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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In its oblique gesture towards a besieged and perhaps vanishing greatness, Robert’s question brought into play the usual unreflectively naïve assumptions about the uniquely inferior quality of today’s crop of politicians. This is simply a form of political exceptionalism about the present. It is an uncritical habit of thought that calls to mind a notional past in which politicians were upstanding, deft, civil, conservatively-dressed, models of probity. Consider that by some obviously relevant standards — intelligence, moral fitness, command of policy — they are the best pair of candidates we’ve been presented with for several electoral cycles: nothing special, perhaps, but then, it follows, nothing especially bad either. It bears pointing out that the last time the public was invited to vote, the choice was between Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn.

It must of course be admitted that for a workplace of some 650 people, the House of Commons does seem to give rise to more than its fair share of workplace indiscretions. Publicising pictures of your genitals and distributing your colleagues’ phone numbers to potential blackmailers; dipping into political donations to pay-off “bad people” and ending up chained to a radiator; browsing pornography on your phone inside the chamber House of Commons; offering to lobby parliament while being secretly filmed by undercover journalists. At times, the scandals operated according to a kind of nominative determinism for ease of recall: Pincher was the bottom grabber, Parish the profane one, and Bone  — upsettingly — the flasher.

As for Rishi Sunak, it is, of course, a bitter irony that his roll of the electoral dice has been skewed by the scandal of politicians making dodgy wagers against manifestly unfavourable odds. As it stands, five Conservative political figures, including two now-unendorsed parliamentary candidates, have come under investigation by the gambling watchdog for placing potentially illicit bets on the date of the election. It’s a squalid spectacle. The characters, nonentities; the motivations, base; the sums of money involved, comparatively paltry.

But however hard it is to summon up enthusiastic moral condemnation, it is even harder still to feel anything close to surprise. That gambling is, apparently, rife at Westminster is probably in no small part because it calls on the same dispositions and skills as politics does.

If there is an underlying unity to the many and lurid transgressions of our outgoing cohort of parliamentarians, it is their near pathological inability to properly respond to risk. But, then, anyone who wins a seat in the house of commons is, more or less in virtue of that very fact, someone who fancies their chances against sometimes wildly unfavourable odds. Even for the well-qualified candidates, merely being selected by a local association is an often random, taxing and capricious process, a fact testified to by the gleeful operation of Twitter accounts such as “Has Sebastian Payne got a safe seat yet?”.

It is an important fact about MPs that each and every one is a person who decided at some point to channel vast resources of time and energy, and very often their own money, into a process that would at some point or other see them being humiliatingly rejected in a regional leisure centre at 4am. It comes to them all, eventually. And for the time that they are in post, the attraction of thinking of much political action on the model of a gamble rarely dissipates. “ACHAB”, the Tory diarist Alan Clark used to console himself when some scheme or political wheeze seemed to be heading for the rocks: “Anything Can Happen at Backgammon”. The phrase was one exported from the gambling room at Clark’s club, Brooks’s “where games can swing at a late stage on an unpredictable run of the dice”.

Nor would it be sensible to blame politicians too much for acting on the basis of instincts that might share much of the phenomenology of the often unreliable twinges of a gambler’s gut instinct. Sometimes there may be little else to go on. Such instincts, under the right circumstances, may even yield a distinctive kind of political knowledge. It is a well-attested insight of psychology that gut reactions, and fast and frugal heuristics, can provide a reliable basis for knowledge. An expert political operators may, for instance, instantly read a room, or effortlessly notice the most powerful person in it; in the subtle cues of a colleague’s facial expression they might detect weakness or the prospect of betrayal; like a master chess player taking in a board at a glance, they might instantly see a position as a “win” for one side rather than the other.

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The most effective political operators tend to be those who have a lot of such intuitive knowledge. Whether they do or not is usually the sort of thing that one can assess only on the basis of demonstrated performance. Rishi Sunak, by most people’s lights, has very little.

More challenging than the thought that our politicians might be gamblers by disposition — not all of them cut from Clark’s cloth, admittedly — is the knowledge that we actually want them to be rather good at it. Risk-taking is constitutive, rather than incidental, to political life. Political realists, going back to Machiavelli, have emphasised the intelligent management of luck as being key to effective political leadership. A level of daring that might be inappropriate in more sheltered walks of life can be indispensable to successful political action, aided by the absence of any clearly defined or properly enforceable code of professional ethics in political life — the non-existence of which so distresses Question Time audiences.

Calls to clean up politics, to drain the swamp and restore a sense of decency to public life are leitmotifs of politics of the populist Right, Left and Centre. That such partisan charges can be credibly made from all sides suggests that a general phenomenon is being misdiagnosed as something more parochial. There hasn’t been a sudden and local collapse in political standards; this critique is insensitive to characteristics of politicians that are long-lived, widespread, and less contingent to the effective operation of political life than might first appear.

Even if panic about the rapid decline of public morals is unwarranted, the widespread belief that such decline is taking place creates a problem, and ironically, an occasion for opportunism. Public trust in politicians has reached an all-time low. Ruthlessly indulging the exceptionalist view in the final leadership debate, Sir Keir Starmer declared with uncanny historical precision that “over the last 14 years politics has become too much about self-entitlement”. Instead, he suggests that Labour will restore a lost ethic of public service to political life. But the suggestion that one can remould the characters of politicians by moral fiat is one that fails to take seriously the structural features that virtually guarantee these traits are selected for. Perhaps Keir Starmer knows that. As Machiavelli would no doubt advise, making a convincing pitch for the restoration of public trust need have nothing to do with actually acknowledging the truth.

British reactions to Thatcher’s death raised all sorts of questions. A Korean journalist told me that he had spent all afternoon trying to find someone who would admit to having voted for her, and came to wonder how she had won three elections. Meanwhile, the burning of effigies in mining towns seemed to me uncomfortably reminiscent of the head shavings inflicted on French women accused of “collaboration” with the Vichy government: misogynistic violence by men seeking to allay the humiliation of their own defeat. “Ding Dong the Witch is dead” was sent to the top of the British music charts: this, too, seemed simultaneously sexist and naïve. Britain was not a fairy-tale village that would live happily ever after if freed from a spell cast by one woman.

The focus on Thatcher as an individual in 2013 contrasted with the Left’s criticism of Thatcherism as a system through much of the Eighties. The term “Thatcherism” was first used, in a systematic way, by Stuart Hall in Marxism Today, in an article published in January 1979, before she had even been elected. It referred to “Thatcherism” nine times and only once to “Mrs Thatcher”. Hall, married to the eminent feminist historian Catherine, understood how personal attacks on Thatcher slid into sexist sneers. But his austerely impersonal approach was also representative of the Left’s at the time, which emphasised structures. Whereas I sometimes wonder whether my younger colleagues today are aware of anything that is not reported in the Guardian, Hall’s generation of Left-wing intellectuals were assiduous readers of the Financial Times, and always on the look-out for a “crisis of capitalism”.

Early Left-wing writers on Thatcherism were rarely sentimental about what it replaced. They had disapproved of the Heath government of the early Seventies — particularly because of its attempt to implement legislation that would have restricted trade union power. Equally, they often recognised that Thatcherism was part of broader wave of political rethinking that sometimes encompassed the leadership of both major political parties. The Labour government of Jim Callaghan, from 1976 to 1979, had been marked by both a degree of social conservatism (not for nothing was Callaghan a parliamentary representative of the Police Federation) and by a move to a more free-market kind of economics. Peter Jay — Economics Editor of The Times — was the leading British advocate of monetarism. He influenced people in both the Labour and Conservative Party, but he was himself a member of the former, and Callaghan’s son-in-law.

Now, sixth formers are ritualistically trained to write about the end of the post-war consensus; but they are rarely taught one simple fact: in the early Eighties, the fiercest attacks on consensus came from the Left. It was Labour who fought the 1983 election on a manifesto that would, among other things, have meant British withdrawal from Nato and the European Economic Community. Some on the Left had even felt a grudging admiration for the radicalism of the first Thatcher government. They shared its distaste for condescension that some citizens experienced when they dealt with powerful agencies of the state. Like Thatcher, they disliked the complacency that they associated with established politicians of both parties.

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Everything changed after Labour’s crushing defeat in 1983. The challenge of Thatcherism demanded that the Labour Party ease its way back to the centre ground. The Tories, too, saw that there was not much point in ostentatious radicalism, once the major victories of the early Thatcher period had been won — particularly after the National Union of Mineworkers had been broken in 1985. They were now presiding over a new consensus, in which weaker trade unions and the sale of council houses were widely accepted. Privatisation, a word that they had barely dared use as late as 1979, was commonplace. Thatcherism had triumphed.

But Thatcher’s personal style — her flamboyant awkwardness and her obvious distaste for her political enemies — did not suit the new mood. She was never comfortable with consensus, even when the consensus in question was one that she had helped create. The personal myth of Margaret Thatcher began to diverge from Thatcherism. Earlier in the Eighties, for all her strident tone, Thatcher had been a politician, intuitively conscious that she needed to compromise and sometimes even retreat if she was to survive and achieve some measure of what she wanted. Later in the decade, she was increasingly prone to present herself as a kind of British de Gaulle — a national saviour who was above politics.

The emphasis on Thatcher as a person created problems because, as the writers behind Marxism Today had rightly sensed, Thatcherism had not really been about Thatcher. Her government had contained able and powerful ministers who pushed through different aspects of its policy. Indeed, Thatcherism was built on a kind of coalition that involved compromises and alliances between different kinds of people with different priorities. Keith Joseph was the most prominent political thinker behind the whole thing but useless at practical politics. Michael Heseltine and Peter Walker were indifferent about — in Walker’s case hostile to — some of the economic theory that underlay Thatcherism, but both men delivered spectacular practical results.

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Not surprisingly, Thatcher’s emphasis on her own personal significance and her alienation from the mundane compromises of domestic politics annoyed her colleagues. (It was an alienation that was increased by the fact that she came to think of herself more and more as an international stateswoman rather than a British politician.) It helped precipitate her eviction from the leadership of her party and thus from Downing Street. Thatcher’s fall was, though, a revolution within Thatcherism rather than a revolution against Thatcherism. The economic policies of the Thatcher government continued. Indeed, in policy terms, Major was more Thatcherite than Thatcher: he privatised the railways — something that she had hesitated to do — and closed the last British coal mines.

Thatcher’s fall further divided the cult of Thatcher as an individual — let’s call this “Thatcherianism” — from the policies of Thatcherism. Thatcher had been on the Conservative front bench for most of her political career. Now for the first time she was freed from the constraints of practical politics. She became more extreme and was deeply bitter towards party leaders, especially Major, whom she believed had betrayed her. The myth of her martyrdom was cultivated by a small number of loyalists who had followed her into political exile, as well as by younger people who came into parliament too late to have direct experience of what the Thatcher governments had actually done.

