour from Farage at the next election will be stronger than the challenge presented in 2015

The problem for the Tories is that they also need to make inroads into these Leave-voting areas if they are to offset their likely losses to Labour and the Liberal Democrats in Remainia. Yet Brexit Party insiders argue that this will simply never happen because of long established political traditions: voters in these areas will never turn out in large numbers for ‘the Tories’. “If you vote Tory,” Farage declared, “you will get Corbyn and you should stand aside for the Brexit Party who can beat them in those constituencies.”

The claim is not without evidence. In 2017, Theresa May and the Conservatives appealed directly to Brexit voters, hoping to offset losses in Remainia by capturing pro-Brexit seats in Labour’s heartlands. In the end, however, the former happened while the latter never really materialised. The Tories captured just five seats from Labour in places where a majority of people had voted to Leave the EU.

While a handful of Conservative candidates suddenly found themselves representing the good people of Walsall North, Stoke South, Mansfield, Middlesbrough South and Copeland this was simply not enough when set alongside Conservative losses in Remain voting areas.

Suggested reading

The reason people peddle lies about Farage

By Douglas Murray

This time around, a Prime Minister Johnson or Hunt will need to find a far better way of appealing to these areas, otherwise they risk serious losses in both Remainia and Leave Land. This means grappling with the fact that many voters in these seats are ‘cross-pressured’. In their hearts, they agree with the Tories on the cultural issues of Brexit and immigration, and also crime. But in their heads, they agree with Corbyn’s economic radicalism and his promise to do more to redistribute an economy which many feel is rigged against them. Talking only about Brexit is not enough; voters also want to know how this moment will be used to make our society fairer.

Theresa May is familiar with this problem. Many voters liked her on culture but were deeply sceptical when it came to economics. So, while the Conservative vote increased a bit, so too did Labour’s, which was a disappointment to May and her advisors.

So, in short, the next Tory leader needs to go much further on economics than they are probably prepared to. In a world where the vast majority of Brexit Party voters earn less than £40,000 per year, tax cuts for people on £50-80k are not going to cut it.

Farage may have set out his stall, but there has been remarkably little during the Conservative leadership campaign to suggest that either candidate, or the Tory Party as a whole, truly grasps what is needed to appeal to Brexit Party Britain – that place where voters share a profound sense of economic insecurity and pessimism. These voters are looking for a far more radical domestic policy agenda and one that is chiefly focused on economic fairness, not on how to build a Singapore-on-Thames.

More from this author

The coming Conservative catastrophe

By Matthew Goodwin

With an election looming, the Tories need to come up with a counter offer for Brexit Britain and one that goes further than ‘we will deliver Brexit’. And do it fast. If they fail to do so, then even a mediocre Brexit Party vote could cause major problems for incumbent Conservative MPs who are sitting on small majorities – like Johnny Mercer in Plymouth Moor View, Lucy Allan in Telford, Amber Rudd in Hastings and Rye or Simon Clarke in Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland.

Other Tory seats that were gained in 2017, have wafer-thin majorities and are favourable to the Brexit Party like Thurrock, Southport, Aberconwy and Southampton Itchen could fall in the same way. The Tories will need to find a new way of appealing to these areas, not just by delivering Brexit but also going further on the economic axis.

Meanwhile, unless Labour retains its relationship with its traditional working-class voters then it could find that its majorities in pro-Leave seats are further whittled down as Opposition voters coalesce around the Brexit Party.

In short, as British politics continues to fragment, the future of the main parties depends on how they seek to renew their relationship with the Britain that they left behind.

The knee-jerk response from the sanctity of the pro-European high ground was to accuse the Brexit Party of being Nazi imitators (Hitler’s NSDAP led by Joseph Goebbels pulled the same stunt in the Reichstag back in 1930) or petulant children playing silly games.

Either or both may be perfectly reasonable responses but they entirely miss the point. Worse, they play straight into Mr Farage’s eager hands.

The stunt worked. It got them on the Ten O’Clock News. Those who voted for the Brexit Party saw a collective two-finger salute that they would have considered entirely justified. With their predictable indignation, those who despise the party merely helped to amplify the message it was trying to disseminate.

Suggested reading

How Farage outflanked everyone

By Matthew Goodwin

Political stunts almost always have an effect. That’s why political leaders have been pulling them ever since Caligula appointed his horse Incitatus to the Roman Senate, if not before. And they will go on pulling them for as long as they need to reassure their support base or seek new votes.

Wise politicians, or their advisers, resort to them sparingly. They know their use always comes with high attendant risks. Successful ones certainly produce short-term benefits, but these are soon forgotten. When they go wrong they can hang round your neck like a millstone.

Remember the Ed Stone? That ill-fated attempt by Ed Miliband back in 2015 (was it really only four years ago?) to prove the immutability of his election pledges was doomed from the first tap of a chisel.

Its defenders, and there are still a few, argue that any publicity stunt is a good publicity stunt if it gets the product talked about, in this case those pledges. But can you remember any of them? No, me neither. It failed because it amplified the message of Miliband’s opponents rather than his own. Could he be trusted? If the answer is yes, no need to say it. If the answer is no, or at best maybe, then shut up about it.

Suggested reading

Where would the Left be without Brexit?

By James Bloodworth

Visual amplification is the reason we still see those campaign buses, surely the product of a bygone age, on our streets. They are a cheap way of providing a picture for the papers or the TV news. You can paint things on them for a few quid and off you go. The advertising standards authority is powerless to intervene if you make outrageous claims. I think you know the bus I’m thinking of.

