John Healey is different. Where the Prime Minister is all about the rupture, his Chancellor emphasizes “continuity” with his hapless predecessor. Never mind that Rachel Reeves has been voted the least popular recent resident of No 11 — as a former Treasury lackey of Gordon Brown, Healey was trained not to rock the boat too aggressively, lest the judgment of “the markets” and Fleet Street’s business pages condemn Blair’s Labour as “New” in name only. Presumably, in those halcyon days, the budding junior minister Healey didn’t slog away in the belief that he was complicit in the maintenance of some great four-decade injustice. If the last “40 years” are to be blamed for blithely destroying social-democratic Britain, then it’s as much the responsibility of Blair, Brown, and ministers like Healey as it is Margaret Thatcher, who after all left office when the Soviet Union was still around.

And herein lies the central feature — the central contradiction, some might say — of Burnham’s first Budget: the dissonance between his lofty promises and the policy reality. This was no “circuit breaker”, no fundamental shift, no new growth model. This was merely a placeholder, a tinkering exercise, a nothingburger of small-cash transfers and bean-shuffling. In short: about as much as we could have expected from a consummate Brownite. Since 2024, after all, we have been stuck in a half-baked rerun attempt at Gordon’s grand bargain: keep the financialized, globalized, FDI-dependent paradigm largely intact, but redistribute the proceeds of growth via cash transfers, statutory entitlements, and tax-and-spending. That was the modernizers’ Faustian pact. Alas for poor Healey, post-Great Financial Crisis, there is now little growth to speak of, and the whole Blair-Brown paradigm is dead.

In lieu of a replacement for this zombie model, then, we got what Healey called “a Budget for the working people of Britain”, the biggest item on which will be yet another energy-bill subsidy for poorer households (to be judged by council tax bands). There will also be some extra, modest, off-the-books investment via the British Business Bank and the National Wealth Fund. And there were some mild adjustments to capital-gains allowances, and some small rises to gambling and bank taxes. It could have been a lot worse, the spivs and the City will have concluded. Foreign bankers and hedge funds too: those omnipotent gilt markets were pretty relaxed about the Chancellor’s “steady-as-she-goes” measures. Sky’s Ed Conway tallied up the tweaks: 98 in total — a new record. But the average gross value of each pecuniary item was tiny — the lowest on record. Departmental cuts, meanwhile, are being shunted towards the end of the Parliament, rewriting St Augustine’s prayer: “Lord, make me fiscally sustainable, but not yet”.

All of which is to say: how long can this discordant Downing Street double act go on for? Surely the new dialectic between Burnham’s dad-socialist idealism and its conservative, Healeyite antithesis is bound to be resolved in an electoral and real budgetary synthesis before 2029? The prime minister cannot spend three years bobbing along with grammable titbits of cost-of-living policy while promising a post-election new dawn. Something will have to give, and despite the repeated denials, all other signs point towards an early poll. Burnham has restored Labour’s lead and has high personal ratings. Those will be slowly squandered as the inevitable compromises of power begin to bite, and as global stagflationary forces accelerate. Healey’s programmed cuts to Whitehall spending for the supposed year of the next election are testament to this. It would be suicidal for the Government that is promising post-neoliberal national renewal to begin a round of austerity heading into the year of a general election.

Burnham is caught between the cautious pledges of Labour’s thin 2024 manifesto and the necessities of a bleak fiscal outlook. The temptation to seek a fresh mandate for a more ambitious agenda — for a National Social Care service, publicly owned utilities and reindustrialization-through defense investment — will grow by the day. What’s more, running an election campaign against a still second-placed Reform Party, which rightly or wrongly the majority of the electorate is genuinely repelled by, is far more attractive to Burnham than waiting for the revived Conservatives to run a more traditional, less scary, less risky campaign against Labour profligacy.

But it isn’t simply political considerations, nor mere timidity, that is preventing a major Budget intervention before the next election, whenever that turns out to be. For Healey really is constrained by economic realities. Transformative investment that might finally change Britain’s economic geography is, whether the Labour Party likes it or not, currently precluded under the current framework, not least by spiking gilt yields. Somewhere along the way, the bond market, along with the OBR, has become a kind of unelected second and third chamber, fastening successive administrations to a narrow orthodoxy.

Yet there is nothing natural, pre-ordained or apolitical about this arrangement. The markets are not permanent, capricious deities that must be placated. They are institutions, governed by rules and political decisions. A radical Budget could have set out a major investment program to renew public capital stock, focusing on energy, transport and industrial capacity. It could have leveraged public financial institutions to finance it, and mandated pension funds to leverage their mountains of capital toward domestic investments. It could have instructed the Bank of England to use its balance sheet to hold borrowing costs down and invest in public infrastructure bonds for growth and revenue generating capital projects, all while bypassing Britain’s labyrinthine planning laws. 

More than Burnham’s abstract seismic shifts, the lesson of the postwar settlement is surely that it didn’t depend on ministerial speeches. It relied, rather, on capital controls, on directed lending, on nationalizations, on price controls, and close fiscal-monetary coordination. Ending these policies was integral to the “neoliberal” revolution that Burnham decries, and, in extremis, reimposing some version of them would be integral to any truly “post-neoliberal” order. Tellingly, two recent papers from Mainstream, the pro-Burnham parliamentary grouping, have nodded in this direction. The first, “The Productive State”, calls for extensions of public ownership; the second, “Reclaiming the UK’s Fiscal Space”, argues for an alternative macroeconomic strategy to facilitate a radical agenda.

None of this is costless. There would be losers, not least the substantial body of Britain’s asset-rich middle class. Any push to radically increase capital investment would have to be accompanied by demonstrations that ballooning current spending could be brought under control. The middle-class homeowner with a large, unearned rise in the value of their house, the landlord collecting rent from an increasingly scarce asset and the affluent saver accustomed to earning a safe return without productive investment in the domestic economy — all would face a different bargain with the state. But the purpose of policy would no longer be to preserve asset values, maximize private shareholder returns, then redistribute whatever income remained. It would instead be to end the Faustian pact, and begin a shift from a bureaucratic cash transfer and entitlement state, towards an investment-first, productive state. But Healey and his boss have chosen not to make the argument, accepting the orthodox framing and the market’s verdict before testing whether it could be challenged, managed or otherwise politically overridden.

When Burnham selected Healey as his Chancellor, there were reports that it was because he was a smaller beast than Ed Miliband or Shabana Mahmood, and could therefore be relied upon to roll over and impose No 10’s will. No 10 North has been conceived as the most significant breach in the Treasury’s monopoly on economic policy since Harold Wilson’s ill-fated Department for Economic Affairs. And yet for all the talk of a Prime Minister willing, finally, to get to grips with a proper political project, the offer of his first Budget is a thin gruel, totally at odds with the stated ambitions of his office. It seems that Healey is more powerful or persuasive than first thought — less willing to implement Burnham’s whims come-what-may, and more beholden to the Treasury mandarins. Never one to shy away from contradictory spitballing for political convenience, perhaps Our Andeh only ever intended a radical systemic overhaul at the level of rhetoric and vibes: unite the Labour Party and the progressive voter bloc by talking Left, but keep the show on the road by governing Right. Only time will tell.

Of course, it would be foolish to assume a real break with history could arrive in a single Budget. Labour’s “1945 moment” didn’t invent social democracy from thin air, but rather rested on decades of embryonic welfare state experimentation and the wartime command economy. Thatcherism had a prehistory too: before 1979, the IMF crisis and James Callaghan’s warning to his party that the Keynesian option “no longer exists” had already narrowed the field of acceptable economic policy. Perhaps Burnham’s rise, Healey’s cautious Budget, and the likely election to come will be remembered in the same way — not as the moment Britain emerged, fully formed, from “neoliberalism”, but rather as stepping stones away from a model that no longer works. Yet for now, at least, that much-touted new settlement remains mere aspiration — maybe until that election.

Andy Burnham is something different. Based on the evidence so far, he is a kind of idealist. He is driven by a vague but deeply-held idea of what Britain should be, namely a country defined by a spirit of solidarity and rooted in a strong and protective state. This vision bears the imprint of Burnham’s upbringing in a Northern milieu infused with strong local identities, a prominent tradition of working-class politics, and Catholic notions of social justice. Its aesthetics come from football and the guitar music of the Eighties and Nineties — the last eras when the nation shared broadly the same cultural consciousness. Its highest aspiration, perhaps, is to make community something more than a euphemism for an interest group. 

You can see this romantic and, in its way, rather conservative vision in most of Burnham’s stated priorities, from social care reform and public control of utilities to a defense of pubs as “working-class culture”. Bunrhamism is consistent in its enemies too: privatization, Thatcherism and the bond markets represent the undermining of state and society by the extractive forces of capital.

An idea of Britain is not the same as a credible plan, but it is welcome to see a prime minister who at least seems to grasp that a nation is a social entity held together by bonds of emotion and identity, rather than simply a receptacle for abstract values. Blair’s restless tampering with the constitution, his contempt for nationhood and enthusiastic embrace of globalization, laid the ground for many of our current crises. His managerial successors often seemed to occupy power like CEOs trying to boost a company’s stock price, or officials managing a civil service department. 