“Thatcherianism” began to acquire its own political identity, separate from Thatcherism. It revived the social conservatism that had been part of Thatcherism in 1979 but had largely disappeared from the policies of the Thatcher government by 1989. Most important, it pushed a ferocious hostility to the European Union — particularly after Thatcher presented herself as the standard bearer of opposition to the Maastricht treaty in the early Nineties. This was quite a break with the past: it had been Labour that spoke of leaving the European Community in 1983. Thatcherites had welcomed West-European unity as a means of resisting Communism and promoting free markets. Thatcher was always emotionally ill-at ease with Europe but, during most of her years as prime minister, she was also realistic enough to know that emotion is a bad guide to politics. As late as 1988, she would regarded leaving the European Union as bat-shit crazy.

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In an odd way, the rise of a personalised “Thatcherianism” cult played into John Major’s hands in the early Nineties. The intemperate, ungracious nature of attacks by Thatcher and her remaining allies occluded the extent to which the Major government was really continuing her economic policies. It also contributed to the sense that Major was a moderate and consensual figure — and this, in turn, helped make policies that might once have seen as highly controversial seem like a new kind of common sense. Tory frontbenchers in the Nineties managed to imply that they had moved on from the savage conflicts of the Eighties and that it would be unreasonable to hold them responsible for the policies of the Thatcher governments — governments in which many of them had served as senior ministers.

Of course, the success of Thatcherism extended beyond the Conservative Party. The truth is that large parts of the British establishment — civil servants, Labour politicians and even the occasional trade unionist, such as Frank Chapple — regarded much of what the Thatcher government did, notably breaking the miners, as necessary. There was also a more general shift in public opinion and behaviour. Dozens of small-scale actions — buying shares in privatised companies, voting for demutualisation of buildings societies (or taking the bonuses even when we voted against) — made most of the British middle class complicit in one way or another. Indeed, it is extraordinary how the free-market pervades everyday life in modern Britain. I am writing these words in Delhi. When I first came here, in 1984, the notion of haggling over money when, for example, one took a ride in an auto-rickshaw, still seemed odd. Now we are, in effect, haggling over money every time we book an Uber online.

Andrew Gamble was the single most important person to write on Thatcherism for Marxism Today. When he kindly came to speak to my students about this part of his career, he remarked on the brief commercial success of the magazine after it was stocked by W.H. Smith. The students asked whether this meant he got paid more. He grinned ruefully and said that he — and, so far as he knew, the other contributors — never even thought to ask about payment. Things have changed. A friend of mine gave a television interview after Thatcher’s death. A child of the Eighties herself and with a keen entrepreneurial instinct, she was much impressed that the leading public intellectual with whom she shared the studio negotiated ruthlessly about his appearance fee. Finally, the cameras went on and the interviewer asked what Thatcher had done to the country. The leading public intellectual paused to compose his features into an appropriately solemn expression and said: “I am afraid that she made us all much more selfish.”

Cheryl’s experience is not uncommon. The most important lesson I ever learned about domestic abuse was when I first met the residents of a refuge where I had volunteered in the Eighties. I had expected the women to have been beaten to a bloody mess of broken bones — and some were — but the majority spoke about living in abject fear of “what would happen next”.

We call it “coercive control” now, but back then, there was no particular language to describe the non-physical abuse that every one of those women had endured at the hands of abusive men. These perpetrators often had no need to lock a woman in a basement or hold a gun to her head — all they had to do was keep them in a state of perpetual fear, while keeping up the façade of a happy relationship.

According to the latest annual Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW), coercive control is the most common type of domestic abuse faced by women today. Yet it wasn’t until 2015 that coercive and controlling behaviour was finally made a criminal offence in England and Wales. The law covered any behaviour designed to intimidate, punish or frighten a family member or partner — including isolating them from friends and family; constantly criticising their clothing and appearance; dictating where they could go and who they could see; controlling their finances; and threatening violence.

Now, politicians are promising to crack down even further. Last week, Rishi Sunak vowed to put controlling or coercive behaviour on par with physical violence. This means that offenders sentenced to a year or more in prison for coercive behaviour will now — like violent abusers — be actively “managed” by the police, prison and probation services to avoid future offending. Offenders will be placed on the “Violent and Sex Offenders Register”, and will be required to notify police of any change in name, address, banking or passport information, as well as any foreign travel plans.

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The policy sounds good on paper. The problem is that it is rare for any domestic abuser to be arrested — let alone convicted and given jail time. This means that the vast majority of perpetrators will never end up on this register. While the number of police-recorded domestic abuse-related crimes increased by 7.7% in the year ending March 2022, there has been a steady decline in charging, prosecution and conviction for the crime. When it comes to coercive and controlling behaviour, it is even worse: 94% of cases reported to the police last year did not result in a conviction.

For many women, the coercive control laws came too late. Sally Challen was convicted of murdering her husband Richard in August 2010: she had battered him to death with a hammer at the kitchen table after he demanded that she cook him bacon and eggs. Reflecting on her crime while in prison, Challen came to realise that she had been psychologically tortured by her husband throughout their 40-year marriage. But in the eyes of the law, and in terms of public awareness, she was not seen as a victim of domestic abuse.

At her initial trial, Challen was painted as a jealous, spiteful wife taking revenge on her husband for having affairs. In reality, Sally had been forced to sign a humiliating agreement promising not to interrupt Richard or answer him back, and never to speak to strangers during a night out — a clear sign of coercive control. Despite this, she was convicted of his murder and sentenced to a minimum of 22 years in prison.

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Justice for Women (JfW), the feminist law reform organisation I co-founded 30 years ago, began to campaign alongside Sally to overturn her murder conviction in 2012, on the basis that she had been subject to extreme coercive control by her husband for decades. And when, in 2015, the law criminalised the abuse Sally had endured, JfW lawyers submitted grounds of appeal in which they argued that had coercive control been recognised in law when she was originally on trial, she would likely have been acquitted. Sally was finally released from prison in June 2019, having successfully overturned her murder conviction, which was replaced with one of manslaughter.

It has been a long, hard slog for women’s rights campaigners to change the law on domestic abuse. The first time it was mentioned in a court of law was in 1782, when a judge stated that a man may beat his wife so long as he uses “a rod not thicker than his thumb”. A curfew on “wife-beating” came into force in 1895, with a City of London by-law that criminalised the beating of a wife between the hours of 10pm and 7am out of concern for noise complaints. In 1971, the world’s first refuge for victims of domestic violence opened in Chiswick, West London, yet it was not until 1991 that rape in marriage finally became a criminal offence.

Despite the government’s new initiatives, we are in danger of returning to the bad old days. It is almost impossible to convince legislators that domestic abuse is a high-risk crime when police insist on telling the public that cases of femicide — such as the recent murder of the schoolteacher Emma Pattison by her husband — are “isolated incidents”. In fact, a domestic homicide is rarely, if ever, an “isolated” event; usually, it is an escalation of a pattern of abuse over some time. Controlling behaviour is a big red flag when it comes to homicide risk, as men who feel they are losing control of their victims often commit the ultimate act of control: murder.

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Up until that point, non-physical abuse is used to keep victims constantly on their toes, their sense of dread inescapable. All victims of domestic violence and abuse operate at a high level of anxiety, but a woman living under coercive control is constantly watched and scrutinised. This is often unbearable: as new research shows, women who suffer domestic abuse are three times more likely than their peers to attempt suicide, and are more than three times as likely to self-harm.

Despite the encouraging words from Westminster, not enough is being done to protect women living under domestic terrorism. There are so many women still living in fear of coercive husbands, too ashamed or afraid to tell their friends or family the truth. And for those without broken bones and black eyes to prove their suffering, justice is still disgracefully hard to come by.

But we should not be too harsh on Sunak and Hunt, even if their supposed plans to turbocharge growth through harnessing of technology look skeletal. Prime ministers must pretend to have purpose while chancellors must talk up economic prospects by pushing back against tides of negativity. After the latest data showed Britain’s economy to be flatlining rather than contracting, Hunt insisted it was “more resilient than many feared”. But if you really want to see the sorry state of our economy and our nation’s struggles to adapt to the fast-changing world, take a look at one sector that is laden with national symbolism and long been a bellwether for our economic health.

This is the British car industry, a production hub reliant on sophisticated supply lines and a proven beacon of innovation. It is a sector that has shown an uncanny ability to reflect the zeitgeist through its rollercoaster ups and downs since the Second World War. It boomed after the birth of mass motoring, then crashed in spectacular style amid industrial strife, before its careful restoration with a woman driver at the wheel. Now it is being allowed to rot again, partly thanks to the stewardship of a glossy magazine’s former motoring columnist. Perhaps we should have been more alarmed by Boris Johnson’s cavalier approach to cars when we discovered he had racked up £4,000 in parking tickets for GQ.

Once it was the world’s second biggest, but now our shrivelling car sector has sunk to the fringe of the top 20, just behind Slovakia and one place ahead of Iran. Last year, we produced 775,014 cars. This was the fewest since 1956 — a time when an Austin A30 cost £529, a gallon of petrol was 22p (or four shillings and six pence in “old money”) and there were no motorways. There were only 3.3 million drivers, roughly one-tenth of the numbers cramming our roads today, some no doubt humming along to that year’s biggest hit by Pat Boone. Almost all their cars were made in this country by five makers — Nuffield/BMC, Ford, Rootes, Standard-Triumph and Vauxhall — and three of them were British-owned.

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Britain also possessed a thriving collection of smaller-scale makers with more than 60 marques, such as Aston-Martin, Jaguar, Jensen, Lotus and Rolls-Royce — more than any other country. Think of the swinging Sixties and you might think of stylish Minis, an icon of British culture born in 1959 that was such a clever and distinctive design it was acclaimed as the most influential car of the 20th century after the Ford Model T. Or the gorgeous E-Type Jaguar, which even the great Enzo Ferrari acclaimed as “the most beautiful car ever made” after its launch in 1961.

Yet at start of that glitzy decade, barely a generation after the war’s end, our car production slid below Germany. Four years later, Daihatsu’s Compagno became the first Japanese car on sale in this country, and by the mid-Seventies — when, badly managed and beset by strikes, we had sunk to sixth place in the global league table as car manufacturers — it became a sorry totem for the disturbing decline of British industry. Post-imperial Britain seemed to be slumped in a gloomy haze of mediocrity, driving haplessly along the slippery road to nowhere. It felt like the whole country was in a slow-motion tailspin.