The same risks apply to stunts on wheels as they do more generally, however. Long before Theresa May took to the stage as the world’s most improbable Dancing Queen she was associated with those vans touring London warning illegal immigrants to “go home or face arrest”. Labour’s Pink Bus was widely regarded as unsophisticated at best or patronising at worst in its attempt to appeal to women voters. Neither vehicle was seen by many people in person but the images lived on long after the garage doors were thankfully shut.

Stunts grab attention because the media in all its forms demands images and images stick in the mind. Pretty unsophisticated stuff but it’s a fact of modern political life.

They work when they reinforce a view that most inattentive voters are generally inclined to accept. They almost never change perceptions dramatically. Margaret Thatcher driving a tank. Strong on defence. Tick. Neil Kinnock also driving a tank. Fail. David Cameron riding with huskies. A different kind of Tory. Tick. William Hague wearing a baseball cap. Fail.

Suggested reading

Why the Iron Lady is an icon for our times

By Ian Birrell

What gives the campaign strategist hope is knowing that occasionally a stunt that might be expected to produce a collective groan or belly-laugh actually works. People still remember Tony Blair buying Gordon Brown an ice cream cone during the 2005 election, smiles all round.

Everyone knew that the two men could barely stand to be in the same room together by this stage. Perhaps that animosity had already, in the jargon, been ‘priced in’ and people were just pleased to see them looking so happy. Election victory number three for T. Blair duly followed.

Stuntology is an inexact science, but a reasonable case could be made for saying that those politicians with the self-confidence and the chutzpah to carry off a stunt effectively are also likely to be election winners. That is not to argue for causality, rather for concomitance. True certainly of Thatcher and Blair, and arguably the two Harolds, Wilson and Macmillan.

The obvious exceptions need not spoil a good general theory. John Major’s soap-box in 1992 worked and he was no natural showman. But he was up against Neil Kinnock, whose stunts included appearing in pop videos with Tracey Ullman and falling in the sea in Brighton. And one of the greatest showmen of all time, Winston Churchill, was soundly beaten in 1945 by Clement Attlee whose contribution to political communications was best summed up by the exchange with a TV interviewer. “Is there anything you’d like to say about the coming election?” “No.”

Which brings us to the future. Barring accidents, including the possibility of a stunt that spectacularly misfires, we are about to see the Greatest Showman on today’s inglorious political stage take on the role of Prime Minister. There is no need to rehearse his repertoire of headline-grabbing tomfoolery because it is so well known. Suffice it to say that he knows how to play to the cameras.

Suggested reading

Charisma will only get you so far

By Elizabeth Oldfield

He’ll get there without the inconvenience of a general election, although one may soon follow either because he wants one or because he’s forced into one. What then?

Boris the buffoon, who would like to be compared to Churchill, versus Jeremy Corbyn, who holds Attlee as a political hero. “Is there anything you would like to say about whether Brexit is actually good for the country, Mr Corbyn?” “No.”

I suspect much of the country would prefer to turn their backs on the pair of them. If they do it would help both Mr Farage and whoever gets to head the Liberal Democrats after their under-reported leadership election.

In a matter of months, we could face a choice between Tory and Labour leaders who prefer to deflect scrutiny with a mixture of bluster and obfuscation and political outsiders who have so far escaped detailed examination because they haven’t been considered serious contenders for power.

It is as fertile ground for stunt-based politics as we have ever seen in this country. For the first time we may be looking at an election that could be swung by who pulls off the best stunts. And that is as serious an indictment of the state of British politics that I, for one, can think of.

Two examples are commonly cited to illustrate Johnson’s doomed romance with grands projets: the Emirates cable car and the aborted Garden Bridge across the Thames, both initiated when he was Mayor of London.

The cable car has indeed proved a largely unnecessary and expensive addition to the capital’s transport system (though it was, miraculously, completed in time for the 2012 Olympics).

How far the Garden Bridge can be classed as a BoJo folly is more questionable. It was the brainchild of Joanna Lumley, the actor and celebrity whose considerable powers of persuasion also convinced a hard-hearted government to allow several thousand former Gurkha soldiers and their families to resettle in the UK – an expensive undertaking that has not always ended well. 

Of course, a wiser mayor than Boris might not have been seduced. But it is worth remembering that there was a time when the idea of an eco-friendly bridge wreathed in greenery was well received by Londoners – before the restricted access and the size of the future maintenance bill hit home.

And anyway, to describe either the cable car or the unbuilt Garden Bridge as a grand projet is quite wrong. They were at best minor vanity projects for an attention-seeking mayor. 

Suggested reading

Where's our ambition for the North?

By Philip Blond

A grand projet is very different in its scale and ambition. It requires imagination, even vision – and yes, a wad of taxpayers’ money. But also a sense of both elevated purpose and the value of something that inspires.

The list of Mitterrand’s legacy includes the Pyramid at the Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay, the Opera-Bastille, the Grande Arche de la Defense, and the National (now Mitterrand) Library. The last, especially, has its critics – it ran late and vastly over-budget and used to be hard to reach, but it now takes its proud place in the Paris landscape. 

In general, though, the finished products offer something impressive to show for the time and money expended – something that might hark back, in a way, to the great civic building projects of the past, or to the era of the great international exhibitions. The political will behind them also gives them the great advantage that they are seen through to completion, not abandoned half-way. 

In fact, while much British scorn is reserved for other people’s grandiose schemes, it is not true that “we” can’t do them. How would you classify London’s Docklands, or the regeneration of Liverpool? Or the “new” universities of the 1960s and 1970s? Or Tate Modern, or the London 2012 Olympics?