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There is, however, a reason that idealism has a bad name in modern politics. It was articulated by the philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli during the Renaissance. More than the calculating ruthlessness that his name is associated with, what made Machiavelli a foundational thinker of modernity was his response to a world of dramatic and frightening change. Italy in the early-16th century had become a battleground for competing European powers, plunging the region into chaos. Its leaders had become fatalistic, Machiavelli observed, due to “the great changes and variations, beyond human imagining, which we have experienced and experience every day”. His conclusion was that such upheaval had turned principled leadership into a recipe for failure; what mattered was an ability to infer what the situation demanded. “One who adapts his policy to the times prospers,” he wrote. “One man proceeds with circumspection, another impetuously; one uses violence, another stratagem; one man goes about things patiently, another does the opposite”; and yet, success ultimately depended on “nothing else except the extent to which their methods are or are not suited to the nature of the times”.

The question for Burnham, then, is this: what good is a vision for the country if it takes no account of our historical circumstances? We are living in a Machiavellian moment, a time of “great changes and variations, beyond human imagining”. The immediate challenge is a looming economic crisis, as Trump’s Iran War and wider instability in the Middle East feeds through into surging energy bills, rising inflation and high interest rates. All of this is ramping up the cost of the government’s debt, meaning that six weeks out from John Healey’s first budget, the chancellor faces a struggle just to keep his head above water. 

Meanwhile, the tectonic plates of global politics are shifting around us. The unpredictable and increasingly hostile Trump administration has recently declared support for Irish unification. The EU could soon be upended by a Le Pen victory in France and the ascent of the AfD in Germany, imperiling, among other things, European support for Ukraine. Chinese technology and manufacturing power continues to steadily rewire the global economy. And that is before mentioning the wide range of transformative outcomes that could result from artificial intelligence.  

In other words, Burnham may prefer to focus on homelessness and vocational training, but he does not have that luxury. However compelling his image of Britain may be, his premiership will be defined first and foremost by how he responds to the challenges thrown up by a volatile world. There are already signs that he is floundering. The Treasury has told the Financial Times that Burnham and Healey did not realize how bad the public finances were, as though the subject had not been near the center of attention for the past two years. Last week, in an apparently off-the-cuff remark in the Commons, Burnham recklessly opened the door to another Scottish independence referendum, before rushing to close it again.

The deeper issue is that Burnham’s visions of Britain as it is and Britain as it should be are seemingly impervious to historical change. His judgment that the country has suffered under “40 years of neoliberalism”, implying a political economy that has remained relatively static across decades, is alarmingly imperceptive. Beginning with New Labour’s efforts to re-engineer the Thatcherite settlement for progressive ends, Britain has moved steadily towards a hybrid model in which privatization, the plundering of national assets by foreign investors, and the decimation of government services coexists with an expansive bureaucratic state that seeks to micro-manage the economy through regulation. The second half of the equation matters as much as the first, because the ever-growing expense of regulation, including that introduced by the current Labour government, has left British businesses especially vulnerable to rising costs and higher interest rates, forcing them to cut investment, hire fewer workers and, increasingly, to give up. To give one vivid illustration of these problems, 2025 was the worst year on record for housebuilding in London, with the number of new projects collapsing by 85% in a decade. Since much of Britain’s regulation is inflationary, it is also partly responsible for the government facing higher borrowing costs than comparable nations. 

In fairness to Burnham, his reductive framing of the country’s problems answers a public demand. Suspicious of politicians and beset by insecurity, voters want principled leaders and stories that explain in familiar terms what has gone wrong. As a result, the most successful communicators are those with beliefs that are both sincerely held and inadequate to the realities of the 21st century. 

This does not mean, however, that an idealist is necessarily unsuited to a volatile world. Modern history has been shaped by leaders who have pursued ideological convictions in times of flux. Such figures have a paradoxical power: their rigid commitment to their vision enables them to be flexible in reaching it. Understanding Machiavelli’s insights, they see that they must work with the tools and circumstances at their disposal. They concede that realizing a vision of society will never mean achieving a Platonic ideal, but at best, an ability to guide the process of change in a particular direction. 

Otto von Bismarck, the great Prussian statesman of the late-19th century, expressed this idea poetically when he spoke of “hearing God’s footsteps moving through history and walking with him some of the way”. Bismarck himself was probably the ultimate example of this type. Remembered as the master of Realpolitik, he was nonetheless a committed archconservative who worked to secure an old order for a new age. He unified Germany to buttress the power of Prussia, and he introduced universal male suffrage and the first modern welfare state to turn the masses from potential socialists into loyal subjects of the Kaiser. At the other end of the ideological spectrum, no less a doctrinaire Marxist than Vladimir Lenin proved endlessly adaptable in establishing the Soviet Union as the first Communist state. 

The figure in British history who most resembles this model is surely Burnham’s great nemesis: Thatcher. Though now often characterized as a liberal, it is truer to say that she recognized in economic liberalism the means necessary, at her historical juncture, to realize her deeply-held conservative vision of society, one based on personal responsibility, property ownership, and the slashing back of an over-powerful state. As with Bismarck, this meant building a coalition among parts of the working and middle classes, and pursuing a form of populism directed not at elites, but at the institutions of organized labor. 

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These precedents bear the lesson that principles and convictions are of little worth unless coupled with an ability to see beyond one’s own context, recognizing that what appears fixed and inevitable now will soon be revealed as transient. Boldness and risk-taking are indispensable, but can only succeed if they are informed by a clear analysis of history and an instinctive judgment. Burnham has shown some signs of grasping the nature of the challenge: his coup against Starmer was skillfully executed, and while it remains to be seen if No. 10 North is any more than a gimmick, his ambition to loosen himself from Whitehall’s deathly grip is admirable. He has the benefit of a public that has already accepted change in some form is coming, and numerous policy ideas which have been identified by others. These include breaking the 2024 manifesto by raising income tax, so as to begin easing the burden on businesses; means-testing pensions; balancing the renewable energy drive with more domestic oil and gas in the medium-term; and reforming the Bank of England’s role to help with government financing. 

These are merely a few of the avenues that Burnham could pursue towards his idea of Britain. More significant opportunities, and risks, could well emerge from domains that are still rapidly evolving, namely technology and international relations. Since any course he chooses will likely antagonize his party, and will take time to produce results for the electorate, the prime minister will need to keep his vision alive through political theater. Thatcher understood the value of a dramatic confrontation to demonstrate her principles and create sharp dividing lines with her opponents. Similarly, Burnham could seek a public showdown with the investors and creditors involved in the totemic scandal of Thames Water.

History shows that the politicians who orient themselves towards a particular idea of society — even a conservative or a moralistic one — can, with the necessary temperament, end up being more modern than the modernizers, more pragmatic than the managers, and more radical than those who set out to disrupt. Of course, history is also littered with figures — the Jimmy Carters and Jeremy Corbyns of this world — who have justified the common image of the idealist as the polar opposite of the realist. The danger for Burnham is that he owes his power to a likeable caricature he has crafted for the public. His idealism may therefore come to little more than clinging to the simple sentiments that have made him popular, until he is overwhelmed by events.

Entrepreneurial types have started to get wise to this national obsession, too. Britain’s “leadership” industry has become vast and lucrative: podcasters and influencers throughout the land churn out self-help manuals and Diary-of-a-CEO-type podcasts, selling their listeners the dream that they might one day be as irresistibly charismatic as Steven Bartlett or Jake Humphrey; exclusive private networks promise to put aspiring board members in touch with real-life “NEDs”; historic stately homes are shuttered so that self-important middle-managers can take them over for residential leadership getaways. Any serious author who can get recognized as some kind of thought-leader in the theory of leadership can count on a flurry of sales — both to wonkish political commentators desperate to work out what makes someone fit to rule, and to ambitious young tech and business types, keen for someone to teach them how to sell their SAAS products with the might of Marcus Aurelius and Genghis Khan.

This, at any rate, seems to have been the main consideration behind the decision to publish Jared Diamond’s Profits, Prophets, Coaches and Kings: (When) Do Leaders Make a Difference?, which is released by Allen Lane this September. Diamond shifts books: his 1997 inquiry into why the West became so powerful, Guns, Germs and Steel, sold over two million copies, and became the prototype for the other middlebrow blockbusters, like Sapiens and Prisoners of Geography, that dominated the bookshelves of the corporate-boardroom autodidacts in the pre-podcast era. His foray into the science of “leadership” promises to prise this old audience back into Waterstones with one weird trick: a nifty thought experiment that he calls “The Hamlet Test”. By posing the question of whether anyone else would have written Hamlet if Shakespeare had died of smallpox at the age of 10, argues Diamond, “we can make a strong argument that Shakespeare was uniquely talented”; in the same way, we can make a strong argument that a leader was effective by asking not whether he or she effectively represented a particular group, or achieved something noble, but whether he or she managed to make a difference in the world.