Nothing symbolised this pervasive sense of despair and dysfunction more than British Leyland. The conglomerate — which brought together brands such as Austin, Mini, Morris, Rover and Jaguar into one supposed national champion — was spared from bankruptcy in 1975 by nationalisation. It was infamous for poor management, dire industrial relations and toxic union firebrands such as Derek “Red Robbo” Robinson. The cars it churned out were often shoddy — just as Japan was ironing out flaws in its vehicles as an emerging industrial superpower. Even clunky but cheap Soviet-built Ladas started selling decently in Britain, a damning indictment of our own state-run behemoth. No wonder the floundering firm became the butt of jokes in Fawlty Towers.

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The car industry, like the wider economy, was salvaged during Margaret Thatcher’s controversial reign. She opened the nation’s doors to globalisation, sold off or shut down nationalised industries, brutally stripped away barriers to trade and slashed the power of union barons. But she was also sufficiently pragmatic to recognise the role of targeted state aid — as shown with her leading part in persuading Nissan to open its landmark plant in Sunderland by throwing in subsidies, lobbying both its boss and the Japanese prime minister to land the deal and then opening the site. Honda had already started production in Swindon on a site that once built Spitfire planes, Toyota soon followed suit in Derbyshire. The prime minister used their arrival to show that Britain was on the road to revival as a stable European base for industry.

This sparked a renaissance for Britain’s car industry that lasted three decades, with famous traditional marques often falling into foreign hands. When owners from overseas arrived to buy up dreary brands such as Rover, there was talk of betrayal and sell-out on both Left and Right. Yet car makers from Germany, India, Japan and the United States invested heavily, creating an impressive cluster of innovation that rippled through the economy. By 2015, Britain was the base for more manufacturers than anywhere else in Europe, with seven big carmakers, eight premium producers, nine bus builders and scores of niche manufacturers. Such was its importance that eight of the 11 Formula One teams were based in the country, many of them in a cluster around Oxford, to exploit the cutting-edge technology.

This success was led by exports, with sales abroad doubling in a decade, while the 160,000 workers — once infamous for the speed at which they downed tools — had become among the most productive car makers in Europe. Foreign owners skilfully exploited British heritage brands, such as the Minis I saw churned out at the celebrated Cowley car plant in Oxford following their revival by BMW. This was the place where almost a century earlier a former bicycle maker called William Morris had pioneered Britain’s use of Henry Ford’s mass production techniques. But Cowley had also gone on to reflect the industry’s turbulent history with six far-Left splinter groups fighting for shop floor supremacy in the dismal Seventies.

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When I visited a decade ago, however, it was a beacon of industrial modernity. ‘‘If we had not changed, we wouldn’t have had any jobs here,” said union convenor Chris Bond, a former member of the Workers’ Revolutionary Party. The high-tech plant had 513 robots in the body shop alone. It employed 3,700 “associates”, all clad in the same black jackets with MINI on the back — admittedly a fraction of the huge numbers working there before, but there had not been an industrial dispute for almost three decades and everyone received bonuses. I was struck when one woman told me she had previously worked in the NHS where “it felt far more like I was working on a production line”.

Since then, however, the industry’s decline has been precipitous, down 10% last year alone and more than halving since the country voted to leave the European Union in 2016. The UK is no longer a major player in the car industry; only yesterday, Ford announced plans to cut 1,300 jobs in the UK over the next three years. Nissans and Toyotas still roll off British production lines, but Honda has departed from Swindon after producing 3.7 million cars on the site, while Nissan ditched its promise to build the next X-Trail SUV in Sunderland. Elon Musk chose Berlin over Britain for his first Tesla factory in Europe. Five months ago, BMW added to the gloom by announcing the end of electric Mini production in Cowley, although it is continuing with petrol and diesel cars until they are banned from sale in seven years’ time.

Clearly Brexit has been a significant factor. Musk stated that the vote made it “too risky” to open his plant, as well as a research and development base, in Britain. Honda denied its closure decision was tied to the rupture with Brussels, but this is a highly complex industry that boomed off the back of the single European market driven so determinedly by Thatcher, with firms relying on Britain for skilled workers and looser labour regulations but on Europe for sales and many components. The crankshaft for one of those Minis I saw being built crossed the Channel three times before installation in Cowley. The slightest friction for such production techniques can be catastrophic for an industry reliant on low margins and high volumes.

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It is no coincidence that car production hit a two-decade high in 2016, when 80% of the vehicles were exported and more than half sold in European Union countries. Yet Brexit is just one of the problems facing the industry; it was also hit hard by China’s Covid lockdowns, which impacted supply chains and resulted in a chronic global shortage of semiconductors. And all this disruption came just as the industry was engulfed by a technological revolution, with rapid acceleration into the age of electrical vehicles.

In this brave new world of electric vehicles, assembly plants need batteries from giant production houses known as gigafactories. Ideally, these need to be located nearby since batteries are big and heavy. Yet Britain currently has only one Chinese-owned plant being built next to the Nissan factory in Sunderland. At least 35 are planned or under construction in the European Union, with three in Hungary alone. There was huge hype over Britishvolt, a £3.8 billion beacon of post-Brexit levelling up policies in Northumberland intended to deliver 300,000 battery packs a year. Johnson typically talked it up, claiming Britain would be a world leader in electric cars, “creating hundreds of thousands of jobs”. Then it ran out of money, the Government refused to bail it out, and it collapsed last month.

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Andy Palmer, former head of Aston Martin, told the BBC that its collapse was an “unmitigated disaster for the auto industry in the UK”, and he predicted firms would migrate to where batteries are being made. But to put Britishvolt’s demise in perspective, even this ambitious start-up was planned to deliver less than one-fifth of the capacity by 2030 anticipated from two plants in Germany — Tesla’s gigafactory in Berlin plus another being developed by a Chinese firm that is the world’s biggest electronic vehicle battery maker.

Now, think again about the Mini. The first electric version was built at Cowley plant three years ago, but soon all electric models of this British icon will be coming off production lines in Leipzig and eastern China. Last month also saw more troubling news: the pioneering new electric van maker Arrival is restructuring its business and cutting jobs here as it shifts production to North Carolina to take advantage of massive green subsidies being offered for firms buying clean commercial vehicles.

The last three Tory governments have all boasted that Britain will be a world leader in both green energy and electric vehicle manufacturing, seeing car production as a symbol once again of the country’s status in our post-Brexit world. Now we hear the latest prime minister bragging that he will turn the nation into a technology force. Yet behind all the hype and brash talk, one of our most important, innovative and efficient industries is moving abroad thanks to state inertia at a time of fast-moving change. Britain is stuck in the slow lane — and we seem to be ignoring the warning signs flashing on the dashboard before our eyes.

But I’ve not seen anything in our new PM’s utterances or parliamentary career to date to suggest that he will respect this post-Brexit “realignment” in British politics. Not even a homeopathic echo of it.

It’s commonplace to mutter at this point about how this proves British democracy is a sham. This isn’t true; but it is true that if you expect policies to be implemented based on how the public votes at a general election, you’re looking at “democracy” backwards.

Election manifestos and associated political programmes take shape based on the mobilisation of political influence by competing interest groups. The willingness of politicians to take any given view into account in this process is less a principled stance, than a pragmatic reflection of how much real clout interest groups are perceived to have. If the median British political standpoint isn’t well represented in our national politics, this reflects a calculation across the board that leaders don’t need to pay much attention to what the masses want — because they no longer wield enough meaningful leverage to insist on it.

Whether or not this is conclusively true, enough leaders now act on this assumption that it forms the core of running political battles across the West. And all these battles turn on an increasingly open class war between two populations with radically conflicting worldviews and interests: the reality people, and the ideas people.

The structure of this conflict is easier to understand by comparison with an earlier one: the industrial-era battle for dominance of Britain, between aristocratic landowners and an emerging mercantile and industrial elite. This battle came to a head in 1815 with the Corn Laws, a punitive tariff on imported grain intended to shield British farmers from overseas competition.

This policy had obvious benefits for the aristocrats and gentry who owned much of the land, and was perhaps the last time the old agrarian ruling class was able blatantly to use the tax code to protect their own material interests. But they had a powerful and rising coalition ranged against them. The mercantile elite, whose wealth was bound up with trade beyond Britain’s borders, objected to tariffs that cramped their business style. And they were supported, for much more pragmatic reasons, by a swelling industrial working and lower-middle class, who couldn’t grow their own food and just wanted to be able to afford a loaf of bread.

I take this detour into British political history to illustrate three points. First, that contra pop-Marxism, contests for power aren’t always between social classes arranged hierarchically — crudely, oppressors and those they oppress. They can also represent competing interests within a class.

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Second, not having a vote didn’t stop the industrial poor making their views known. There was huge grassroots opposition to the Corn Laws, which fanned demands for an extended franchise, and prompted mass protests that were sometimes brutally suppressed.

But — and third — mass mobilisation doesn’t accomplish much without leadership. And the leaders of mass movements don’t always share the masses’ motivations, a fact that also has lessons for us today. Richard Cobden, the politician most central to repeal of the Corn Laws, was a textile manufacturer and trader. Understandably given this, he was in favour of trade and hostile to aristocratic protectionism. He wrote several pamphlets on British foreign policy, in which he argued against then-settled 19th-century consensus on multipolar “balance of power”, in favour of an early vision of the modern globalist vision of growth based on free international movement of goods, money, and people.

Cobden was a brilliant organiser, and his successful campaign to repeal the Corn Laws serves to illustrate the way divergent elite and mass political interests can coincide in a single issue. The 1846 repeal signalled the decisive defeat of Britain’s Old Tory agrarian order. In its place, the new dominant order became an expansionist, mercantile Whig one, dedicated to Free Trade — the worldview, ironically, now most associated with the modern Tories.

Today, though, the main contest is no longer between the landed gentry and mercantile elite. The goalposts have moved again, and the battleground is now between those whose power and material interests are grounded in the material world, and those whose wealth comes from the world of ideas. The political analyst NS Lyons characterises this as a class and culture war between “Physicals” and “Virtuals”: two outlooks that broadly correspond to the distinction David Goodhart drew between Somewheres and Anywheres in the wake of Brexit.

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What’s key is that the moral outlook is downstream of concrete material interests. Physicals work in sectors such as farming, construction, manufacturing, haulage, mining, and so on: occupations inextricable from the material world. Virtuals, on the other hand, work at a layer of abstraction apart from the physical world: think finance, academia, education, media, tech, and so on.

And Virtuals dominate the elite. For as the West has de-industrialised, Western money and power have drained from Physical occupations toward Virtual ones such as finance and tech. And, as a consequence, Virtuals today hold a near-monopoly on institutional power. Westminster occupational data reflects this: barristers, teachers, solicitors, and journalists are well represented among MPs. Conversely, you can trace the waning power of the Physicals in the total number of MPs who were previously farmers, miners or manual workers. This total shrank by a factor of five between 1979 and 2015, from 142 to a scant 33.