Suggested reading

The rebirth of Liverpool

By Sam Jordison

This last was a grand endeavour that – eventually and despite much national pessimism – won huge public support and left a legacy now revitalising a once-depressed area of east London. Political will, space for imagination (that opening ceremony) and the focus forced by a deadline all contributed to its success. It bust the original budget, yes – but, how many would now say that it was not worth it, to have a nation feel better about itself? 

In fact, far from dismissing grands projets, the UK would do well to consider a lot more of them. And not just them, but grands travaux – the more utilitarian, but no less inspiring, infrastructure projects at which the French in particular excel: the high-speed train network; the motorways, the Alpine tunnels, the bridges.

It is worth mentioning that two of these were the result of UK-French collaboration: the spectacular and supremely elegant motorway bridge across the Tarn at Millau (completed ahead of schedule in 2004), and the Channel Tunnel, which speeds more than 10 million people and 1.5 million lorries between the UK and France every year. Announced by Margaret Thatcher and François Mitterrand in 1984, the Eurostar was whisking its first passengers under La Manche 10 years later in a feat of engineering completed on time and rarely even remarked upon today. 

Suggested reading

If you're pro-immigration you can't be anti-development

By Peter Franklin

Which is a good point to return to Boris Johnson and the potential there might be for whoever becomes the next Prime Minister to embark on some serious 21^st century nation-building in the form of major new national infrastructure projects. 

Johnson himself is reported to have broached the possibility of the Channel Tunnel being supplemented by a bridge during a Franco-British summit last year, only to be slapped down by the famously unimaginative Theresa May. Yet a bridge providing a road link was part of the original Channel Tunnel discussion. It is technically feasible; it would help loosen the pinch-points at either end of the Tunnel and send a forceful message about how the UK might be “leaving the EU, but not leaving Europe”, as the politicians like to say. It could also appeal to the French President, Emmanuel Macron – himself no slouch in the ideas department. 

Johnson also highlighted the possibility of another bridge during the hustings this week in Belfast. There has been talk of a fixed link between Scotland and Northern Ireland for a while, with varying assessments of its feasibility. But what better way to send a message about the next Government’s determination both to preserve the Union and to look beyond the south-east than to initiate such a project?

Back to the south-east, and “Boris Island” airport is another Johnson project whose time may yet come. The new runway at Heathrow may now have parliamentary approval, but there are more consultations and more hurdles – especially ecological – to jump. With concern about climate change rising rapidly up the political agenda, and air and noise pollution increasingly recognised as harmful to health and quality of life, the marshes and birds of the Thames estuary may yet be sacrificed.

Another eco-friendly idea – also Johnson’s, as it happens – was to put the capital’s haphazard and congestion-prone North and South circular roads underground – as their equivalents mostly are in, say, Brussels and Paris. The idea was warmly received by local residents where plans were mooted, with the land freed above earmarked for housing and recreational space. But nothing came of it. Too difficult, too disruptive – and by then there was a new mayor. 

Suggested reading

How to fix Britain after Brexit

By Paul Embery

Contrast the travails of Crossrail, designed to ease journeys into and across London – now running way over budget and more than two years (if we are lucky) over time. And then there’s the controversial north-south high-speed railway, HS2, which may never be built. The difficulties have been not only with the planning and implementation, but with the “selling”.

Where is the vision of what a more direct, faster, north-south railway could provide? Why was the chance to transform travel around the north of England, or the currently parlous east-west routes, not highlighted? Why has it all been so London-centric?

And why has no one picked up on the opportunity, since the Houses of Parliament need to be vacated for refurbishment, to look seriously at the possibilities of a new building – or even a capital – elsewhere? Or even an imaginative temporary structure, such as the Serpentine Gallery manages to construct on a small scale every year? Current plans are for an extraordinarily expensive adaptation of an existing building on Whitehall. Where is the imagination? 

It is beyond time for the UK to drop its supercilious and defeatist attitude to grands projets, and recognise that they can have multiple benefits.

At best, they can inspire, they can add aesthetic and cultural value, they can improve public facilities on a scale that is beyond the capacity of many local authorities. With political will behind them, they do come to fruition.

The next Prime Minister and his government should take a lead, but also invite ideas from around the country. They might be surprised at the vision and practical ambition that is out there, just waiting to be freed.

Last week, I pointed out the pitfalls amid the putative Conservative leaders’ debate on the BBC. But it was probably unfair of me to single out one programme for criticism. Because an inability to deal with serious questions and an unwillingness to allow for serious answers has in many ways become the hallmark of the age of TV political discussion.

I see examples of what is wrong, and of what might have been, all the time. But let me cite a  recent example. Earlier this month, on Politics Live, the BBC’s main daily political discussion show, there was a discussion about socialism and communism. The conversation skimmed across a couple of surfaces, with two of the guests talking in a positive light about the alleged virtues of the same. And then the Conservative columnist Toby Young riposted with the rather good line: “Socialism always begins with a universal vision for the brotherhood of man and ends with people having to eat their own pets.” I raise it not to discuss the line – clever, true and pithy though it is – but the reaction to it.

Suggested reading

Why should the BBC censor the public?

By Douglas Murray

The presenter was Jo Coburn, one of the best political journalists and interviewers in action. It is precisely because of this that her reaction was so striking. There are a number of things you might say in reaction to Young’s statement. You might ask him to extrapolate it, or otherwise further explain it. You might ask why that was always the case with socialism, and what lessons might as a result be learned from it. You might contest it, and argue that not every single person who lived under socialism always ended up always having to eat their pets. Or you might look at the human catastrophe of what an unfathomable number of 100 million deaths actually means.