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Once we define effective leadership this way, Diamond seems to think, then the perennial question of “what makes a good leader?” can be reduced to “under what conditions do leaders make a difference?”. Conveniently, this gives Diamond the chance to conduct lots of nice, big, multivariate analyses of the kind that social scientists love. Profits, Prophets, Coaches and Kings contains several mad charts “ranking” different leaders according to how much they could be said to have “made a difference” to their countries’ economies: good leaders in this regard include Lee Kuan Yew and the military dictators Chun Doo Hwan and Georgios Papadopoulos; bad leaders, meanwhile, include Idi Amin and Harold Wilson. Occasionally, he goes into more depth — most convincingly his chapter on Seretse Khama, Botswana’s first president after independence, who almost, uniquely in sub-Saharan Africa, managed to steward a relatively peaceful handover of power, keep a lid on ethnic conflicts, and integrate the Botswanan economy reasonably effectively into the global system of trade. 

Whenever Diamond does try to go into depth, however, some pretty serious problems start to emerge. In the Khama chapter, for instance, he diligently lists a few obvious factors that helped Khama’s success — his chieftaincy of Botswana’s largest ethnic group, the discovery of diamonds shortly after independence — but totally neglects some of the most important factors of all. There were, in fact, plenty of other similarly promising leaders across sub-Saharan Africa in the Sixties, whether Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana, or Thomas Sankara in Burkina Faso — it’s just that they were all killed or overthrown in coups that Western powers were rumored to have sponsored. This, needless to say, seems important for anyone claiming to be conducting an empirical study of the factors that led to Khama’s success. Arguably, what really set Khama apart from his pan-African counterparts was his willingness to renounce leadership on a global level — distancing himself from the non-aligned movement, refusing to intervene against apartheid South Africa, and generally toeing the line drawn by the world’s greatest, pushiest power. Yet Diamond barely grapples with this possibility. Instead, he simply reproduces the hagiographies that liberal NGO-workers and development economists have been churning out for years.

There is, I suspect, something paradigmatic about this failing. All attempts to analyze “leadership” in terms of the different factors that contribute to it end up sounding rather nonsensical: after all, if a leader’s capacity to “make a difference” is reducible to certain structural conditions, or obedience to certain rules, then “making a difference” doesn’t really count as making a difference at all. Can you really be a leader by virtue of having been in the right place at the right time? Are you really a leader if you have got to where you are by following a simple five-step plan laid out for you by some podcast? No sooner does the literal-minded investigator start to ask questions about leadership than he or she starts to run up against an ancient antinomy: to make a difference, they must be free from the forces that determine events; but if they are free from those forces, there can be no science capable of explaining why they succeed. In Diamond’s case, this leads to some genuinely embarrassing formulations: Hitler was an effective leader because of “four qualities: anti- Semitism, speaking ability, tactical cleverness, and risk-taking”. 

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If you are really interested in the phenomenon of leadership, you will have to look elsewhere this autumn. Crowds and Power, the 1960 masterwork of the German theorist Elias Canetti that has just been republished by Fitzcarraldo, will probably not attract too many ambitious young politicos or corporate middle managers. It is a strange, unclassifiable document: a mixture of Victorian comparative anthropology, Jungian psychoanalysis and the just-so stories of modern-day evo-psych. It isn’t hard to see why it has been so thoroughly overlooked by mainstream social scientists: its main champions were literary and philosophical figures, including Susan Sontag and Iris Murdoch, and its first part is basically just one, vast typology of all the different types of “crowd” which human beings can amass themselves into — “closed crowds”, “open crowds”, the wolf-like “packs” that dominated human social organization in the days of prehistoric game hunts — interspersed with pieces of mad speculation about how certain deeply ingrained mythic symbols inform and determine real-world mass events. To give one gloriously unfalsifiable example, Canetti explains the Third Reich via the fact that Germany is a forested country, whose inhabitants have as their essential “crowd symbol” lots of tall, upright things standing to attention like coniferous trees. Thus, he concludes, Germans were particularly susceptible to militarism in the 19th century, and felt the disbanding of the German army by the Treaty of Versailles as a vast, existential humiliation that demanded redress.  

What would the contemporary consumer of leadership-content make of this kind of explanation? Clearly, Canetti’s account is massively unsatisfactory to the empirically minded reader — how exactly does one measure a “crowd symbol”? — and could certainly not be condensed into any kind of how-to guide for would-be Elon Musks or Seretse Khamas or Hitlers. But it does, I think, have one distinct advantage over almost every other invocation of leadership one might encounter in today’s media. By layering hundreds of apparently mutually exclusive explanations like the Hitler story — many of them seemingly self-sufficient in their own right — Canetti hints at the fact that psychic causation doesn’t work quite like physical causation. Human actions are, as Freud might have put it, overdetermined: the same act can be simultaneously caused by a dozen different motives, memories, fantasies and psychic mechanisms, none of which can straightforwardly be isolated as the variable which “made the difference”. In this sense, in fact, Canetti’s lunatic profusion of explanations is more realistic than Diamond’s sober attempt to rank them: the closer we look at why anybody does anything, the more their psychic life seems exempt from the laws of causation entirely.

Once we start to see human action in this light, questions like “what makes a good leader?” start to look very different indeed. Perhaps the most striking effect of Crowds and Power is the way it induces the reader to think of the great men of history as mere conduits for impersonal psychological and social mechanisms — as mere vessels, in whom vast, unpredictable “crowd energies” temporarily reside. It is a truth that we all notice from time to time: one only has to look at the last few parliaments to see the range of animal instincts and bizarre psychosexual neuroses that send people careening towards power. It is also, in a sense, the project that more mainstream leadership-theorists, Diamond among them, seem to be wanting to ask — even if the demands of reader-flattering liberal good manners never quite allow them to do so. 

The genius of Canetti’s account, by contrast, is to assign priority to the deepest, strangest mechanisms of all, and totally ignore what leaders say their interests might be, almost as a matter of methodological principle. The true common factor among leaders, he argues, is a kind of primal, evolutionary obsession with being the sole survivor of an atrocity, standing over a pile of dead — a terrified, animal desire to claw one’s way to a position where one can send others to die in one’s place. The archetypical political leader, in fact, is the Jewish historian Josephus, who, trapped with 40 fellow rebels during a siege, deceitfully engineered their suicide pact so that he emerged one of its only two survivors, then surrendered to the Romans, prospered, and wrote the history of his own lies. Josephus’s deception, writes Canetti, “is the deception of all leaders. They pretend that they will be the first to die, but, in reality, they send their people to death, so that they themselves may stay alive longer. The trick is always the same.” 

Of course, this kind of thinking will not be acceptable to today’s leadership-fetishists. One suspects Diamond’s book will outsell Canetti’s, and however much I would like to switch on Newsnight and see Andy Burnham locate the reason for his recent leadership campaign in his despotic compulsion to stand over a heap of corpses, I have to admit this will probably not come to pass. And yet, if there is one lesson of Canetti’s that is worth retaining, it is that people’s interests and fixations are never quite what they seem to be — especially when leadership is involved. 

The irony of Britain’s current fascination with “leaders” and “leadership” is that in many ways, it is born of a dissatisfaction with the way in which most people think about the role of human freedom in political and commercial affairs. Why else would you single out leadership as the thing that needs to change, if you were not hungry for some streak of pure, overdetermined madness to shock those in power out of their unimaginative ways? Perhaps, in their bottomless appetite for leadership manuals and corporate podcasts, the British public are channeling something deeper and more dangerous than we realize. Consider it, next time you are cornered by one of them at a party: look into your smarmy interlocutor’s eyes, and tell me you can’t see the piles of dead, smell the pine forests, hear the packs of howling wolves. 

Lansbury came from a radical family, and he’d been campaigning for women’s rights since the 1880s. Then in the Liberal Party, he’d gone on to join the Social Democratic Federation, the country’s first socialist party, before being elected in December 1910 as the Labour MP for Bow and Bromley, in the East End of London. Once in Parliament, he was infuriated by the Liberal government’s refusal to extend the franchise to women and by its approval of force-feeding Suffragette prisoners on hunger strike. “You are beneath contempt,” he shouted, walking up to the government front bench. “You will go down in history as the men who tortured innocent women.” He was suspended from the chamber for that outburst.

He was equally angered by his own party’s failure to confront the government on the issue. Having exhausted all other tactics, he resigned his seat and called a by-election, asking his constituents “to endorse my policy of making women’s suffrage the beginning and end of my parliamentary fight”. It was a risky move. Bow and Bromley was a marginal constituency, and he’d only been elected in 1910 because the Liberals had declined to field a candidate and had backed him, giving him a clear run against his Conservative opponent. But it was worth the risk for one so committed to the cause. 