This class-inflected contest between the virtual and the real economies is the core of the class and culture war now being fought across the West. It also helps to make sense of how apparently unrelated issues, such as trans rights and immigration, can become bitter battlefronts in the same war.

Trans rights make sense as a proxy for the Virtuals’ core moral claim: that ideas matter more than the material world. When we consider what a person is in legal terms, do we prioritise the material fact of their biological sex, or their inner, abstract idea of who they are? Understandably, the Virtuals prefer the answer that places their class of work, their worldview and by extension their political interests at the top of the moral pile.

High immigration, meanwhile, is a material positive to Virtuals: more people means more growth. This material upside is then moralised in terms of “openness”, “culture”, “freedom” and so on. For working-class Physicals, though, high immigration means stiffer competition for jobs. This, far more than racial animus, was the central driver of the working-class Brexit vote.

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The anti-Corn Law movement has further lessons for the Brexit battle between Virtuals and Physicals, in that it followed the Cobden pattern: it was a mass movement that succeeded with leadership from elites with their own reasons for pushing it. Two mutually exclusive Brexits were promised: an open and globalising one for those such as Jacob Rees-Mogg and an immigration-restrictionist one for the Red Wall. The impossibility of delivering both has paralysed the Tories ever since.

For what complicates this class war is that it’s not a simple contest between “elites” and physical-world proles. Overall, Physicals skew more working-class, and working-class Physical jobs are generally low-status and precarious. But farmers, tradesmen and oil executives can be relatively well-off while still sharing broad cultural sympathies with working-class Physicals. And yet the latter can’t always rely on Physical elites to defend their interests: on immigration restriction, for example, factory-owners and farmers will swap culture-war sides in a flash when they can’t get seasonal workers from overseas.

Still, it remains to be seen whether the Virtuals’ dominance really is as complete as it appears from their stranglehold on government and the media. At the last count, Virtuals remain materially dependent on the real economy: without farm workers, shop workers, bin men and drivers, the laptop class are as helpless and useless as a snail without its shell. This was visible in those groups for whom lockdown rules were most blithely waived: despite often-cramped living conditions, for example, even those seasonal agricultural workers coming to the UK from high-risk countries were exempted from the 14-day quarantine rule.

What happens if the Physicals start weaponising this dependence more methodically? As Lyons observes, the Vancouver truckers’ protest at the start of this year offers a glimmer of what it might look like when the simmering class conflict between Physicals and Virtuals erupts into open warfare. Arguably the Yellow Vest protests in France, and recent farmers’ protests in the Netherlands form part of the same picture. And with rising energy prices driven by US foreign policy in Ukraine pushing German manufacturers offshore or into shutdown, we may presently see more German Physicals in the dissident ranks.

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But mutinous Physicals may need to learn from the truckers: Trudeau eventually ended the protest by freezing protesters out of their own bank accounts. Even the most capable Physicals can’t easily get by in the modern world without access to Virtual finance and tech.

Another possibility is a more thoroughgoing push to turn what’s left of working-class Physicals into the “useless class“ some predict will emerge if AI and automation replace human-powered jobs. This would represent the final Virtual victory: for without even the option to withdraw their labour, it’s hard to see on what basis such a group could compel elites to consider their political interests. This condition of political weakness would be even more pronounced should UBI replace earned wages: few adolescents, however rebellious, will do more than pull faces at their parents if they’re afraid their pocket money will be stopped.

Whether or not this is the future we get, the likelihood is that we’re in for a period of class conflict on a scale not seen since the early days of trade unionism. If history is any guide, the eventual outcome will be some kind of settlement — but before we reach that point, we can expect a great deal more mobilisation by the Physicals as a class, and a great deal more moral denunciation of that class and its interests by their Virtual class enemies. And whatever the eventual settlement is, formal democracy won’t be the vehicle for bringing it about. It’ll be the rubber-stamp for an exercise of political leverage that forces Physical political interests back onto (or definitively off) the table.

To exercise such leverage, working-class Physicals will need to find allies among dissident segments of the elite, all of whom will (like Cobden) have their own motivations for the bargain. And if this seems an ugly compromise, the alternative is a political process that continues to elect Prime Ministers who ignore their interests. Simply because they can.

If he returned to the UK today, on the BBC’s 100th anniversary, Morris would find that pretty much all of its output is one long advertisement for itself. In one series, the presenter unearths “lost” BBC recordings with all the reverence one might expect an archaeologist to accord to some piece of Etruscan pottery. In another, the son of the DJ John Peel (the BBC gives much airtime to broadcasting dynasties) discusses his father’s record collection. The BBC, forbidden from carrying paid advertisements on its own channels, pays for posters that advertise its own programmes but also for a more general form of advertising that promotes the whole BBC with slogans such as “This is our BBC”.

The sense that the BBC is “ours” and that it is a “national institution” has, in fact, done great damage to the broadcaster. There is a cosy, self-congratulatory tone to much of its programming. Its presenters can expect to become “national institutions”, which greatly increases their earning power from sources other than their formal salaries. Meanwhile, its position as the national broadcaster has made its political reporting lazy. It expects to be at the front of the queue for interviews and inside information: there was, for example, much indignation last Friday when Liz Truss failed to give the BBC first dibs in her press conference. This means that its definition of journalism often means just repeating what politicians tell their interlocuters: “Friends of the Prime Minister tell me that…”, and so on. What gets lost in this is real research.

The keystone of the BBC is the licence fee — an institution similar to one of those ancien regime taxes on windows or powder for wigs. Everyone who watches is required to pay for the privilege and the fee is complicated and messy to collect. Every householder in the country gets stern letters telling them that they must pay and, ostensibly, detector vans can pick up illegal sets in much the same way that the Gestapo could find the position of Special Operations radio operators in occupied France. The exception to this is the BBC World Service, which is paid for out of general taxation. It is also the part of the BBC that commands most respect. Anyone following events in Ukraine will note that the experts from the World Service are usually less smooth than their counterparts in the mainstream BBC, but they are almost invariably better informed and more interesting.

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The problems with the licence fee are obvious. Once the BBC had an effective monopoly on Broadcasting in the UK — though there were always a few heroic dissidents who insisted on getting their information from Radio Tirana. Independent television companies have existed since the Fifties but they were regulated in ways that meant that they had to observe the same kinds of rules as the BBC. Now, however, anyone with a computer can watch programmes from anywhere in the world and many don’t bother with television sets at all. Anyone who listens to France Culture or watches the Franco-German television channel Arte would regard the suggestion that the BBC is the best broadcaster in the world as laughable. Most of all, the BBC faces competition from the big American streaming services which have deep pockets and the advantage of starting from scratch, unencumbered by the veneration for its own traditions that does the BBC such damage.

There is a simple way out. Sell the BBC, or sell the particular programmes that it makes. This would be less of a break with the past than it might sound. The BBC already sells its formats to foreign broadcasters. Some say that it would be wrong to sell the BBC because its programmes are popular, but this is an absurd argument — popular programmes are precisely the ones that will get made by private sector companies. And they will be made much better. Not least this will be because Netflix will make celebrity programmes that feature real celebrities rather than just people who are slightly famous because they have appeared in other BBC programmes. There is a core of news and documentary programmes that will probably not attract commercial buyers. But these are precisely the kind of programmes that are made well by the current BBC World Service. A slightly expanded version of this service could be funded by the state — perhaps from the receipts from selling off the rest of the BBC. It would concentrate on factual broadcasting and its gravity would be greatly enhanced by the fact that its presenters would be relatively unknown people who would concentrate on doing their job. They would not have their own twitter accounts and they would certainly not perform cringe-making imitations of Duran Duran, which is what Andrew Marr, until recently the lynchpin of the BBC’s political reporting, once did on one of those charity marathons that the BBC periodically inflicts on its audience.

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So why does no one do it? The Right claim to believe in the free market and constantly mutter about reducing or abolishing the licence fee, but the truth is that they like the BBC as it is. It is, like almost all parts of the establishment, conservative at heart: its coverage of the death of the late Queen would have embarrassed the most slavish of Soviet broadcasters. The Chairman of the BBC from 2011 to 2014, Chris Patten, was a former Tory politician — only in the insane world of current British politics can someone who was a cabinet minister under Margaret Thatcher be described as a member of the “liberal establishment”. There is plenty of pantouflage between the BBC and the Conservative Party. Michael Gove has worked for the Corporation and Allegra Stratton moved from being a presenter on Newsnight to being Boris Johnson’s press advisor. Robbie Gibb had a 25-year career at the BBC before spending two years in Downing Street under Theresa May and then returning to the BBC board. When Jeremy Paxman stepped down as presenter of Newsnight, he was filmed in a matey little scene cycling a tandem into the sunset with Boris Johnson.

Most of all, Conservatives like the BBC because it is easily bullied. Every time a journalist says something that they do not like, they can make threatening noises about the duty of impartiality and hint that they might appoint some particularly brutal Gauleiter as chairman of the governors. Charles Moore, former editor of the Daily Telegraph perfectly encapsulates this relationship. For a while, he refused to pay his licence fee. The ostensible casus belli was, in fact, a good one. The BBC refused to sack the oafish, pretentious, and unfunny comedian Russell Brand after he used a radio programme to make offensive remarks about a young woman to her grandfather. However, refusing to pay his licence fee has not stopped Moore from appearing on the BBC or from presenting programmes (for which, one assumes, he was paid with licence payers’ money). It was even suggested that he might be made chairman of the BBC governors.

The Left should put a stop to all this. Getting rid of the BBC would end the absurd Tory pantomime of simultaneously getting uncritical coverage and complaining about Left-wing bias. An enlarged World Service would be much better. Neutrality, objectivity, and balance are all problematic words but a broadcasting service that has managed to annoy the governments of China and Russia must be doing something right.

The next government is probably going to be a Labour one and no one doubts either that it is going to have to deal with appallingly difficult circumstances. The BBC has done much to trivialise politics — think of the cringe-making television career of Ed Balls after he lost his parliamentary seat. But if a small, news-focused BBC core were built around the World Service, it would encourage seriousness about public affairs and a new level of clarity and concision from our leaders. Perhaps we will go back to the wonderful days when Clement Attlee was asked whether he wanted to comment on some matter and replied with one word: “No.”

The only other person I see doing this is the local MP. I feel their pain, but showing face is an important part of our democracy. The best thing about our current electoral system is that it grounds our Members of Parliament in their local communities: one MP to, roughly, 60,000 voters. That’s why popular MPs do lots of vicar-like stuff. They need to be seen out in the community, attending local events — even rather boring ones.