But none of this happened. Coburn immediately moved things on with an “Oh, charming”, as though Young had said something vaguely rude or otherwise malodorous. All done in the most jocular and easy fashion, of course: seamless and professional.

There are two reasons for this neat segue. One is technical. It is one of the oddities of political discussion on television that host and guests are (even when they are mildly at odds) always in a state of collusion. It is in the interests of all of those involved that the thing should run smoothly.

The contributors must play their ping-pong of political points with energy and grace and the presenter is to marshal events in such a way that every allotted time-slot is hit and no awkward silences or dry-ups occur. Indeed, to some extent, the guests help each other out as much as the presenter helps them. Everyone is relieved when it all runs smoothly and pleasantly. If feels like someone’s walked over your grave if a fellow guest does dry up, or doesn’t make sense or does something inappropriate.

Suggested reading

Can we reform our rancid political debate?

By Douglas Murray

So that is the technical reason. But there is another reason why any reference to the most serious events of the past or present can only be done through badinage. And that is because political discussion shows of the kind that have come to dominate are simply not suited to discussing the most serious issues. That isn’t to say that they do not get broached, rather that they must be treated as a sort of game.

The medium is fixated not on accurate excavation of truths but on contributors moving the agenda along. People must say what they think will happen next. They must have a stab (almost never with any more knowledge than the viewers) at predicting what someone they don’t know might do next. And then it’s time to move on to the next spot of allotted guesswork.

The bonhomie of the resulting political discussion is, I suppose, an antidote to those shouting-matches which have occasionally arisen (and indeed been encouraged) in the past. But it is completely unsuited to the most serious subjects. Watching the BBC’s discussion about communism, I was reminded of the point when I realised something was truly wrong with this television culture.

Suggested reading

Communism's forgotten victims

By Douglas Murray

A few years ago, when the Cuban dictator Fidel Castro died, I was invited by Sky’s rolling news channel to come on and discuss his legacy. Preparations were being made for the funeral and there was talk of which foreign leaders would and wouldn’t show up for it. Just before we went live, I realised that the other guest who would be on to discuss or debate with me was Richard Gott. Some people might not remember this, but Gott is not merely an occasional contributor to The Guardian and roving commentator on South American affairs. In the 1990s, when he was still on the editorial staff at The Guardian, he was outed as an agent of influence of the KGB, and eventually admitted to taking “red gold”. His editor at the newspaper tried to persuade him to stay on staff at the paper, but eventually accepted his resignation.

Anyhow, as Gott and I were talking and he gave his pro-Castro and deeply anti-American version of history, I thought that any viewers who were not aware of Gott’s KGB past should be enlightened about it. And so I mentioned that my fellow guest was not exactly an impartial commentator on matters to do with socialist dictatorships, but someone who had himself worked as an agent of influence of the KGB. It struck me, as I said on air, that it was like hearing someone who had worked for the SS being asked his opinion about German affairs in the early 1940s.

Once again some invisible tripwire had been walked into. On that occasion the interviewer was the (again excellent) Kay Burley. “OK – let’s try not to be too personal about each other and play it a little bit cooler and talk about what’s happening as far as Fidel Castro is concerned, who is going to the funeral and who isn’t.”

 As viewers can see for themselves I wasn’t irate or foaming as I made my points. I didn’t look like I was about to throw over a table and hit someone. I simply thought that for the sake of any viewers not familiar with Soviet history, some context about my fellow discussant was necessary.

There may, of course, have been a number of reasons why Burley moved things along. She may herself have had no idea of Gott’s KGB connection. Her producer in her ear may have had no idea. They may have thought I was making the most serious allegation imaginable (I was) and worried that I had no evidence for it (I did). And so, perhaps the actual or metaphorical voice in Burley’s ear was just saying “Hell, hell, get him off making these allegations and onto the funeral guest-list”. That is one possibility.

I also suspect (regardless of those Right-wingers who will insist that the situation would have been different) that if Gott had worked for fascists rather than communists, then the reaction of the presenter would not have been much different. But it struck me then, as it strikes me now, that it all demonstrated a serious failure of the medium.

Today, TV politics requires levity, ease, lack-of-heaviness: it exists on airy chattiness. The opposite of this is any glimpse of the real horrors that lie beneath. Yet horrors do lie beneath, and a medium which aspires to inform should find a voice able to speak there too. To be wide-reaching, political discussion must obviously speak in many registers. But if it cannot speak to the most serious register, and gets stuck solely in that of entertainment, then it makes not just the medium, but politics as a whole, frivolous and eventually superfluous.

I had gone along to what was being described as his ‘losing party’ to see what the fuss was about. True, I had been impressed by the energy and enthusiasm of his walking tour from Warrington to Wigan, via Belfast and Edinburgh. But could the reality live up to the online hype?

I arrived to find around 600 fans packed into a small courtyard, eagerly awaiting their new hero’s arrival. “If Rory went to Glastonbury, he’d get just as big a response as Jeremy Corbyn,” said the excitable 17-year-old next to me. 

The crowd loved him, whooping and cheering as he leapt on to the stage. “You’re much more interesting than me because you’re more diverse than I am,” he told the gathered throng. Though a quick glance around showed only a sea of young white men, shiny-faced and besuited. He must have been referring to followers of his wider movement.