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The by-election that followed was noisy and atypical. The Labour Party was incensed by Lansbury’s actions and declined to give him official support, while the Liberals again refused to participate. Women’s groups from around the country campaigned for Lansbury, with public meetings addressed by the constitutionalist Millicent Fawcett, the socialist Ethel Snowden and the extremist Emmeline Pankhurst. Meanwhile, anti-suffrage opponents rallied under the slogan of “No Petticoat Government”, and the Conservatives tried hard to insist that this wasn’t a single-issue election.

The most effective poster read: “Lansbury is sick of Parliament. Bow and Bromley is sick of Lansbury. Vote for Blair and make everybody happy.” And on polling day, that’s what happened. On a 10% swing, the Conservative Reginald Blair took the seat and Lansbury was out of Parliament for a decade.

In the long run, standing on his principles didn’t do him any harm. When he returned to Westminster in 1922, again for Bow and Bromley, the number of votes cast had more than tripled, the electorate swelled by the enfranchisement of the working class and of most — if not yet all — women. It turned out that he’d been, in that curious modern phrase, on the right side of history. And when the Labour government split in 1931, and the party suffered a massive election defeat, he was the only ex-Cabinet minister left in Parliament, becoming leader by default at the age of 73. He held the party together in its darkest hour, his record speaking for him as a veteran campaigner for women, peace and the working class.

Nigel Farage, it hardly needs saying, is no George Lansbury. There is no issue of principle, or even of policy, at stake in today’s by-election in Clacton. And the difference doesn’t speak well of today’s politics. Beneath Farage’s thin-skinned petulance and posturing, there lies the media’s — and perhaps the public’s — fascination with electoral contests, rather than actual policy. Keir Starmer’s premiership was a time of flatlining productivity, of rising unemployment, of an incipient borrowing crisis (bond yields are higher than when Liz Truss “spooked the markets”). But the average voter could be forgiven for not noticing the parlous state of the economy as the drama of Andy Burnham’s by-election victory and unopposed coup played out in the press. This isn’t politics, it’s soap opera, and with the departure of Peter Mandelson, Farage is now the longest-standing character still in the show, in large part because he recognized the direction of travel early on.

It wasn’t always thus. Even if we consider the closest recent parallel to Clacton, that of David Davis in 2008, there was a serious point being made. Davis was the Conservative shadow home secretary and believed that a critical moment had been reached when the Commons voted in favor of the Labour government’s proposal to allow detention without charge for up to 42 days. This came in the midst of an attempt to introduce identity cards, attacks on the jury system, and increased surveillance by councils and quangos. As Davis pointed out, “600 public bodies have the authority to bug phones and emails and intercept the post”. So he resigned both his shadow cabinet job and his seat to fight a by-election in his constituency of Haltemprice and Howden in Yorkshire on the issue of civil liberties.

Then, as now, the other major parties didn’t contest the election. Labour, understandably, had no wish to defend its record, and Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg said his party supported Davis’s position and wouldn’t therefore stand against him. The whole thing became a farce. There was a record field of candidates — 26 in all — including the likes of David Icke, Mad Cow-Girl and Ronnie Carroll (the man who’d sung “Ring-a-Ding Girl” in the 1962 Eurovision Song Contest). There were so many of them that they weren’t allowed on the platform to hear the result, for fear of breaking the stage. 

Davis won, of course, with an increased share of the vote, but it was a pyrrhic victory, both politically and personally. Gordon Brown’s government paid no attention at all. And Davis’s career suffered. Just three years earlier, he’d fought David Cameron for the Conservative leadership. Now, he looked a much reduced, peripheral figure. “If I was given my job back, I think I’d take it,” he said. “But I don’t think I’ll be offered it.” He wasn’t, and he didn’t serve in the Coalition government of 2010-15.

In retrospect, Davis’s by-election captured the moment when British politics became totally trivial. The question of civil liberties was genuinely important, and has become ever more so. But the chance to challenge the growing power of the state was ducked by the media, which had decided that soap operas were more fun. The Daily Mirror saw Davis’s actions as “a cynically disguised leadership challenge to David Cameron”, while the Daily Telegraph said it was “a challenge to Mr Cameron’s authority”. It wasn’t. It was an attempt to position the Conservatives as the party that would defend the individual. When it was turned into a circus, the opportunity passed and the direction of travel remained unchanged. The era of the police raiding people’s homes in pursuit of social-media rudeness was just about to dawn.

And now comes Farage in Clacton. He may not have distinguished himself in Parliament, he may have struggled with delegation and with running a political party, but he has proved over the last three decades to be a consummate campaigner, and calling a by-election looks like a retreat to his comfort zone. But it’s a path fraught with danger. To start with, he runs the risk of becoming a laughing stock, even more than did David Davis. Breaking the 2008 record, there are 34 candidates, ranging from the SDP through three separate representatives of the Official Monster Raving Loony Party, all the way down to Rejoin EU. It’s hard to retain any sense of dignity in these circumstances. Worse still, the focus on Farage’s finances risks giving the impression of him being a spiv, rather than the lovable rogue that has previously been his great selling-point. 

These three self-triggered by-elections tell an unedifying story of political decline. Lansbury’s was an honorable position and it was seen as such. Davis was also a principled man, but he was treated as a joke. And now Farage reduces legitimate concerns about the probity of his funding to a caricatured gimmick of the electoral process.

Oddly, though, that comment from the Suffragette may yet be applicable. The Bow and Bromley by-election in 1912 does not “stand out in history as a great political landmark”. But if Farage is sufficiently damaged, then Clacton in 2026 may do.

This certainly sounds ambitious. But rhetoric is cheap and it has so far proven difficult to pin down Burnham on specific policies. He took a week to end speculation about scrapping council taxes and stamp duties and replacing them with a flat property value tax, clarifying that “nothing immediate” on the issue was in fact planned. This was just a day after he walked back an earlier suggestion about raising personal income tax allowances. 

With this in mind, it is not clear how to interpret the Prime Minister’s announcement on Wednesday that the Government will look into financing a reform of Britain’s long-neglected social care system, potentially with tax hikes. But following the old adage that personnel is policy, perhaps one can infer Burnham’s actual priorities and preferences through his staffing choices.

On matters of economic policy, Burnham’s court of ministers, advisers and aides can be divided into roughly three camps: Brownites with a regionalist and national security bent who are broadly aligned with the Treasury orthodoxy; soft-Left mandarins and policy experts with a long paper trail of criticizing it; and progressive think-tankers with cautiously radical reform ambitions.

The Chancellor falls squarely into the first camp. John Healey’s resignation over his predecessor Rachel Reeves’s budget was not a sign of heterodoxy but of its opposite: a complaint that the Treasury would not fund rearmament, not that it ran the country by rulebook. His formation is the purest Brownism left in frontline politics. He came into Parliament from the campaigns directorship of the Trades Union Congress, co-wrote Labour’s first paper on regional economic policy with Ed Balls in 1998, and spent five years as a Treasury minister under Brown before the housing brief made him the party’s most persistent advocate of council house building. 

Last week, Healey told Treasury staff in his first speech that “fiscal control must be the first duty” of the office and promised to meet the rules “in lockstep” with Burnham while “ensuring there’s a buffer also for uncertainty”, a sentence that commits him to running larger margins than Reeves ever enjoyed. The distinctive Healey move is to weld the doctrine to the flag: fiscal credibility, in his telling, is “the bedrock of economic stability and national security”. Tellingly, his new political team, drawn largely from his defense operation and chiefed by Will Straw (another product of the Brown Treasury), contains not a single economic adviser.

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The intellectual warrant for this position comes from Richard Hughes, the former chairman of the Office for Budget Responsibility, whom Burnham included as one of his fiscal advisers ahead of the expected leadership challenge. Hughes is the nearest thing British fiscal policy has to an internal auditor: a career Treasury official who ran the 2007 spending review, did fiscal surveillance at the IMF, and at the Resolution Foundation wrote the case for rules that recognize the state’s assets as well as its debts, the intellectual ancestor of the net financial liabilities measure the government now targets. His verdict on the UK’s current fiscal framework inverts the common complaint: the rules are not too tight but “among the loosest the UK has had in its history”, he told the Lords in January; the British disease is “how frequently we abandon” them, and the gaming of targets that are met in letter and violated in spirit. 

Ranged against Healey and Hughes, at least on paper, are the two most senior economists in Burnham’s orbit: Jim O’Neill and Andy Haldane. They are both Sheffield economics graduates of a certain vintage as well as long-standing critics of the framework their government has just re-embraced. O’Neill, tipped as chief economic adviser, took the scenic route to Manchester patriotism: after two decades at Goldman Sachs, where he coined the term BRICs and chaired the asset management arm, he oversaw the Royal Society of Arts’ City Growth Commission, making an agglomerationist case for metro devolution that George Osborne bought wholesale, hiring O’Neill to deliver the Northern Powerhouse. He has called the fiscal rules “petty and arbitrary”, dismissed Starmer’s welfare squeeze as “playing around with small amounts of savings” to satisfy them, wants council tax and stamp duty replaced outright, and confirms that devolving income tax is being examined “in a serious way”. 