It’s easier doing this as a vicar as our patches are smaller: there are 12,500 parishes in England compared to 543 constituencies. But the principle is similar. Just as the vicar seeks to connect the everyday and the sacred, so the MP links each region of the country back to the source of power in Westminster. Britain’s first-past-the-post system (FPTP) may not be the most democratically inclusive or politically efficient, but it connects the particular temper of everyday life to the larger perspective that is required in Parliament.

Proportional representation would sever this connection. Even the most local-friendly versions of PR involve considerably expanded constituencies and multiple MPs for one area. When parishes are combined into huge conglomerations, the vicar dies of exhaustion or retreats behind his computer screen. And MPs would face the same fate. To the parishioner or the constituent, authority begins to feel much more distant, more top-down than bottom-up. And levels of trust begin to decay. You may say that trust in politicians, and indeed in clergy, has long gone. And that’s partly true, but people do tend to trust their own MP more than they do politicians in general.

Yet PR would erode this unique bond between MPs and their constituents. Just as the role of the Church of England vicar is to be there for everyone, regardless of their denomination or faith, so too an MP is there for you, whether you voted for them or not. Why? Because there is only one of them. A constituency of multiple MPs would encourage constituents to gravitate towards the MP of their own political persuasion, thus introducing a political divisiveness all the way down to the local level.

As a communitarian, I have long hated PR. But how can we possibly avoid it? The sclerotic duopoly of two political parties created by FPTP has produced politicians and leaders of such mediocracy that many of us now have no one to vote for.

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A great many Brits lean Left on economics and Right on culture: a position not reflected by either political party. We want a fair redistribution of wealth, but we don’t want gender self-ID or woke culture wars. We are happy to pay more tax to help out those in need, but we don’t want our politicians presenting England as a country of racists or the Royal family as an unnecessary burden from a bygone age. And we are pleased that we left the European superstate project. Boris Johnson, for all his many personal failings, was the only recent politician to embody those values.

Yet Boris may have been an aberration, a blip in order of things. Because what FPTP does in practice is to offer politicians the sorting hat with two possible choices: Labour or Conservatives. Yes, they could decide to be Liberal or Green, but like Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw, no one really cares about them. To get into power, you have to form a coalition with people whose views you may quite dislike. Not only that, but you will have to accept the discipline of the party structure, sometimes pressuring you to keep some views to yourself.

Politicians would still have to form coalitions under PR. But whereas FPTP encourages MPs to form coalitions before an election — by choosing one of two parties — crucially, PR creates its coalitions after elections, with lots of small parties jostling to form alliances so as to achieve the collective numbers to form a government. As a result, PR has no need of broad-tent political parties.

This is why the Labour Conference voting for PR, as they did recently, was a vote for their extinction. If we had an electoral system in which smaller parties could get a chance of power, the Left of Labour would split from the Right of Labour. Blairites, Blue Labour, and the Trots would all find their own distinctive voices. And similarly with the Tories. If we had PR, the “red wall” Tories and their country cousins would no longer need to remain in a forced marriage with all those strutting libertarians and City-types. The two big parties would fall apart. And good riddance, I say. In one stroke, I and millions of others would have someone they felt comfortable voting for.

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It feels more than slightly ironic that this communitarian is coming round to PR, which is highly toxic to local political communities, and to the MP’s ministry of presence. But it has been forced out of me. I believe voting to be the nearest thing to a sacred responsibility that you can have in a secular democracy. But when the next election comes round, I couldn’t vote for any of them. And while I could spoil my ballot paper, that would feed my inner cynic. Is it too much to ask for a political party that many of us could vote for without holding my nose? Only PR would give us all a longer list of credible options. Both the Labour and Conservative parties have outlasted their welcome. The way of getting rid of them would be to shake up the voting system.

Never watch how sausages are made, they say. It will put you off. PR would let you watch. After an election, we would see coalitions being formed, compromises being made, policies betrayed for power. That is how it works. We would need a strong stomach as PR can be a messy business. But anything has to be better than this.

What I didn’t expect was a local food bank, which last year gave out more than 5,000 emergency supplies to hungry people. Statistically, Richmond has some of the lowest rates of poverty of any London borough. If there is a food bank here, the Tories are toast.

Last Sunday was our Harvest Festival. We brought hoop spaghetti, toothpaste, and health care products to the altar. At lunchtime, 60 of us sat down in the church hall for shepherd’s pie and trifle, raising several hundred pounds for the food bank. Every spud peeled, every carrot scraped was another reminder of the failure of trickle-down economics. If people are going hungry in an area as posh as this, I don’t give the Tories a sniff of winning the next election.

Not that the food was that appealing at the Tory Party Conference in Birmingham, judging by the looks of those who laboured through their tasteless Starbucks sandwiches. The tone was funereal. They have lost their appetite, not just for bread and cheese, but for government too apparently.

Pacing about those gloomy halls, it was good to see the friendly face of Danny Kruger, MP for Devizes, and, not unrelated to the purpose of my trip, the son of restaurateur and food critic Prue Leith. I told him I was at conference to argue for restoring Britain’s 0.7% aid target: once an international standard of generosity for rich countries. He smiled at me, sympathetically: “Good luck with that.” The Tories had other things on their minds. Much more pressing issues, apparently.

But what could be more pressing than this? “Do we care, do we act, and do we lead? The promise of 0.7% meant that we — Global Britain — answered ‘yes’ to all three,” said David Cameron in 2020. But the current Tory party seems to have forgotten all this precisely at a time when it is most important.

“Growth, growth, growth” intoned the Prime Minister at her conference speech, obviously pleased with herself at presenting so succinctly the holy trinity of Trussian economics. With harvest hymns still ringing in my ears — “We plough the fields and scatter the good seed on the land” — I wondered how her philosophy of growth related to the growth of real living things — being rooted, being fed and watered, being tended. For her, growth seems to be the thing that happens when the gardener, aka the state, stops interfering. But the state of my garden tells me that when you do this, the weeds will always win. It is not insignificant that the people most upset by the bright idea of “economic development zones”, which means tax breaks and planning liberalisation, are those who point out the environmental impact. There is good growth and bad growth.

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How the Tories were radicalised

By Richard Bourke

To be fair, the Tories can’t be blamed entirely for the current crisis of food insecurity. Putin’s wicked invasion of Ukraine has devastated the breadbasket of Europe. Russians have been deliberately shelling agricultural lands with incendiary shells, burning down crops, using food and hunger as a weapon of war. Because of this — and yes, for other reasons too — 40 million people in the horn of Africa are on the edge of starvation. In many places, fertiliser has become too expensive for the poor to buy, leading to low crop yields. Farmers in Somalia are surrounded by the white bones of their dead cattle. Many have abandoned their fields looking for more fertile lands. But despite their arduous travels, they find the famine wherever they go.

I sat on a panel with Vicky Ford, the new Development Minister and Emma Revie, the CEO of the Trussell Trust, which runs the Richmond Foodbank along with 1,300 others in the UK. A handful of people attended our event. Outside the meeting, groups of young men in the ubiquitous Tory uniform of blue suits and open-neck white shirts walked past at West Wing pace, obviously going somewhere terribly important. But they weren’t coming in here.

I do believe Vicky Ford gets it. She was off to Ethiopia on Tuesday. But there were few answers to the challenges that now face the poorest people in the world. New technology could be leveraged to help, she explained. And the Qatari’s are being very generous too. The Tories have promised that they will return to the 0.7% target once the economy is back on track. “Good luck with that,” I said, perhaps a little too sharply. “Be nice,” replied the Minister. But I am not in the mood for being nice about this. We should be far angrier.

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Liz Truss makes the case for Labour

By John McTernan

In 2015, the United Nations launched the Sustainable Development Goals, which aimed to eliminate hunger by 2030. But we are nowhere near hitting that goal: in fact, global hunger levels have risen since 2015. Today, nearly 9% of the world’s population are hungry.

The Harvest Festival looks very different in church these days. Instead of giant leeks and corn dollies, we pile up baked beans in front of the altar. And when we pray “give us this day our daily bread”, we think of combine harvesters in Ukraine dodging enemy tank fire and desperate families trekking across the Sudan, with a child in one hand and a packet of seeds in another.

But we also think of families in Britain struggling to afford their weekly food shop. Hunger has never just been an issue for the developing world, and now that it’s found its way to the door of places like Richmond, the tin-eared Conservative party will finally have to take note. It may be politically convenient to ignore starving children in Sudan, but it’s foolhardy for politicians to turn their backs on a hungry electorate. If the party has any hope of winning the next election, it will have to find itself a moral compass.

The writer-director Michael Winterbottom begs to differ. Sky Atlantic announced his six-part drama about the UK’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic in June 2020, towards the end of the period it covers. Winterbottom’s original title was This Sceptred Isle but Sky, fearing that the allusion was too niche, requested a more broadly legible phrase from John of Gaunt’s speech in Richard II: This England. It began filming in February 2021, when the first picture of Kenneth Branagh, buried in prosthetics as Boris Johnson, was released. At the last minute it was delayed for a week due to the death of the Queen but it’s still a good six months away from Orwell’s three-year red line.

“Here’s a chance to engage with something which has that certain uniqueness — but engage with it now, as soon as possible after it happened, as opposed to trying to recreate a war story from 70 years ago,” Winterbottom said in a defensive interview with the New Statesman. He co-wrote the series with Kieron Quirke but had to delegate directing duties to Julian Jarrold for health reasons. He added: “It’s very neutral. Almost a diary. A record of something we all lived through.” Perhaps he was trying to pre-empt early-bird hatchet jobs like the one in the Mail on Sunday, which called it “yet another sneerfest by the TV-land Lefties” and accusingly introduced Winterbottom as “a staunch supporter of the Labour Party and close friend of actor Steve Coogan”. Oh no, not a friend of Steve Coogan! Nadine Dorries, still Johnson’s most loyal attack dog though no longer responsible for the culture brief, slammed “a self-regarding, metropolitan, theatrical class whose favourite sport is trying to take pot-shots at the Johnsons”. The Mail claimed credit for the addition of a disclaimer, “This is a fiction based on real events,” but Sky told me that this is “standard practice”.

Looking at Winterbottom’s freewheeling filmography, it’s easy to spring to conclusions about which lane he would choose for this story. Perhaps it would be what you might call Coogan Mode: antic, postmodern portraits of charismatic narcissists from Factory Records founder Tony Wilson in 2002’s brilliant 24 Hour Party People to a fashion mogul rather like Philip Green in 2019’s misfiring Greed. Or maybe the sober, polemical style of documentaries such as The Shock Doctrine and Eleven Days in May. But This England, which tracks the six months from the 2019 election to Dominic Cummings’ rose garden press conference and the end of the first wave, is neither of those. Barring an incomprehensibly ill-advised recurring dream sequence, it is cautious in a way that Winterbottom rarely is, fully conscious of its responsibilities to history. In aspiring to neutrality, however, it winds up proving that neutrality is impossible.