Rory’s talk was rousing. He talked about compromise and coalitions, and beseeched us to join ‘his movement’. The crowd was right behind him. I found myself slightly swept along. So much so, that afterwards I actually queued up in the hope of a handshake and a selfie. In it, I found a little diversity. One woman told me she’d “sign up for Rory Party, but not the Tory Party”. Another explained why the Rory bandwagon should swing by Sheffield to pick up her friends who are not Tories but are enthused by his honesty and vision for a fairer society. 

He had also picked up a new fan during the previous Sunday’s leadership debate. The woman who’d asked the candidates if they’d be willing to suspend parliament to break the Brexit deadlock forced her way to the front of the line to tell Rory, “I’m a Lib Dem, but after your answer on Sunday, I’d vote for you.”

As I approached the hero of the hour, I was elbowed aside by a middle-aged man introducing himself as the head of a local ‘Conservatives for a People’s Vote’ campaign. He was desperate to tell Rory about his shock that 57% of Tory members want to pursue a no deal Brexit. Rory, I was surprised to note, wasn’t so keen to talk about it. 

In his speech, Rory had encouraged the audience to accept differing opinions and everyone’s individuality. But I don’t imagine many of the audience were Leavers. And that may prove problematic for Stewart. Those Brexit bashing fans could block his movement from extending out of the London liberal bubble. If he is going to remove that great wedge driven into society, Rory needs a fan base that is ready to move on. 

Suggested reading

What do we want from our leaders?

By Douglas Murray

When I finally came face-to-face with him, he seemed like a different man from the ball of energy I’d seen on stage a few minutes before. Weeks of tireless campaigning, early morning radio and late-night TV had taken their toll: his face looked worn and tired, and bloodshot eyes accentuated the pale and sunken skin smudged with foundation, the residue of the TV studios.

It had clearly been a huge effort to get this far; maintaining momentum now he’s out of the leadership race will be a struggle. Especially if he’s going to try to re-energise the centre ground one person at a time. 

But watching him listening and trying to understand people felt strangely affecting. And refreshing. It’s hard not to admire a politician who can mingle seemingly effortlessly with the public for well over two hours.

So I nervously began to talk about the failure of contemporary centrist movements to make a real impact. Rory nodded. Encouraged, I continued to waffle on about how politicians don’t truly value the insight of the public or seek to venture outside of the ‘Westminster bubble’. “Thank you,” he replied, earnestly.

Frankly, this was a bit of a disappointment. I’d expected something more substantial in response. “Thank you?” Was that it? I felt a little short-changed as I took my selfie and turned away. 

But, then, when I re-played our encounter in my head on my way home, once my nerves had abated, I realised I’d fallen into the trap of projecting my world view onto him. It’s hard to see how else he might have responded.

Suggested reading

The Tory plot thickens

By Various contributors

These days, the idea that a big political figure might be willing to engage with the voting public is an alien one. May had a reputation for being whisked away before she could be questioned by the electorate; Boris Johnson has done everything in his power to avoid speaking to anyone or anything during his leadership campaign. More and more, our politicians seem disconnected from the people. It’s no wonder they’re repeatedly surprised by the messages the electorate keep sending them. 

If we want our politicians to listen, then we have to be ready when they do just that. Rory listened and digested, rather than trying to work out what line to spin me. It weirdly felt like he valued me. 

Before seeing Rory first-hand, part of me had cynically believed that his following was manufactured. But leaving, I felt I understood better why Rory’s walking tour had been such a success – he could make people feel that their opinion was worthwhile, that they were a little bit special.

As I pondered this, my friend interrupted my political epiphany with a screenshot. It was of a face beaming out from the front page of Mail Online alongside Rory. My face. Why had they picked that shot? Did I look like an archetypal Rory-ista, I wondered. And for the first time I actually thought: maybe I am.

But it is the BBC, rather than the politicians, which has come under most pressure. An unlikely array of opponents have lined up to criticise the lamentable programme, including George Osborne’s Evening Standard and the Daily Mail. And the main subject of contention has been not the dire production standards, but the selection of guests. Members of the public were brought on during the debate to ask questions of the candidates, and two of them have now been weighed in the balance and found wanting.

Most striking is Abdullah Patel, an imam who asked the candidates about ‘Islamophobia’ and demanded that they agree on the importance of words. It was an obvious attack on Boris Johnson and his almost unanimously misrepresented comments in his Telegraph column last year about Muslim women who wear the burka.

I say unanimously misrepresented because it has been forgotten in the intervening period that the article was a defence of people’s right to wear whatever religious garments they want. Furthermore, this mild criticism of the appearance of a burka has everywhere been turned into ‘an attack on Muslim women’, as though all Muslim women wear the garment. It’s a deliberate and dishonest misreading of the column.

Suggested reading

The reason people peddle lies about Farage

By Douglas Murray

In any case, it transpires that he imam who asked the question has a somewhat chequered set of views himself. As the media have revealed in recent days, Imam Abdullah Patel is not what you might call a philo-Semite. In fact, he seems to have rather unpleasant views about Jews and Israel in particular.

On rape, too, he seems to have not entirely enlightened views. As he inventively put it in one Tweet, “it takes 2 to tango”. He was suggesting that if a woman is alone with a man, then rape should not come as a great surprise to her. Which tells us far more about the Imam’s views than it tells us about other women or men.

Questions have been asked, and not answered, about how somebody who holds such views could have been selected and passed screening by the BBC to then be asking a question (which was itself highly loaded and sectarian) of the men vying to be next UK prime minister.