Haldane, the former Chief Economist of the Bank of England, arrived at similar conclusions from inside the state: after 32 years at the Bank — where his speeches on the financial sector’s mirage of measured productivity and the share buyback culture of the equity market remain the establishment’s best account of why profits stopped becoming investment — he chaired the Industrial Strategy Council and helped to write the Levelling-Up white paper. He has attacked the “fiscal straitjacket”, called the case for changing the rules “overwhelming”, and blamed last autumn’s “fiscal fandango” of tax speculation for flatlining growth. 

Burnham’s talk of putting “life’s essentials back under stronger public control” bears the watermark of some of his more progressive advisers, including figures from influential think tanks, the New Economics Foundation, IPPR North and Common Wealth. Miatta Fahnbulleh, NEF former chief executive and now Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, is among Burnham’s closest confidantes. She describes her politics in the terms of the cooperative tradition of the Left, favors “common ownership of public goods and essential infrastructure”, and has explored taking water into public hands on the costless model Louise Haigh used for rail. IPPR North’s Zoë Billingham is a natural pick as the head of one of the institutional homes of the devolution and regional rebalancing agenda. Common Wealth’s founder, Mathew Lawrence, was the co-author of a recent paper, published through the Burnham-aligned Mainstream group, extending Manchesterism to British capitalism at large. It advocated public intervention wherever investment has dried up and rents inflate the price of primary needs. 

This is the only wing of the Burnham court with a sophisticated theory of public ownership, one that is framed in terms of fiscal prudence too. Nonetheless, the current fiscal framework prices their program as ruinous, since rules that net off financial assets but not physical ones make renationalizing a water company look like fiscal incontinence and a minority stake look like prudence.

Indeed, the priorities of Burnham’s three different camps militate against each other: accepting the notion that the UK’s fiscal position necessitates an enforcing of the rules is ultimately not compatible with planning for industrial revival and renewed public control of key goods provision. These ambitions imply a decade of investment, public and private, in plant, grids, housing and skills before any of it returns a penny of revenue. The current rules that treat such outlays as identical to consumption ration precisely the spending on which future output depends. And reasserting public ownership compounds the offense: perversely, borrowing to acquire a controlling stake in a revenue-generating utility registers as pure fiscal deterioration, since consolidation extinguishes the offsetting financial asset and the physical estate counts for nothing against the debt incurred. Above all, persistent fiscal constraints depress the aggregate demand on which private investment decisions hinge, so productivity continues to stagnate, the growth rate and tax revenue disappoint, and the rules tighten again. This vicious circle that the UK has drawn since the financial crisis is not conducive to any program of economic transformation. 

If this seeming contradiction has to be resolved one way or another, then Healey’s appointment, with Hughes lurking in the background, suggests it won’t be in favor of the progressives. Healey’s first speech as chancellor suggested that his quarrel with Reeves wasn’t doctrinal but specifically about the refusal to accommodate more defense spending. That’s why he named fiscal credibility as “the bedrock of economic stability and national security”. On the evidence of the Government’s first fortnight, Haldane and O’Neill, neither of whom hold confirmed posts, have already lost the argument.

Whatever his rhetoric, then, one might conclude that this signals Burnham’s revealed preference for continuity. More cynical tongues might suggest that any perception of a political sea change reflects the Prime Minister’s penchant for savvy social media stage management. But though his personnel and fiscal doctrine are Brownite, Burnham is distancing himself from Whitehall. While Brown’s model made the Treasury the strategic brain of government, Burnham’s “beefed-up No. 10” with a “malleable” Chancellor is built to do the opposite. The extent to which more transformative policy ideas have any purchase on his decision-making will depend on this new model actually working as intended. It is noteworthy, however, that it was Burnham and not Healey who sought Hughes’s council.

But what is more conspicuous about Burnham’s economic worldview are the elements that are absent. There is little to suggest that Britain’s new leader realizes how strange the country is, in macroeconomic terms. Though “Manchesterism” produced consistent above-national-average employment and output growth, income growth remained weak. That is because real wages have grown poorly everywhere, not just because cost-of-living pressures have persisted but because productivity growth has not budged, in no small part due to investment being consistently low. On these metrics the UK is a strange outlier among its peers.

But as some of the response to Burnham’s moderately ambitious proposals suggests, there is little appreciation for this fact. The reaction to his social care proposal this week was telling. He accurately pointed out that social care workers, often immigrants, live on “poverty pay”, while almost two million elderly Britons need to qualify for state aid given the low threshold, and often face having to sell their homes. But many commentators suggested that the UK can’t afford any more social spending and that middle-class households are already overtaxed. The Resolution Foundation had already taken to sounding the alarm based on Burnham’s proposals so far, claiming Burnham’s pledges had reduced the “fiscal headroom” to as little as £8 billion.

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What is absent from the conversation is how UK spending measures up internationally. First and foremost: the UK is not a heavily taxed society by any standard. As of 2024, total tax revenue including social security contributions as a share of GDP was at 34.4%, only just above the OECD average and well below the EU average of 39.3%. And the tax wedge, that is how heavily the state taxes a full-time single worker on an average salary, was at 29.9%, placing Britain dead last in a group that includes all EU countries and the United States. When including average council taxes, the wedge increases by a few percentage points, keeping the UK well below the EU average of 44.1%. This reflects the fact that median income households in the UK are in fact less taxed than elsewhere, and significantly so. 

Meanwhile, the most recent figure for the UK’s net social expenditure was at 22.8% of GDP, below both the EU and the United States. Any worry that the country’s welfare bill is too high seems misplaced. It is equally hard to understand why the much maligned triple-lock on Britain’s modest state pension attracts so much vitriol and media attention: precisely because of the reliance on capital income to fund pensions, the magnitude of gross old-age benefits is minimal, amounting to just over 7.6% of GDP in 2023. The same OECD data suggests that the UK relative position doesn’t change even if the triple-lock persists until 2040.

Whatever the reason the UK economy underperforms relative to its wealthy peers, it is hard to find fault in social programs whose public spending footprint pales in comparison. There is little to suggest that the senior government and its current crop of advisers and official appointees realize that the country’s economic policy discussions are profoundly insular and out-of-tune. Perhaps the biggest inference we can make about Burnham is that he lacks the ability to formulate a response to the opponents of his economic vision. This would go a long way to explaining why he has invited some of them into his government.

The idea is deliciously fiendish. Combined with Project Smear’s fake numbers, which insist that Brexit has robbed them of much-needed wealth, the public is encouraged to view the EU as an institution that has reached new heights of sophistication — in part thanks to Britain’s absence. The implied message is that poor, ruined old Blighty is unworthy of the transformed bloc. The hope is that if this narrative gains traction, the good burghers of Britain may be spurred into action — if only to prove that they are worthy of higher things.

Will this new tactic work? Almost certainly not. So, why am I wasting your time, dear reader, to alert you to it? Well because, though it will fail, the new tactic is still capable of causing a great deal of damage. In prolonging this clapped-out, regressive, evidence-free debate on whether or not to rejoin the EU, the already much delayed discussion of how to make actual Brexit work for the many is delayed further. 

So let us take a closer look at Project Smear, and deconstruct the statistical falsities underpinning claims that Brexit dealt a massive macroeconomic shock that impoverished the nation. Chief among these is a report entitled “The Economic Impact of Brexit”, published by the US National Bureau of Economic Research, but authored by British and European economists. Its gist is that, a decade after the Brexit referendum, the British economy is 6% smaller than it would have been had voters opted to remain in the EU.

It is interesting to note that a hypothetical has replaced any actual measurement. The argument has shifted from Project Fear’s prediction of recession (which the alert reader will have noticed never happened; indeed, during the 2016-2025 period, the UK outgrew France, Italy, and Germany) to suggest that Britain would have grown 6% faster over the past 10 years had it stayed in the EU. Of course, this is a hypothetical that, sadly, economists can never test since we lack a time machine to return to 2016 and start again sans Brexit. Still, economists insist that they have the next best thing to a time machine: econometric models that can simulate hypotheticals.

As a trained econometrician, I can tell you that the only real utility of these is to make astrologists look respectable. But don’t take my word for it. Look under the bonnet of “The Economic Impact of Brexit” — the report that the BBC, The Guardian and so on have endorsed chapter and verse. What you will find here is an attempt to identify a group of countries that, during the decade preceding the Brexit referendum (2006-2016), were following more or less the same growth trajectory as Britain. By analyzing the economic fortunes of this cohort, the report assesses whether, in the decade following Brexit, Britain’s economic path followed or diverged from that reference group and draws its ill-fated conclusions thereupon.

It sounds like a reasonable method for assessing, not so much Brexit’s impact but at least whether the year 2016 coincided with what economists refer to as a “structural break”. Until, that is, you discover which eight countries the authors selected as the British economy’s doppelgangers. The country they gave the largest weight (60.5%) to is the United States. It is difficult to imagine a more indefensible choice. For 2016 was the year of Trump 1.0, with huge tax cuts following his election. This was followed, in 2020, by Biden’s gargantuan stimulus program. With or without Brexit, the UK’s economy (indeed, any European economy) could never have come even close to America’s post-2016 growth rate. Nonetheless, this study comes to the manifestly illegitimate “conclusion” that Brexit was the reason the UK lagged the US after 2016.