We have to start with Branagh, who read every word and watched every second of Johnsonia he could lay his hands on, and pays Johnson the compliment of taking him seriously. I’m no fan of prosthetics but he captures the burly, bearish demeanour, the blustery charm, the cosplay gravitas, the constant air of improvising his way out of a tight spot. He compulsively rifles through a mental wardrobe of ready-made quips, comfy quotations from Shakespeare and the Classics, and self-flattering allusions to Churchill. Criticised for boasting about shaking people’s hands in the early days of the pandemic, he protests that not to do so “would be like Churchill hiding in the bunker”. But whereas one national crisis transformed Churchill from an erratic, divisive politician into a great leader, this one exposed Johnson’s fundamental shallowness and reluctance to make big decisions. His failure is framed as having less to do with specific choices than with the question of character. He was a people-pleasing booster thrust into a once-in-a-century cataclysm that he couldn’t bluff his way through.

Yet Branagh’s Johnson is unexpectedly sympathetic, unless you’re Nadine Dorries. He has some witty lines. “Not dead,” he says when he’s in bed with Covid. “Or if I am, nobody’s briefed me.” His hospitalisation, easily forgotten now, is genuinely traumatic. His relationship with Ophelia Lovibond’s Carrie Symonds is warm and playful. While each episode is frontloaded with evidence of his arrogance, infidelities and glib provocations, he does at least emerge as a palpable human being.

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Nick Cave's divine rebirth

By Dorian Lynskey

The other tentpole character is Dominic Cummings, played by Simon Paisley Day as a far more gaunt and sinister character than Benedict Cumberbatch’s flamboyant disruptor in Channel 4’s Brexit: The Uncivil War. (Confusingly, Paisley Day was Douglas Carswell in that earlier drama.) Cummings, in this telling, wanted to exploit the systemic failures of Covid policy to strengthen his case for a root-and-branch reform of Whitehall in his own image, pitting his fantasy team of hypercompetent mavericks against a caricature of the sclerotic establishment. “He wants everyone to be crap except him,” complains Matt Hancock. Of course, that would-be revolution stalled after Cummings’ road trip to Durham and died with his firing six months later but it was always less a coherent plan than the projection of a gigantic ego.

This England illuminates when it shows the tension between health strategy and political optics. We see Hancock’s obsession with hitting the testing target by the end of April driven primarily by concern for his own reputation. Shri Patel’s Rishi Sunak is a glib, headline-hungry lightweight and director of communications Lee Cain (played by Derek Barr) a petulant bully who stomps around yelling, “We need something to announce!” Focus groups appear to have been almost as important as SAGE. Government announcements, taken from real news footage, are met with a Greek chorus of unimpressed doctors, scientists and journalists. Winterbottom shows his hand in these scenes but who would now defend the handling of PPE procurement, or the decision to return elderly patients from hospitals to care homes without testing them? Compared with Jonathan Calvert and George Arbuthnott’s damning book Failures of State, This England might even be accused of being too generous. Matt Hancock, for one, should be pretty chuffed on balance, and not just because he’s played by the earnestly handsome Andrew Buchan.

The directors recreate the sense of how bewilderingly fast everything happened, especially in March, when the facts and calculations changed from day to day. Beyond the Johnsons and Cummings, most scenes are kept short, like shards in a collage of British life under Covid. The irony can be heavy-handed but no less true for that. Cutting from Johnson’s promise that “2020 will be a year of prosperity, growth and hope” to a tray of bats in Wuhan market? Well, that was the case. Juxtaposing the match between Liverpool and Atletico Madrid on 11 March with a dying man? A report by MPs concluded that 37 people died as a result of that match, and 41 because of the Cheltenham festival on the same day. Cummings in Durham grimly watching Hancock on television reiterate the order to stay at home? The dates align. I remember all of that and you probably do, too, although there are some things we didn’t know at the time, like the rapidity with which the vaccine was designed in February 2020.

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The Sandman is coming for you

By Dorian Lynskey

For most of us, the first phase of the pandemic was an unprecedented blend of anxiety and boredom. The lucky ones can look back on it as a strange hiatus, enlivened by Joe Wicks, Tiger King and sourdough loaves, so there is value in forcing viewers to focus on the unlucky. The director’s cut briskly from the corridors of power (and the corridors of Zoom) to ICU wards, care homes and houses across the country, where NHS staff faced an overwhelming tide and tens of thousands people died who might have lived if things had been done differently. The regular sound of coughs and the beeping of monitors provides the drama with a kind of sickly drumbeat. With this panorama of pain and grief, This England does similarly vital work to the Covid memorial wall, commemorating those who paid the price for bad short-term decisions and inadequate long-term planning at a time when the country is keen to move on. Whether the bereaved will feel that their anger has been represented on screen as well as their loss, I’m not so sure.

I think that This England has a strong answer to the question of whether it is too soon for a drama like this. It passes Orwell’s test of seeing the events of the moment in perspective. In fact, I was shocked by how much I had forgotten, or was unable to piece together sequentially. Exhaustively researched through documents and interviews, the series is a gift to posterity. The effort to tell it true and tell it whole is undeniable, yet I still got the impression of conscientious people working extremely hard to do what could not be done: withhold judgement.

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American Gigolo wants to say sorry

By Ann Manov

“I personally have no point of view of whether things were done correctly, or incorrectly,” Winterbottom says in the press pack, but I can’t see how that could possibly be true, not least because he and Quirke have Johnson tell Cummings in the final episode: “I think we failed… We fucked up, Dom.” There is no such thing as neutral history, unless it is an unfiltered mountain of data. As soon as you begin to tell a story you have to make choices about what to include and how to frame it. There need not be partisan bias but there must always be judgement. While a historian can assemble evidence for competing accounts of an event, a dramatist must pick one version to show you and say, yes, this is how it was. In an effort to pretend that such decisions have not been made, the writers mute their impact.

If you tune in hoping for the clear assignment of blame, then you will be disappointed, whatever your priors may be, but perhaps that task should be left to the official inquiry. This England does what a drama can do, which is to convey how it felt across the country to live through that unreal period when the world seemed at once to stop and to unravel. Muttering Shakespeare to himself in the dark, Johnson sees himself as a tragic hero, but the tragedy was ours.

I was lying on a sun lounger when a call came through to ask if I would like to take part in The Reunion, a Radio 4 programme bringing together those involved with Occupy to reminisce about the significance of that movement. I wearily declined. Being over 2,000 miles away from the steps of St Paul’s made this an easy decision. But I may have declined anyway. My protesting days are over.

“I have sung Joan Baez’s We Shall Overcome for years, but nothing has changed” was how an old friend of mine expressed the same weariness — not so much a cynical acceptance of the status quo, more a feeling of being beaten down by political reality. Many of the friends I made during the Occupy protest had various sorts of breakdown after the camp was cleared. Some made for the woods to find themselves again, some were burnt out and plunged into depression, others found the emotional wherewithal to reboot their protesting energy, and I admire them for this. We Shall Overcome began life as a Methodist hymn, words taken from the letter of Paul to the Galatians: “Let us not grow weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.”

Protesting, even to the point of civil disobedience, has a great deal of religious energy about it — one might even say Christian energy. It is not insignificant that protester and Protestant share an obvious etymology. In the letter to the Galatians, Paul was exhorting his fellow Christians to place faith above the religious law. His major concern was a distant dispute about circumcision, but the philosophical way he addressed this issue — setting faith and law against each other — has provided a kind of justification for protesters ever since. It makes no difference that this may be a misreading of Paul, whether the target is the government or the Pope, the disruptive energy of Galatians has reshaped the world. So why am I rooted to my sun lounger? Am I not convicted by this inaction, especially as I am slapping on the sunscreen whilst directly facing the Sea of Galilee, a few miles from where all this disruptive energy was first expressed, at least in my tradition?

Yes, there are things about the “spirituality” of the protestor that have come to bother me, not least an overconfidence in what they think of as “doing good” — an overconfidence that can spill over into self-righteousness, that abiding condition of many on the progressive Left. Is it really OK to block the path of ambulances on their way to hospital or people trying to go about their legitimate business? If the cause is weighty enough, the means can be justified. This can provide a dangerous licence to behave badly, the virtue of the cause obscuring an obligation to common human decency. But there again, if the cause is something like the Civil Rights movement and yes, even the Climate Catastrophe, then emergency measures can feel necessary. I wish I knew how to square this circle.

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How woke is Nietzsche?

By Giles Fraser

Back in the late Sixties, the two famous Czech writers, Milan Kundera and Václav Havel, began an ongoing spat about the value and dangers of the protesting mindset with respect to the so-called Prague Spring of 1968. Following a period of liberalisation and democratisation — “socialism with a human face” they called it — the Soviet Union sent half a million soldiers into Czechoslovakia to reverse the changes. Eight months of protest followed: some sabotaged street signs, some set themselves ablaze. Havel admitted that there was no hope, but nonetheless proposed “risky” protest. In a fierce essay called Radicalism and Exhibitionism (1969), Kundra went for the jugular.

“Havel states that no hopes endured, but unlike most people this does not arouse in him resignation or defeatism, but on the contrary a strengthened longing for action. But to what end action, when no hopes endured? … Such action has only a twofold aim: (1) to unmask the world in all its irreparable amorality, and (2) to display its author in all his pure morality.

“In this way what was originally a purely moral attitude (the rejection of the unjust world) has turned into pure moral exhibitionism. The effort to publicly demonstrate the beauty of one’s own morality outweighs the effort to change things for the better…”

I do not want to take a deep dive into Czech politics, but it should be said — contra Kundera — it was protesters and the memory of those who had given their lives during the Prague Spring that kept the energy going and helped topple the Soviet regime in 1989. And, of course, Havel became President. This is the moral dilemma: Kundera has, to my mind, a compelling point about the moral exhibitionism of protest, but Havel seemed to be on the right side of history.

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The good news from Gaza

By Giles Fraser

This same energy of protest is now being focused, not just against those who deny the gravity of the current environmental crisis, but also against the Tories whose indifference to the cost-of-living crisis seems evident to many of us. Around 1,500 people packed Manchester Cathedral on Tuesday evening to protest that “Enough is Enough”, and call for a national day of action on 1 October. Another movement called Don’t Pay UK is co-ordinating a mass non-payment of energy bills and blockades of petrol stations. As a church we are thinking about establishing ourselves as a “warm bank” for local people who may have to choose between food and heating, even in a relatively prosperous place like Kew.