The other questionable guest is one Aman Thakar. Mr Thakar, it turns out, is a Labour party apparatchik. That might explain why he asked a question which pushed the five contenders to commit to a national election. Mr Thakar – who is a solicitor by profession – has also been subject to scrutiny following his appearance, and, before it was taken down, his social media history combed through.

Suggested reading

The dangers of post-truth journalism

By Douglas Murray

To the delight of a certain number of people, one of his Tweets from earlier this year read “Hitler’s abuse of the term nationalism is, to me a nationalist, the most harmful part of his legacy”. This has been pounced on by those who would like to take down Mr Thakar and the BBC as well as anybody who is close to the current, rather morally compromised, Labour party.

It is harder to work out exactly what Mr Thakar meant by his Tweet, since his account no longer exists. But it is not quite honest to portray him as having sparked a ‘Nazi storm’ or anything else that should cause him to be suspended from his job, as he has now been. The law firm, Leigh Day, for whom he worked says that it is conducting an internal investigation into the Tweet. For no fee I think I can save them the time. The Tweet would appear to be a sarcastic response to comments made by the American commentator and activist Candace Owens which were themselves dishonestly reported.

In February, off-the-cuff comments by Owens at an event were dishonestly used to portray her as in some way pro-Hitler. People such as Aman Thakar leapt on the bandwagon and attempted to ruin the reputation of Candace Owens by falsely claiming that she – a black, female Republican – is actually a Nazi. And now it is Mr Thakar’s turn, in kind, to be dishonestly represented in the press as a Nazi, and to have his career destroyed in turn.

There are many attitudes one might take towards all this. Not least among them is to simply say ‘Oh, how the wheel becomes it’ and move on. One political side can chalk up its own dishonestly acquired set of corpses and the other can pile up theirs.

Except that in the days since the BBC debate, and the backlash to it, two things have begun to disturb me.

Suggested reading

Teen Vogue's idiotic hypocrisy

By Douglas Murray

The first concerns Imam Patel. It seems to me that the larger failing is not the imam’s nor even the BBC’s for having him on (wise though it may have been to have vetted his views in advance). The imam is a member of the public and should be as free to question politicians as anyone.

The disgrace was that, in answering, Sajid Javid advocated a policy (having a Conservative party ‘investigation’ into ‘Islamophobia’) which he does not believe in. And the Home Secretary was in turn able to persuade all four other contenders to agree to the same policy – even though most if not all of them were or are also opposed to implementing it.

In other words, the weak link that has been shown here is the politicians, and perhaps the political class as a whole, which finds it exceptionally hard to hold onto any principles at all in public. In that respect, you might argue that the BBC show did do what it was supposed to, and successfully exposed the candidates.

Suggested reading

Can we reform our rancid political debate?

By Douglas Murray

The other qualm, which is linked to this – and which has been absent from the coverage – is that there is something slightly disturbing about all the background searches and potential career annihilation of all those who have (politically and religiously slanted though they certainly were) merely asked questions of politicians.

It has become clear in our politics in recent years that – fine though some people in politics undoubtedly are – we seem to be paying the price for making politics so unattractive. Why would anybody with a life, a history or any desire to enhance their standing in this world, want to go into politics?

Hot on the heels of this thought comes another. What happens when those who question their representatives are put through the same fine-toothed comb, and on occasions disingenuous, wringer? What effect will this have. Who will bother to engage with politicians and in our politics?

That’s what bothered me most about the BBC show. If the whole political arena is so dangerous an environment for public and politicians – for questioners and answerers – alike, then what kind of democracy will we have at the end of that process?

One of the most interesting twists in the term’s recent history is not its misuse, however, but the fact that it has finally fallen out of favour. Until very recently, in most democratic countries, ‘charisma’ was thought to be one of the most – if not the absolute most – important quality for any leader to have. John Major was derided for not having it. Bill Clinton was admired for his. Tony Blair possessed it in droves, while the same was rarely said of Iain Duncan Smith. Winners and losers were pretty much determined based on their ‘charisma’.

Suggested reading

Charisma will only get you so far

By Elizabeth Oldfield

Even as this state of affairs proceeded, there were clear problems with it. The first was that charisma is largely in the eye of the beholder. Plenty of people attested to John Major’s, on meeting him. Others claimed that the former French President, François Hollande – often mocked for his lack of allure – had the fabled quality in spades.

Another problem is that ‘charisma’ can be faked. Or at least created. Once somebody holds any form of power they immediately become slightly more interesting and important. Once they start walking into rooms surrounded by retinues of bag-carriers and security officers, the illusion is almost complete. If you are the centre of attention in most rooms you are in, you are almost inevitably going to be described as having some form of charisma.

Oldfield describes charisma as something that mattered because it was seen as a unifying force. Which is perhaps why Barack Obama was so frequently described as charismatic. Not just because he was an excellent public speaker, but because he genuinely did seem – for a time at least – to have the power to bring people together, and unify them around some ideals, even if only the most broad and ill-defined.

More from this author

The dangers of post-truth journalism

By Douglas Murray

But then came Donald Trump, who appears to have helped kill off – among much else – this obsession with charisma. By any ordinary analysis, Trump must count as one of the most successful figures in American history. A man who made a fortune, lost it, made it again, became a household name and then won the Presidency on the first occasion he ran for it.

Normally, this sort of achievement that would cause people to wheel out all sorts of hyperbole – including the magical charismatic virtue. But no discussion of Trump has ever mentioned the term. Perhaps that’s because many people have no desire to be caught praising the man. Or perhaps his divisiveness means he couldn’t possibly possess the crucial uniting quality that ‘charisma’ demands. For whatever reason, Trump didn’t warrant the charismatic epithet – neither in terms of lacking it or exuding it. And, in turn, no one is seeking the virtue in the Democrats who are hoping to run against him.