As if the comparison with the US were not silly enough, guess which country was given the second-largest weighting: Greece! That’s when my initial suspicion that the authors had crossed the line from mere incompetence to intentional fraud turned into a near certainty. If these reference countries were meant to track Britain’s growth trajectory between 2006 and 2016, then Greece should have been disqualified immediately. Having shed at least 25% of its national income between the Great Financial Crisis of 2008 and 2016 (in sharp contrast with UK national income which fell by a mere 1% for only a year before it rebounded), Greece was a terrible reference country. Not only was its pre-2016 path nothing like the UK’s, but it was always going to perform, around 2016, what financiers callously refer to as a “dead cat bounce” — a temporary rebound that even a dead cat would make if dropped from a great enough height — something the UK economy was never going to emulate, thus inflating further the mis-measured Brexit effect.

And then there is the small matter of Ireland’s inclusion. Seriously? Do these people not know that Ireland’s national income, its GDP, is a hallucination? Did they forget that America’s Big Tech companies monstrously inflate Ireland’s GDP by booking their global revenues in Dublin for tax minimization purposes? Could m’learned colleagues have missed the simple point that, given Big Tech’s remarkable rise after 2016, comparing Ireland’s post-2016 growth rate with Britain’s would always make the UK look like a laggard for reasons that have nothing to do with Brexit? 

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But then, setting aside these risible national income comparisons, “The Economic Impact of Brexit” goes on to bolster its assessment that Brexit was an unmitigated economic calamity by focusing on the miserable fate of 7,000 UK companies. This, in fact, is the most interesting segment of their report. For it discovers a massive fall in UK productivity — something corroborated by Britain’s Office for National Statistics. Unfortunately, though, as Ambrose Evans-Pritchard has pointed out, this fall took place before 2016 and, if anything, it petered out around the time of the referendum. 

In short, Project Smear was founded on non-credible data. It cannot, like Project Fear before it, withstand even the most cursory of rational analyses. This, then, is why the smarter Rejoiners felt the need to roll out their new psychological approach: the illusory truth effect. Infuse into the public’s consciousness the belief that the EU has, in their absence, become a different, a better beast — one that Britons could no longer hope to join, even if they wanted to. 

Mujtaba Rahman, the European director of Eurasia Group, most recently deployed this tactic. In a piece for the Guardian (where else?) he argues that since Britain’s departure, Europe has been spared London’s constant vetoes. Thus, the bloc was able to simulate many of the benefits of a federation without having to waste time debating a federal constitution or taking chances with member-states’ national sovereignty. This continental consolidation, that Britain has allegedly missed out on, supposedly encompasses four areas.

First, following the pandemic and the formation of the EU’s Recovery Fund (officially known as NextGenerationEU), common borrowing now allows the EU to operate like a fiscal union that is better able than individual member-states to finance things the union needs: like investments in post-Covid recovery, all sorts of stabilizing fiscal transfers, even €90 billion to be gifted to Ukraine. Second, a new common security and defense agenda worth hundreds of billions is in place that extends a protective umbrella over member-states. There is also now a much needed joint industrial policy that transcends naïve free-trade notions and gives European producers a leg-up across the union. And finally, the bloc has a capacity to do that which lone countries, such as the UK, can ill afford to even try: become more assertive vis-à-vis the United States and China. 

It all sounds pretty impressive, doesn’t it? Even a cosmopolitan Briton, or even a Leave voter, could be forgiven for feeling a little miffed at being left out. But each of these examples of Europe’s “continental consolidation” is nothing but smoke and mirrors. In fact, together they reflect developments which are excellent reasons for the UK to remain outside the EU. 

I have been a staunch advocate of a European fiscal union for 40 years, including common borrowing in the form of eurobonds. However, the common borrowing which is now practiced in Brussels is anathema to any sensible advocate of a fiscal union. Its first faux pas is who borrows: not some common Treasury, but the European Commission, an outfit that has no power to tax or even to roll over previous debts, relying for its funds on fiscally stressed member-states that lack a central bank willing and able to support them. Is it any wonder that financiers do not take the bonds Europe uses to procure its common debt seriously, referring to them as sub-sovereign and charging the EU suitably inflated interest rates in the process? 

Then there is the question of what the EU does with the jointly borrowed money. A quick glance at how the EU divvied up the €750 billion recovery fund after the pandemic is enough to send shivers down anyone’s spine: our leaders gathered in a room and haggled for a few hours over how to distribute the spoils, which were then handed out to the oligarchs back home. As I wrote six years ago:

“Imagine the sheer awfulness if parliament had to debate how much would be transferred to Cumbria, to Norfolk or to north Wales from Surrey, Sussex and west London. Britain would be wrecked by divisions that make Brexit look like an amicable affair. And yet this divisiveness has been baked into the EU recovery fund, complete with country allocations drawn up even before we know the effects of the recession on each region. It is almost as if the whole thing were designed by a cunning Eurosceptic.”

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It’s the same with Europe’s current rearmament and industry policies. Long meetings, with scant oversight from parliaments or public scrutiny, take place to discuss how the borrowed billions will be distributed between German, French and Italian weapon manufacturers, and which companies’ products will be part of the “Buy European” directives, whose workers will be protected from Chinese imports, how much of the borrowed money should be sent to Ukraine and so on. The culture of oligarchic merriment which is funded in this opaque manner raises inequality, within and between member-states, to ever greater heights.

As for the claim that the EU would, at least, offer some protection from the vagaries of Donald Trump and a resurgent China, it sounds persuasive in theory — a version of safety in numbers. But in practice? Was it not Ursula von der Leyen, the President of the European Commission, who bent the knee in front of President Trump, in his Scottish golf club of all places, giving him everything he asked for (including a pledge for $700 billion of European investments in the United States which was not in her gift to make)? Is the EU not riven by squabbles between German car industry representatives, who are resisting tooth-and-nail more tariffs on Chinese exports, while their French counterparts are gung-ho about them? 

Even the most ardent europhile can’t ignore the slow and sure disintegration at work here. The building up of unsustainable sub-sovereign debt won’t yield productive investments capable of repaying themselves, but will need to be financed by an already stressed EU budget that spendthrift member-states are working furiously to diminish, not to bolster. Evidently, this is a disaster in the making, not the sensible continental consolidation over which envious Britons should drool. 

None of the above, of course, means that Brexit has been a spectacular success — quite the opposite, in fact. But what it does mean, however, is that Britain’s stagnation will not be reversed by rejoining a hopelessly stagnant, indeed a deindustrializing, Europe. Nor will the UK’s low productivity, low-wage, diminishing prosperity equilibrium be transcended by Andy Burnham’s justified lamentations about how neoliberalism vandalized British industry under Thatcher and Blair. The time for thinking about what a New Deal for the UK entails, undistracted by the “Europe question”, is now.

And like Doctor Who, Labour cannot afford another bad series. It’s glory or cancellation. Keir Starmer’s time as leader started with promise, but viewers quickly figured out that the story wasn’t going anywhere. Starmer wanted to run the government like a barristers’ chambers, tackling everything on a case-by-case basis. Labour now understands that competence and a shopping list of achievements are not enough. The country feels like it is heading in the wrong direction. It wants a prime minister with a compelling narrative of what has failed and what needs to be done about it. What seems to be emerging are two competing camps of political organizers, advisors and intellectuals with different views on what had sent the ratings tumbling and what is needed to revive the Labour franchise: the Philosophers and the Economists.

This may simply read like backroom maneuvering, but it matters, because the Prime Minister does not run the country directly. He depends on his advisors to identify problems, frame the solutions and monitor implementation. The day-to-day is increasingly outsourced. As Starmer found out with his appointment of Morgan McSweeney, more than anything else, the people that you appoint to work for you will define the direction of your premiership. This is why Andy Burnham’s appointment of James Purnell as chief of staff has attracted as many column inches as some Cabinet ministers will get in their lifetimes.

What, then, are the next choices available to Burnham? The Philosophers think that the Government’s original sin was to treat the current political moment as business-as-usual. Too focused on technocratic challenges and delivery, Labour missed that it was actually in the midst of an existential fight with the forces of Right-wing reaction, forces that have been emboldened by passivity from the center and progressive politicians. The problem with Starmer, in this view, was that he did not fully commit to this fight despite diagnosing it. The Philosopher camp thinks that a new progressive alliance is necessary to rally Greens, Liberal Democrats and various brands of socialists. The only way to build this alliance is to demonstrate a full-throated commitment to a new politics through constitutional and social reform.

This means breaking up the Westminster system, particularly through maximal devolution, electoral and constitutional reform. Westminster is the target because, in the Philosophers’ view, its centralized adversarial system has entrenched division by pitching region against region to compete for resources and preventing long-term consensual policy development in critical areas such as social care and infrastructure.