But we want affordable energy and we want environmentally friendly energy — not necessarily a straightforward combination. We want to stand with the people of Ukraine, but we flinch when the Russians turn the gas off. I can’t say I like the look of this coming Tory government and their cold-heartedness towards the poor. But it’s not all about the Tories.

Protest is often a legitimate cry against the detrimental impact of human action towards the world and especially the most vulnerable, but it is not always the best means of providing solutions, especially ones with full democratic legitimacy. “We shall overcome” is not a programme of action.

So am I still the protesters’ friend? I may be tired and still a little burnt out, but I know what I have to say: of course. Because in the end, despite all my Kundera-like pessimism of human nature, I am equally Eeyore-ish about change ever taking place without grassroots political pressure. So perhaps I should lift myself off my metaphorical sun lounger and get back involved. I still feel a little emotionally burned from my experience during Occupy. I too felt the darkness after it ended. And I do still fear the way in which protest can become morally high on its own supply of virtue. But I must get over this debilitating melancholy. Sometimes we have little choice.

In those final fateful moments, you can observe highly intelligent, highly trained professionals making error after error, gradually dooming them and their passengers. Despite the ringing alarms of the onboard systems, they lose sight of what they are doing or how to avoid the impending doom. They pull the joystick instead of releasing it, they shut down the working engine instead of the failing one, or sometimes the two pilots pull in different directions, cancelling each other out. Eventually, they hit the Point Of No Return and, shortly after, the ground.

The current Conservative leadership election has a similar atmosphere. Every day in this interminably long contest, the final two candidates fire out press releases and half-formed policy proposals, only to wind them back in — flailing around the controls they want to wield in a month’s time. Meanwhile, the country slides towards crisis.

Neither Rishi Sunak nor Liz Truss appears to recognise the serious problems Britain faces, both in the short and the long term. Analysts predict that the energy price cap will hit £4,400 this winter. As an isolated threat, that would mean deep discomfort for many. Combined with other price rises and increasing interest rates, it will mean destitution. Government will have to step in to prevent this. And yet it is offering only piecemeal solutions.

This might be forgivable if it were the sole issue to which the candidates seem oblivious. But everywhere you look, the country faces massive challenges that the governing party has no answer to. On housing, for instance, Rishi Sunak has swung behind defending the greenbelt, while Liz Truss has prevaricated and developed an obsession with “Soviet style targets”. But as anyone who has managed KPIs will tell you, if there is no target for something, the target is zero.

Beyond this, Britain looks forward to running out of water and electricity. Infrastructure projects that could have alleviated this have been bandied around and frustrated for decades, and little can be done to turn it around on short notice. They say the best time to plant a tree was ten years ago, and the second-best time is today. In Britain, the second-best time to begin is after three preliminary reports, two judicial reviews and a general election. The best time is never.

Even in foreign and military policy, the natural home of the Conservative politician, the reality is bleak. While the country has performed well in arming Ukraine, its own defence commitments have been mealy mouthed. Promised rises are undermined by inflation and clever accounting, while procurement remains scandalously wasteful. With beautiful bureaucracy, a chunk of our defence spending goes on consultants planning the next round of cuts and another chunk on how to cope with the last ones.

But this catalogue of woes just serves to highlight the most pervasive and surprising problem the Tory Party faces: it doesn’t care about politics. This is not to say that the party doesn’t care about winning elections. It remains ruthlessly committed to that and its record is clear. Even after the crashing scandals of the Johnson era, the incoming PM has a fighting chance of securing the next election, giving the Tories nearly 20 years in power. The problem is they no longer understand why or to what end they wield such power.

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Who would be a young Tory?

By James Sean Dickson

Those on the Left must be shocked by how apolitical most of the Conservative Party is. I suspect no more than a handful of Tory MPs have ever read Burke or Hayek, unless they cropped up on a PPE reading list. They will be far more familiar with Isabel Oakeshott than Michael.

Factionalism within the party is therefore driven far more by aesthetics than by ideology. One former MP once told me that when he asked his association why they had picked him for the safe seat, he was told: “It was the lovely way you spoke about your wife at the selection.” In more than a decade as a party activist, I’ve met fewer than half a dozen mainstream Tories who could be classed as ideologues. At its best, this makes the party flexible and pragmatic, able to pivot around the issues of the day. At its worst — and it really seems to be falling into the worst now — it becomes listless, incapable and slightly baffled by the power it holds. It’s the cat that has finally caught the laser pointer.

The track record of the current government is testament to this. Despite coming to power with a majority of 80, the government has failed to push forward on any of its purported objectives. The government which claimed to be hard-line on immigration did nothing to reduce it. The government that seeks to be tough on crime has seen petty crime become almost legal. The government that complains about “woke culture” has done nothing at a legislative level to prevent it.

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The Tories need to get over Thatcher

By Robert Saunders

Even on its beloved Brexit, the party tries to stoke an ongoing threat that it might be undone or revoked or strangled at birth rather than engage with the realities of leaving the EU. It has no clue whether Britain’s future is Singapore-on-Thames or shoring up the dying embers of Red Wall industries. Instead, it jumps to silly-season headlines on imperial measures and crowns on pint glasses. The party once sought to campaign in poetry and govern in prose; now it campaigns in shitposts and governs in tweets.

All of which reflects an emptiness at the heart of the current Conservative Party. Its politics and principles are skin-deep and conflicted. It is apparent in almost everything it does, from Remainer Liz Truss becoming the “Brexit candidate” for leadership, to the pious Catholic Jacob Rees-Mogg defending the serial liar and philanderer Boris Johnson to the hilt. In place of policy innovation, the party grasps around for yesterday’s answers to yesterday’s problems, copying the homework of a leader who has been out of power for 30 years and dead for ten.

In the place of politics, all the party can do is say things that appeal to the voters who keep returning it to power — the generally older, wealthier suburban dwellers. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the leadership contest. Last weekend, Rishi Sunak’s suggestion that he would cut degrees that don’t lead to good jobs was viewed by many on the Left as an attack on the university sector, or even part of a grand plan to exclude the working classes from the humanities. In truth, it is neither. It is Sunak appealing to an electorate who came of age when 10% of the population went to university and economic growth carried them to prosperity, and who now see their grandchildren laden with debt, unable to buy a home. It’s the “common sense” of the bloke at the end of the Conservative Club bar — not something that will ever seriously happen.

Equally tenuous is Liz Truss’s insistence that the cost-of-living crisis can be solved by tax cuts rather than handouts. Those facing the most acute pain pay no income tax and minimal national insurance, while much of their spending is likely concentrated on low-rated or VAT exempt items, such food. It’s preaching to the Tory choir, with a plan that won’t survive a collision with reality once she is in Number 10.

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By Aris Roussinos

I could go on through a dozen such announcements — the theme remains the same: Tory MPs and Tory leaders, saying what they think the person in front of them wants to hear. No plan for implementation, no plan for adverse consequences, no underpinning logic or principle. They are bricks thrown through windows with no notes attached.

Which takes me back to those panic-filled cockpits. With an impending crisis, they have lost sight of what levers they hold and what they can do, instead debating whether they want the chicken or lamb as the altitude warnings flash. The Conservative Party has fallen into a fundamental problem — it is unwilling and unable to address the needs of the day.

So when I look at my own party, I feel not fealty but disappointment. From the housing crisis, to the stagnating economy, to law and order, to the health service, there are solutions out there. Yet the party has given up on seeking them, seduced instead by the 24-hour news cycle, the focus group and the Twitter grifters. Neither leadership candidate offers much hope. Sunak looks like he will run the country like a private equity project, cutting any expense he can and damn the consequences, while Truss will run it like a village fete, harking back with boundless enthusiasm to the old hits.

Whoever wins in September, Britain will remain stuck. The Conservative Party is failing to adapt, failing to plan. The sirens are ringing. The ground is coming.

***

A version of this article first appeared on the Joxley Writes Substack

On related issues, our Penny also seems to be a proud member of Team Female. She told Sky News “It makes no sense for government to be prescribing bathroom policies”. She told Twitter that she supported a “science-based approach” to the issue of transwomen in women’s sport, and claimed “It was me that changed maternity legislation that was drafted in gender neutral language … to use female terms”. Infamously, Mordaunt is the MP that once mentioned the word “cock” six times in a parliamentary speech, as a forfeit. Is it possible she now believes a woman doesn’t have one?

Yet when as Minister she introduced the highly divisive Gender Recognition Act consultation about moving to self-ID in July 2018, she told parliament: “Trans women are women. Trans men are men. And that is the starting point for the GRA consultation, and it will be its finishing point too.” Even as late as March last year, she was still intoning the Stonewall-approved mantra. Much of the rest of her narrative has also been contradicted in the last few days by Tory insiders, from former No 10 director of legislative affairs Nikki da Costa, to MP Sir John Hayes, to Attorney General Suella Braverman. This weekend, The Sunday Times revealed leaked documents which suggested that Mordaunt had indeed expressed a wish to remove the dysphoria diagnosis requirement from the GRA — though apparently she had also wished to introduce a medical requirement that the applicant for a legal sex change be shown to be of “sound mind”.

Even treating the matter ultra charitably, and assuming that, in her own mind, she was never in favour of self-ID strictly conceived as including the total absence of medical requirements, it’s still obvious that Mordaunt’s revised proposal, requiring only proof of sanity for legal sex change, would have caused almost exactly the same worries as self-ID — mere proof of sanity not exactly being a high bar in safeguarding terms (ask the victims of Chris Pincher). Equally, on her Ministerial watch a huge number of institutions, influenced by Stonewall, were at that point happily dismantling genuinely single-sex services for women anyway, regardless of whether the male who wanted access to them had a gender recognition certificate or not. This all happened without any interference from government.

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Stella Creasy's bourgeois feminism

By Kathleen Stock

The real interest here is the fact that Mordaunt has felt forced to commit herself to such an easily disproved and desperate lie. I take this to be a fitting tribute to the effectiveness of the grassroots women’s resistance that first formed around 2015 — the year Stonewall first revealed its ambitions to change both the Gender Recognition Act and Equality Act in favour of inner gender identity. The fact that the issue has arisen so prominently during the Conservative party leadership contest is the latest indication of this movement’s success. In its infancy, though it’s not quite true to say that women who raised concerns about self-ID couldn’t get arrested — they certainly could, or at least, could be interviewed under police caution – they were treated as pariahs, cranks, or bigoted obsessives. Not so much now.