It is in Britain, though, that we can see the real reason why the charisma obsession has taken a break. Tony Blair take a bow. Just look at the current leader of the Labour Party. There are few people who met Corbyn in his wilderness years who observed any charismatic qualities.

And that is the point. Momentum, among other Labour Party movements, have recently been strongly pushing their line that their party’s real enemy was always Tony Blair – and that the man who led them to three successive general election victories is precisely the sort of figure of whom the party now has no need.

People on both the Right and the Left who dislike Blair can, and do, make the argument that the problem of the Blair years is that the country was suckered by an unusually charismatic figure who then led everyone (Left and Right) in the wrong direction. If charisma can lead to the catastrophe of Blairism, then perhaps it makes anything possible; in future, it’ll be best to remain suspicious of anything which may lead to a repeat.

Suggested reading

Who broke the Left?

By Giles Fraser

This suggests that the side-lining of charisma is caused not by a misunderstanding of a term, but simply by disillusionment with the quality as we had come to view it. Disillusionment caused by over-promises and the missteps of ‘charismatic’ people, and a growing scepticism among the voting publics of people alleged to have such magical qualities.

And so the key qualities politicians must be seen to possess have shifted accordingly. In the race to lead the Conservative party, nobody has felt impelled to make claims about the vast charisma emanating daily from Jeremy Hunt. There have been few attempts to pretend that when Matt Hancock enters a room, nobody can take their eyes off him. Of those who might end up leading the party, Michael Gove is majoring on the fact that he has been a smart and successful minister who mastered a range of portfolios. Sajid Javid is running in part because his backstory would demonstrate a ‘diverse’ candidate for the Tory party. Rory Stewart is running on the fact that he is quirky and strange. On it goes.

Even in the case of the front-runner, Boris Johnson, the argument for his appeal is not that he is ‘charismatic’ per se but that he is simply the biggest beast in the jungle, and that the biggest beast at some point ought to be allowed to run the jungle. His campaign launch rested on his seriousness and appeal, without reference to any magic qualities. His appearances before potential voters so far in this race have actually focused on his apparent meekness and mildness, as though he were trying to slip through without people making any special claims about him.

So perhaps it is over – this quest for a much-vaunted if hard-to-define quality. If so then it should not be much lamented. It was always too imprecise a quality to take on the load it ended up bearing. But its absence does leaves us with a serious follow-on challenge: what qualities do we actually want in our politicians? We thought we wanted charisma. It turns out we want something else. But what? Perhaps it’s an entirely new breed of politician.

Charisma is one of those slippery concepts – we know it when we see it, or more accurately when we feel it. But should we trust it? Some argue, and research indicates, that it may be something to be wary of – as it hides a lack of substance, capability and character. Boris Johnson is widely acknowledged as charismatic, but for many it is in this flashy, shallow sense.

I think we should definitely seek charisma in our leaders, but an older, deeper conception of it. The word charisma comes from the Greek for the gift of grace or favour. Truly charismatic leaders give off a sense of having received something beyond themselves and an ability to communicate and share this across difference. Whether it’s grace, power or purpose, true charisma isn’t just an appealing individual with whom we’d like to have a beer.

Suggested reading

Confessions of a Tory entryist

By Robin Aitken

The original moment of ‘charismatic leadership’ offers a good model. Last week churches were celebrating Pentecost. This festival commemorates one of the stranger events in the generally quite strange New Testament. Following Jesus’s death and resurrection, a small group of his friends meet in a house, bewildered and exhausted, and “receive the Holy spirit”. An indoor tornado appears and small fires break out on their heads. They are then able to start speaking in the myriad languages of the nations gathered in Jerusalem for the Jewish festival of the harvest, and people start joining them. They receive a gift which propels them into leadership, with exponentially increasing numbers of followers.

Pentecost was the “ground zero” of the church. This divinely conferred ability to communicate across groups, to inspire, envision and incorporate people from every language, tribe and social class was part of the reason the early Christians were able to transform the face of the known world so rapidly. All Christians trace their lineage to it, but it is particularly associated with the wing of the church called Pentecostal or Charismatic, most of whom still “speak in tongues” and encourage powerful ecstatic experiences of the divine.

Whether you take this as a powerful story or gospel truth, it has something to teach us today about charisma. It isn’t about Hollywood gloss, or sex-appeal, or extraversion. It can’t be manufactured.

Suggested reading

The best PM we'll never have

By Various Contributors

It’s first about communication, and the ability to connect with people not like yourself. Every person who showed up to see what all the kerfuffle was about was able to hear a message about God intervening in history in their mother tongue. They were spoken to in the language of their dreams and longings, not just the language of the empire or the elite. They felt known, seen, understood. Boris Johnson has this with some audiences who connect with him viscerally, but the opposite effect on many others.

But it can’t just be about one person. It’s noticeable that the whole group received the Holy Spirit and were able to communicate and connect in miraculous ways. Although there were famous apostles (John, Paul, George and Ringo) charismatic leadership in the early church was collective. Diverse audiences didn’t just hear a message, they were invited into a community, a story.

This model of leadership is the opposite of a narcissistic personality cult. There was a saviour involved, but it wasn’t any of the leaders, any single human individual. The big risk for the current crop of leadership contenders is attempting to invite people to follow them without offering an idea of what they can become part of.