It also means not compromising with those who say that voters on the Right need to be met halfway. For example, being bolder on overturning austerity and making the welfare system more generous, through potentially a “social guarantee” that substantially reduces poverty. In this view, Labour should also double down on its defense of the value of migration and Net Zero to give plenty of red meat, or quinoa, to the base.

The Philosophers include Mainstream Labour’s Neal Lawson, who was an early backer of Burnham and a persistent outrider for a new progressive alliance. This alliance has been a very long-term Labour project. It can trace its recent lineage to Tony Blair’s flirtation with the Liberal Democrats in the Nineties to heal what he saw as the historic mistake of the split between Liberals and Labour that allowed the Conservatives to win so many elections in the 20th century. As the “Liberal” voter bloc has diminished, however, the progressive alliance is now focused on that group of disillusioned younger voters, split into various smaller parties following the failure of Corbynism. Compass, the Left-wing pressure group co-founded by Lawson, has been the home of this project for many years. Lawson himself was nearly expelled from Labour after retweeting a message about backing Green candidates in local elections to beat the Conservatives. Burnham has repeatedly spoken at Compass events and has made no secret of his desire to work across party lines.

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This side has been strengthened by the appointment of Matthew McGregor, now the Prime Minister’s Director of Strategy, who worked on Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign as well as Hope Not Hate and 38 Degrees, organizations which in their own ways have created new alliances, particularly with young voters, within the progressive ecosystem. Another fellow traveler is former Miliband speech writer, Marc Stears, who has spent years working on how to craft a progressive narrative that can appease both the progressive base and win over disaffected voters in deprived areas. A rising star within this group is Miatta Fahnbulleh, the former Minister for Devolution and a London MP. She strongly defended Starmer’s conference speech last year, which framed the political moment as a “battle for the soul” of the country. She has also previously said that it is “sad” that immigration has become “toxic”. “If you look at the facts,” she said “the benefits of immigration to any country, any society, always outweigh the losses.” Fahnbulleh is one of the central coordinators of Burnham’s emerging policy agenda and is at the heart of the process of deciding which policies will be prioritized in the first 100 days.

The Economists take a different view. They see the primary failure of the government as a naive belief that it could squeeze a bit more life out of the current economic model and share the proceeds of growth through higher public spending. In their analysis, this was a fatal misreading of the state of the economy, which is in terminal decline due to a lack of investment and corporate short-termism. The only way back is to break this economic model through a package of increased public investment, greater public control of utilities and reindustrialization as well as tax reform to spread growth across the nations and regions.

The Economists include the respected think-tanker Mathew Lawrence, who more than anyone else has sought to give coherence to Burnham’s economic ideas through his influential essay on Manchesterism. It also includes the Tribune Group of MPs, which is reported to have over 100 MPs as members; its leading lights are Louise Haigh and Yuan Yang. The Tribune Group has a long history of being the home of soft-Left, a collection of views that now means not being Blairite or part of the patriotic “Old Right” of Labour traditionalists. Haigh and Yang have called for “using the powers entrusted to us by the British people to build an economy fit for the 21st century” and a more flexible approach to the fiscal rules. Josh Simons, Burnham’s predecessor as Makerfield MP, was pushing for reindustrialization of the British economy to bring jobs back to his former constituency and has been heavily involved in preparation for government work.

Floating around these camps are the “freelancers”, such as ex-Goldman Sachs chairman Lord Jim O’Neill, former OBR chief Richard Hughes and one-time Bank of England chief economist Andy Haldane. They are currently advising Burnham as well as providing assurance to the markets. All have previously worked with the Conservatives in government, most notably on the Northern Powerhouse and Levelling Up. At the core of the O’Neill-Haldane project lies a belief in sticking to clear fiscal rules to keep the bond markets happy, more devolution of powers on infrastructure and skills to mayors, not raising taxes on business, and long-term public investment in infrastructure, particularly rail and energy. In many ways, this is a continuation of the economic orthodoxy of the past 15 years. On the surface, these freelancers may seem the natural allies of The Economists, but they fear their radicalism. In many respects, they are emotionally closer to The Philosophers despite their professional backgrounds. They are establishment figures who desperately want to return to the days before the culture wars. Taking the fight to Farage on values while running a more traditional economic program would be their preference.

Burnham’s genius since he became mayor of Greater Manchester has been his ability to straddle both camps. He has been a strong defender of progressive causes from trans rights to a more inclusive approach to migration, while also championing business reform, using public procurement to encourage businesses to sign up to more labor and social rights for workers, and a commitment to a green industrial strategy. The latter, the green transition, is a bridge between the two camps. Fahnbulleh and Lawrence, for example, are both prominent champions of Net Zero as a means of spreading growth across the country, saving the planet and appealing to young progressive voters. Devolution is another area where both Philosophers and Economists think Labour can demonstrate a new form of politics and deliver economic reform. However, there will inevitably be tensions. A radical economic program of public control of utilities and reindustrialization will be very hard to pursue if Westminster is occupied by big constitutional debates. Getting permission from skeptical voters for the state to raise taxes for public investment will be challenging if migration remains a hot-button issue with voters concerned about who may ultimately benefit from increased public spending.

Anyone who says they know for certain the direction Burnham will go in is lying. If there is one thing that has so far defined Burnham, it is his pragmatism. As he has said repeatedly, he is a “team player” and the unity of the Labour Party is his central goal. This dislike of factionalism has been central to his critique of New Labour. His Labour leadership acceptance speech was a call for “one Labour team”. In many ways, he is similar to Harold Wilson, who made it his goal to keep the party together during the tumultuous Sixties and Seventies. Like Wilson, Burnham has been and will be accused of equivocation and dissembling. However, like Wilson, he recognizes that as the Labour Party is in the fight for its life, it can only hope to beat Reform and the Greens if the party is relatively united. It is both emotionally at the core of his politics and a matter of rational self-interest. The real question, however, is whether Burnham’s advisors, supporters and MPs see it that way. A new leader offers them a chance to realize their aspirations and priorities; will they be willing to sacrifice that chance to set the political agenda for the good of the party?

The Philosophers have the initial advantage because many of their ideas are cheaper and easier to implement. For example, championing a new voting system won’t cost the Treasury a penny. Turning the Council for the Nations and Regions into a “third chamber” of Parliament, something that may have started with rumors that Burnham plans to give regional mayors peerages, is something that can be guaranteed. Punchier speeches robustly defending the value of migration and attacking Reform and Restore for dividing communities can be done overnight. These sorts of policies are attractive because they will enable Burnham to show that he is changing the country and politics without having to wait years for big infrastructure projects to come off or depend on unpredictable global economic forces.

However, these ideas are unlikely to address the structural forces that are driving people away from Labour. Does anyone think that Reform would be anywhere near government if the economy could generate decent jobs across the country? Would Restore be a threat if living standards were rising at the levels they had been for most of the post-war period? Here, The Economists have the advantage. Unfortunately, their work will take time, is higher risk, and requires a total commitment from the government. For example, taking public ownership of utilities will likely require legal fights with investors, a commitment of public resources to make up for the repair and infrastructure backlog, and take up a lot of time in Parliament. It would be popular, but it would require an effective government machine to deliver it. Given the premium on quick guaranteed results, a betting man would say that The Philosophers have the advantage.

The most likely outcome is a fusion, to maintain the party unity which is the core of Burnham’s politics. The Prime Minister will want both camps to make some contributions to his statecraft to keep everyone in the tent. However, every good television series needs an overriding narrative arc or story. Party unity may be a noble goal, but as Wilson found out, it is not enough to satisfy the public. He will need to go further. Will Burnham define his premiership as being a battle to defeat “Right-wing extremism” with a new consensual, progressive politics? Or will he define himself as a great economic reformer, as Wilson once sought to do? Alternatively, he could create a pragmatic “normie populism” outlined by UnHerd’s Jonny Ball. This would involve keeping Shabana Mahmood’s popular migration reforms to appeal to Reform-leaning voters combined with a dose of public ownership of water companies and a bit of devolution to show care for places that have been left behind. This would play to Burnham’s strength as a unifying figure, but rather than being inwardly focused on the party, it would outwardly focus on the country.

The great danger is that Burnham’s unifying project takes Labour right back to Starmer. The only difference being that Burnham is pragmatic enough to maintain party unity, whereas Starmer’s pragmatism was forced on him by events. Just like his predecessor, Burnham could be beset by constant resets and lurches in direction. He must persuade his party that his pragmatism is in their political interest and for the good of the country, rather than being a sign of incompetence or weakness. Burnham has one advantage that Starmer never had. He knows if he fails to develop a clear narrative that there are plenty of politicians within his own Cabinet who will have no hesitation in deposing him. Once regicide is made permissible, it has a habit of repeating itself.

We are still in the era of “Take Back Control”, to cite Dominic Cummings’ winning slogan for the Vote Leave campaign. The various iterations of this message have shared a basic, underlying narrative, and it holds that people feel poor, insecure and disenfranchised because, at some point in the past, power that was once accountable and responsive to their desires was bundled up and removed elsewhere, whether to Brussels, the quangocracy or Westminster. The implication is that prosperity and a sense of agency can be mechanistically “returned” to the people by reforming the state. 