Today, Conservatives who champion policies based on gender identity are thin on the ground. The focus of public anger rather tends to be upon the embarrassed mutterings of Labour MPs about cervixes. But it’s worth remembering – and especially when commentators talk these days blandly about “toxicity on both sides” of the gender debate – that it’s the Tories who were entirely responsible for setting up the issue to guarantee hot gibbering fury from women from the start. From 2015 on, a succession of Tory Ministers, given jobs in Equalities because they were female, promptly denied that being female was a limiting condition on being a woman. They then sought to dismantle single-sex provision for women without a backward glance at those screaming in frustration in their wake.

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Culprits include Nicky Morgan, Justine Greening, and, of course, Mordaunt herself. The trend was set right from the start, with the outrageously biased Trans Equality Inquiry launched in 2015 under Morgan by the Women and Equalities Select Committee, with Tory Maria Millar as its Chair. This Inquiry might have saved itself a lot of trouble by explicitly outsourcing the whole project to Stonewall and Mermaids. Apparently blind to potential clashes with sex-based rights, and on the basis of evidence from some extremely partisan and inexpert witnesses, it recommended both moving to full self-ID — including lowering the permitted age of a recipient of a legal sex change to 16 — and that those males who possessed them should have full access to women’s services, and be able to work in women’s rape crisis services and domestic violence shelters if so wished. The Committee also recommended that the Equality Act should protect the characteristic of “gender identity” rather than “gender reassignment”. Each of these was among Stonewall’s main campaigning objectives at the time.

Other recommendations of this Inquiry have also aged terribly: for instance, that there are only a very few occasions where transwomen can be justifiably excluded from women’s sport; that dysphoric children’s access to puberty blocking drugs should be speeded up; and that all university staff should receive “gender identity awareness training”. Overall, it’s hard to imagine a more divisive bomb to drop on women, parents of dysphoric children, or academics who wished to criticise the problems involved in the proposals.

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Test article

By Kathleen Stock

Most of these recommendations were received positively by the Government in their response, and a year later prime minister Theresa May herself was announcing plans to move ahead with self-ID at the PinkNews awards. I remember my incredulity as I watched these events unfold from the sidelines, each one smoothly presented as sensible and compassionate by whatever Tory woman was championing it, and with all dissenting voices positioned as bigoted or stupidly misinformed. The Tories were in power, but the Opposition offered no hope of relief either – for Labour and the Liberal Democrats enthusiastically agreed with the reforms too. The mainstream media, peppered with Stonewall Champions, was largely complicit or indifferent. It felt like a total stitch-up. I felt like I was going mad.

It takes a special kind of indifference to half the population to be like this. On the modern Left, we can explain the enthusiasm for self-ID partly as an attraction to sexily complicated-sounding ideology, and partly as an attraction to reforming existing cultural traditions generally. But neither of these explanations are readily available to Tories. They are supposed to be both commonsensical and conserving of tradition. One would think that at the very least, they would be prepared to conserve the internationally ubiquitous tradition of naming biological sex in humans.

Perhaps then, it’s a different and more hidden ideological commitment of Conservatism, individualism, that explains the attraction to self-ID and associated lunacies: explains how both the party generally and some women MPs in particular could have got so thoroughly behind such a radical and damaging set of reforms without blinking at the consequences. For, bar a bit of urine on National Trust toilet seats, most of the worries about self-ID won’t make any negative difference to them personally. They won’t ever have to share a prison wing with a male rapist. Their private hospital ward won’t be impacted by the presence of a chaotic male in the bay next to them. If their daughter starts saying she is a boy, they can fast-track her into whatever kind of therapy they want, rather than rely on the mad ministrations of a captured NHS gender identity service. If their cancer screening information talks about “cervix-havers”, their first language and education will give them the ready capacity to work out what this means. Their heterosexual dating life won’t be impacted by males pretending to be lesbians either.

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By Kathleen Stock

In other words: in order to care about the multiple impacts of saying that men can become women by declaring they are, you have to be able to care about (actual) women who aren’t just you, or your friends. The Left, and particularly the old Left, has the habit of this. Despite a massive propaganda campaign to deny it, it was largely women on the Left who organised the grassroots fightback to self-ID in the UK. Organisations such as A Woman’s Place UK, Fair Play for Women, and We Need to Talk, were started by (then) Labour members and voters, who were practised in thinking in terms of social structures rather than individuals, and knew how to feel solidarity with the most dispossessed. They also knew how to organise in order to reach a wide range of women, including voices that are often ignored.

A related question concerns why most Conservatives MPs are on board with rejecting self-ID, whereas previously they were indifferent. Do they actually care about women now, or are they mostly interested in the issue only because they have accurately identified it as a wedge, damaging to a Left currently tying itself into knots on womanhood to the derision of potential voters? One promising sign would be if they also prioritised women’s welfare and interests in other less febrile areas: the disproportionate impact of the cost-of-living crisis on women, say, or scandalously low rape conviction rates. But here they seem much less convincing. One is left overall with an impression of opportunism and culture warmongering, not principle.

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There are of course exceptions within Tory ranks. In the Lords, Baronesses Emma Nicolson and Anne Jenkin have been committed and courageous in getting the word out to others that gender law reform isn’t the rainbow-bedecked path to universal happiness often presented. More recently, both Liz Truss and Kemi Badenoch appear to have grasped this point thoroughly too.

But it should not be presumed that the party is wholly cleansed of the temptation to throw women under a bus. Under Tory Chair Carolyn Nokes, last year the Women and Equalities Committee launched another Inquiry into Reform of the Gender Recognition Act, eventually finding in favour of self-ID yet again. I was called as a witness to this Inquiry, and it was clear to me from observing the process that most of the Committee still had no real understanding of the potential impacts of gender law reform on the interests of women and girls.

Throughout my session, Nokes was dismissive, looked bored, and left early, later predictably painting criticism of the Committee’s position as “bile and abuse”. She is also on record as having no idea why you might want to know someone’s birth sex. Perhaps unsurprisingly, in the current leadership battle, Nokes has come out strongly for Mordaunt.

I’m sure that both these women think of themselves as enthusiastically pro-women. Arguably, though, a pro-women politician who doesn’t know what a woman is, is worse than none at all.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Second, the state of the Labour Party, riddled with anti-Semitism and personal vindictiveness, with people cancelled for the slightest ideological slip, with its gender wars obsessions, with its hatred of the very idea that one might love one’s country. It was a huge personal relief to leave all that behind. Good riddance.

At first, my switch of allegiance to the hated Tories came as something of a relief. And in the early stages of our relationship, it was easy to keep on making excuses for the things that did not sit quite right with me. I found myself, less than a month after the vote, inwardly cringing at the refusal of Tory MP’s to support the bid to reunite unaccompanied child refugees with families in the UK. It seemed heartless and unnecessarily petty — a kind of unvirtue signalling designed to send a strong message to the faithful that this government wouldn’t be manipulated by any of that sentimentalism so beloved of the Left. Perhaps you just have to take the rough with the smooth, no party is ever going to be perfect. And with this sort of unconvincing blah, I soldiered on, morally embarrassed.

I’ve had other wobbles. But now, with the reduction of the aid budget to 0.5% of GDP, the romance is well and truly over. The idea that we export our Covid-related economic pain to the most vulnerable is just too much for me to swallow, especially as the Conservatives made a clear electoral commitment on this one. Not only was their previously stubborn defence of the 0.7% figure a bunch of garlic that could ward off the “nasty party” tag, it was also a promise to some of the poorest people on the planet. Theresa May was right when she spoke against this £4 billion drop in funding, warning that: “Fewer girls will be educated, more girls and boys will become slaves, more children will go hungry and more of the poorest people in the world will die.”

An instinctive distrust of grand, over-arching theories of morality is one of the principle features of the Conservative mindset. Practice trumps theory. Utopianism is dangerous. Human beings are messy, complicated, conflicted creatures, and strict moral prescriptions are often inhospitable to the lived reality of human life. I get all of that. I agree with it. But one of the inherent weaknesses of this position is that morality can become so bendy and pragmatic as to be practically non-existent. And there is nothing Conservative about the abandonment of guiding moral ideals, however qualified they might have to become when they bump into reality.

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What distinguishes this government from so many Conservative governments of the past is that this one doesn’t seem to do morality at all. One suspects they think that morality is for lefties. Which is just rubbish. Because Conservatism has always had a moral core, albeit a different one from that of the Left. It honours the implicit moral tone of communities, customs and institutions – monarchy, law, military, the family. Traditionally, it has had a close relationship with the Church of England and its establishment.

It has a ready affinity with environmental concerns, with its instinctive preference for the countryside over concrete. And while it does not typically appreciate the way modernity has formatted the moral instinct, it nonetheless holds important things like honourable conduct, something that used to be called character, keeping your word, being fair, even that much derided idea of noblesse oblige, which, when sympathetically understood, is a sense of social responsibility by those who have much, towards those who do not. All of these add up to a powerful conjunction of obligations — something we used to be comfortable describing as implicit in what it was to be British. And they are deeply conservative instincts.

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But what do we have with this government? No one can say that Boris has ever made any great play of being constrained by morality, certainly not anything like a Judeo-Christian one. Perhaps he thinks that the air has gone out of this particular balloon. But if that’s the case, another one of the bulwarks of moral Conservativism has been dislodged. I wonder if he thinks that the sense of honour implicit in keeping one’s word is equally old fashioned. Green MP Caroline Lucas is right to be concerned that with Boris Johnson there has been a gradual “normalisation of lying to the house”. And this normalisation is highly corrosive of one of key institutions that Conservatives have traditionally respected: Parliament itself.

I don’t care so much about the money spent on soft furnishings, but it’s that creepy conjunction of greed, entitlement and sexual licence that eats away at the integrity of our public life. I am not terribly judgmental about a bit of old-fashioned hypocrisy; the gap between what we want to be and who we are is there in most of us. What I find so deeply dispiriting is its, yes again, normalisation — as if, for instance, there was nothing about Matt Hancock’s bit on the side that should concern proper grown-ups. And such was the normalisation of this corrosive and amoral me-first philosophy that it seems Boris genuinely thought he could get away with there being one Covid isolation rule for him, and another for the rest of us, the little people. Pilot project? More Pontius Pilate, if you ask me.

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I have discovered and nurtured my inner conservative since 2019. People like Roger Scruton have become central to how I look at the world. But the more conservative I become, the less I like the Government. It is true that the very different values of market-led liberal individualism have been hollowing out more traditional Toryism since at least the Thatcher revolution. But there were hopes of a fightback. The Brexit vote was a refusal to put the values of economic growth over those of democracy and sovereignty. It was a repatriation of distant unaccountable power and the first great break with the Thatcherite economic consensus. And there is still a long way to go to undo the damage it did.

I won’t return to the Left. But I won’t be voting Conservative next time either. They have forgotten the values of being conservative. And without those values, the Conservative Party is little more than a vessel for the personal ambitions of the depressingly self-entitled.