Suggested reading

Moved by the Spirit: the phenomenal rise of Pentecostalism

By Andrew Davies

Finally, true charisma is not just showy and surface – it also has content. The ‘charis’ of the apostles was indivisible from ‘kerygma’, proclamation. They had something to say, a vision for a new world and insight into the human destiny, and it wasn’t primarily about themselves.

Even the most authentic charisma won’t appeal to everyone. In one of the surprisingly common moments of dry humour in the bible, we are told that some in the crowd said “they have had too much wine”. Power, purpose, connection and inspirational leadership can easily set off our cynicism sensors, largely because false charisma so often disappoints.

But charisma will only go so far. Competence matters too. A few short chapters after the church’s charismatic revolution, the burgeoning institution faces its first crisis and has to rush to appoint (effectively) operations directors. Connection, vision and belonging are not alone enough – organisational skills and planning are also needed if the original promise is not just to cause more disappointment, more cynicism. Truly charismatic leaders build a team, think ahead, and seek to serve the people who follow them, not the other way around. When we see that kind of charisma, I’ll be ready to follow the leader.

Yet look down the list (now down from 10 to seven) and one unlikely name has made it through to the next round – against expectations and against logic. Yes, Rory Stewart, the Where’s Wally? of the 2019 Tory leadership election, survives to see another day.

It’s odd. He was not supposed to figure in this race at all. Mention his name to insiders and you’d usually get an affectionate smile, a shake of the head, and a sigh: “Ah, dear Rory.” Yet even if he doesn’t make it any further, he has already achieved something remarkable – and proved an important point.

Suggested reading

Confessions of a Tory entryist

By Robin Aitken

We live in an era of targeted, professionalised politics. Successful campaigns these days are at best the masterplans of tacticians such as Lynton Crosby, or at worst the result of black-box Facebook algorithms that tell you exactly what you want to hear without you realising it. Even in a general election campaign, success is supposed to come from professional pollsters slicing and dicing the electorate into ‘segments’ that can be ‘targeted’.

In the case of the Conservative leadership election, this should be even more true. The electorates in this campaign come ready-divided into concentric circles: at the centre, the 313 Tory MPs whose primary motivation seems to be to survive and keep their jobs; outside them, the 160,000 or so Tory members who will vote on the final two candidates; and finally, the general public who (we are repeatedly reminded) have no say in this momentous decision.

The other leadership candidates have understandably focused their promises on the second of these three, with ‘red meat’ stances designed to appeal to the stereotypical Tory member: shutting down parliament in order to push through a no-deal Brexit (Raab), cutting back legal abortions from 24 weeks to 12 weeks (Hunt), slashing income tax for higher earners (Johnson). This last pledge in particular, surprising and unpopular with the commentariat, had the whiff of a pre-polled Lynton Crosby policy (he is running Boris’s campaign).

Suggested reading

The best PM we'll never have

By Various contributors

Meanwhile, Stewart’s has been quite unlike these modern professional campaigns. His central message of compromise on Brexit is exactly the opposite of what Tory members want to hear – according to YouGov 66% of them are in favour of no-deal. During his leadership launch event on Tuesday, he flirted with the idea of supporting a Labour motion to take no deal off the table, to confusion in the audience and in the press. Why would he do that? What on earth is his strategy?

He has seemed to take great pleasure in the illogic, the unprofessionalism, of his campaign. He told a campaign audience that polling guru John Curtice had given him a tip: his message of compromise might have worked 20 years ago when voters were arranged in a bell-curve, clustered around the centre, but these days voters are arranged in a U-shape, clustered around each end. The moderates he is pursuing, he was told, simply don’t exist any more. Stewart laughed heartily as he told the story.

And yet this non-strategy has already been successful. Among the general public, he is the only candidate to have become dramatically more noticed, and dramatically more liked. In one 10-day period between 23 May and 3 June, he moved from 19% of the public having an opinion about him to 29%, and most of that new-found fame was positive. That’s a lot of new fans. (During the same period, minding his public appearances, Boris actually managed to get 2% less famous).

Among voters who know who he is, Rory is now the most popular candidate to become prime minister.

Suggested reading

How do you solve a problem like Theresa?

By Polly Mackenzie

The conventional wisdom has been that while he may be fleetingly popular with the those such as Gary Lineker and James O’Brien, the hardcore base of the Conservative party membership will be the last people on earth to be seduced. So it has caused considerable head-scratching to observe him steadily climbing the rankings in the regular ConservativeHome members’ survey, until this morning he moved into second place after Boris Johnson.

With this he has usefully proved that while voter ‘segments’ may look coherent on a pollster’s spreadsheet, they are not: even Conservative party members are three-dimensional human beings. They are not the Brexit-only automatons of the public imagination: they watch the news, they think about other things, some of them are even open-minded.

Stewart appeals to different Conservative traditions of prudence and common sense that, it turns out, are still alive among the membership. What’s more, despite what pollsters will tell you, he has shown that a convincing leader can actually change people’s minds. His frenetic, undirected campaign that has consisted mainly of saying exactly what Tory members don’t want to hear has already proved surprisingly popular with… Tory members.

Conservative MPs have hardly flocked to him – he squeaked through with only 19 votes. And yet even here, compared to the tally of seven publicly declared MPs only this morning, he has surpassed expectations. Even among this elite electorate, he can still legitimately claim momentum.

In the next round of voting on 18 June, candidates will need 34 or more votes to survive. This may be too high a bar for Rory Stewart. But his biggest hope should rest in the fact that he has already proved something many of his fellow MPs desperately want to be true: that a more instinctive, old-fashioned political campaign that aims to change minds instead of following existing opinion can be surprisingly successful.