This narrative is not wrong, exactly — over time, far too much responsibility has become concentrated in the wrong places — but it is incomplete in ways that will render empty its promises of renewal. It does not reckon with the profound changes to society, and to our own attitudes and expectations, which have accompanied the flight of power to remote institutions. Taking that power back sounds desirable in the abstract; but we ought to ask if Britain is still able to govern itself in a more local fashion, and whether it actually wants to. 

Arguments about taking back power often rely on invocations of history, on the imagined textures and resonances of the past. Burnham’s pitch, delivered last month in the People’s History Museum in Manchester — where else? — is to reverse the legacy of Thatcherism, returning to a postwar golden age of social democracy in which local authorities still resided over powerful industrial cities and built masses of new council housing. This story is as misleading as it is seductive. It is true that Thatcher stripped power away from local government, motivated in part by the resistance to her policies of Labour-controlled councils, most famously the Militant Tendency in Liverpool. Yet by the Seventies, the processes of centralization were already well advanced. The 1945 Labour government had taken the biggest step by nationalizing municipally owned utilities (which Burnham now wants to return to local control), seizing control of key industries and displacing municipal hospitals through the creation of the NHS. 

During the Fifties and Sixties, meanwhile, the Labour leadership concurred with their Conservative opponents that, as the historian J.A. Chandler puts it, “a modern world was not based on neighborhood community but on communities at a distance”, and especially the new opportunities and connections created by mass car ownership, such that “localism was, therefore, becoming irrelevant”. These were some of the factors leading to the 1972 Local Government Act, which removed powers from many towns and cities to a new tier of regional authorities. Before there was Norman Tebbit telling unemployed workers to “get on your bike”, there was Harold Wilson encouraging them to buy a British Leyland car. 

The real golden age of local government came earlier, roughly between the 1870s and the First World War, and it had a very different character. During these decades, the councils of the great industrial cities of the Midlands and the North — not to mention Scottish cities like Glasgow — built what we now think of as the British state. They rolled out elementary education, dug expensive clean water and sewer systems, and bought up gas and electricity grids. They pioneered social housing, laid out parks and operated the first urban transport systems; by 1905, there were 161 municipal tramway services in Britain. And, of course, they invested in magnificent civic architecture: those town halls, law courts, libraries, concert buildings and art galleries, pompously decked out in neoclassical or Gothic splendor, which now present themselves so uncomfortably as symbols of lost greatness. 

If Burnham really wanted to summon a renaissance of local agency and pride, he could have walked down the street from the People’s History Museum and stood in front of the Manchester Town Hall, a grand edifice built during the 1870s, or even the glorious Tootal Buildings, erected two decades later, where he was based as Greater Manchester mayor. The problem is that the councilors, aldermen and mayors who enacted the marvels of the late-Victorian metropolis were not “the People”. They were, rather, the elites of industrial society: magnates, business managers, or partners of white-collar firms, who collected no salaries for their public roles on the grounds that civic leaders should be men of independent means. The archetypal example was Joseph Chamberlain, the energetic mayor of Birmingham and managing director of the West Midlands’ biggest screw manufacturer. Though held up as the father of “municipal socialism”, Chamberlain insisted that governing a town was like running a large business. 

By the early 20th century, local governments controlled half of all state spending in Britain, and raised three quarters of their own budgets (today they account for just a fifth of total spending, or less than a tenth when transfers from central government are deducted). They did this through taxation, but also through long-term loans and the profits of the services they provided. Whitehall was content to take the best policies the town halls came up with and encourage others to adopt them. 

How was it that Victorian capitalists pioneered the municipal model that, according to Burnham, represents the future of socialism? One answer comes from the “civic gospel” preached by nonconformist Protestant ministers such as George Dawson in Birmingham, and by “New Liberals” such as Thomas Hill Green in Oxford, which encouraged those with wealth to commit it to public betterment. Dawson argued that “a great town is a solemn organization through which should flow, and in which should be shaped, all the highest, loftiest, and truest ends of man’s intellectual and moral nature”. 

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But there was a good measure of self-interest too; or rather, overlapping interests between successful businessmen and the communities in which they were rooted. Factory owners benefited from cheap municipalized gas and electricity, not to mention a healthier and more educated workforce. Cities were essentially governed as oligarchies. Those grand civic buildings — which, revealingly, were often erected before the medical, sanitary and educational needs of the population had been addressed — operated as gentlemen’s clubs, where networks were maintained and commercial projects developed. 

The lesson here is not that capitalists make the best civic leaders, but that to achieve the kind of ambitious local government that Burnham yearns for, it helps a great deal if material conditions and cultural expectations are aligned in such a way that those with wealth and power wish to invest in their local communities. It helps, for that matter, if ordinary people are inclined to direct their own political energies within local horizons; the triumph of local government coincided with the expansion of the vote, and Britain’s first mass membership political parties emerged in a municipal context. In this era, power was local because loyalties, dependencies and reputations were local.

But the same economic and social forces which brought this world into being also ensured that it would be transitory. Why would an increasingly organized working class be content with oligarchic governance indefinitely? It is true that, during the interwar period, as the old Liberal Party of the industrialists waned, the municipal worldview remained strong in both Labour and the Conservatives. All three parties were on Manchester City Council in the early Thirties, for instance, when another civic landmark, the neoclassical Central Library, went up. But the logic of 20th-century socialism pointed inexorably towards centralized national government as the best vehicle for organizing industry and welfare provision, and this duly arrived in 1945. The religiously inspired philanthropic movements which had done so much to administer essential services likewise found in the growing powers of central government the most effective means towards their goals.  

As for the business elites, they soon outgrew their municipal framework. Throughout the first half of the 20th century, companies were growing and merging to become national entities, encouraged by governments who saw this as the only way for Britain to remain competitive. In the decades after the Second World War, big business transcended national boundaries. Organizations on this scale have little stake in the long-term prosperity of towns and local areas, which they are inclined to view as assets on a spreadsheet. It is now assumed to be the Government’s responsibility to invest in those assets, so as to create an inviting climate for them. 

Not all big businesses are so deracinated, of course. In Stoke-on-Trent, for instance, the Coates family employs thousands of people at their fabulously successful online gambling company, Bet365, while doling out philanthropy to healthcare, hospices and education in the area, to say nothing of John Coates’s ownership of Stoke City Football Club. By and large, though, the role of business in urban regeneration today tends to look more like Burnham’s Manchester. Gone are the stone facades with their columns and ornament, superseded by soaring glass apartment buildings whose rents flow to real-estate companies, private-equity firms and foreign-investment vehicles, the land having been granted for development on hugely advantageous terms. It is, ironically, a very Thatcherite model, and while it may bring economic benefits in terms of further private investment and jobs, it is unlikely to awaken the “growth in every postcode and hope in every heart” that Burnham has so mawkishly pledged. 

But perhaps the greatest blame for the ebbing away of local power and prestige lies with us, the voters and consumers who demand more of it in principle while resolutely ignoring it in practice. Already in the Sixties, surveys showed that people treated local elections as referendums on the national parties. That era saw the spread not just of cars but also of television, technologies that together drew people’s attention and ambition away from their immediate surroundings. Today even national politics and broadcasting seems parochial for the masses mainlining American podcasts and social media through their smartphones. Do people consuming TikToks about Palestine, or X videos about crimes in US cities, really want to spend more time parsing local policy platforms? Would they really want to navigate new layers of service provision and taxes? They might say they want to, arguably they should want to, but they almost certainly don’t. A recent poll found that, after more than a quarter-century of devolution in Wales, almost 70% are wrong or unsure about who has responsibility for policing (Westminster), while a third are unaware that the Welsh government controls health and education. 

The truth is that the over-centralization has taken place in our own minds as much as in the systems we inhabit, for the two are conjoined. The alienation that stems from having our lives arranged by remote, impersonal agencies, whether political, commercial or bureaucratic, is very real. It is a problem that we are forced to live under rules and processes which reflect the values of people who have little in common with us; and it does leave us unbearably impotent when those rules and processes become dysfunctional. But we have already been conditioned by this relationship to power. In politics as in everything else, we have become globalized consumers who expect our preferences to be met by obliging providers with minimal effort on our part. We surrender responsibility, and in return we feel entitled to complain, to nurse resentments, to demand equal treatment and to deny deference to anyone with pretensions to authority. At least until the centralized systems fail entirely. 

One only has to listen to the casual contempt of the average British person talking about “the council” to realize that, were local government given greater powers, it would invite the same resentments as Westminster does today. In these circumstances, the role of mayor is probably the one best suited to our political culture: a largely symbolic figurehead who answers a local desire for recognition, and gives voice to the strange combination of dissatisfaction and entitlement which marks our relationship with central government. It is a role that Burnham was well suited to, unlike the thankless task of devolving power to a body politic which has forgotten how to use it. 

The “old maid” social archetype used to be well-known: the doughty Church Lady or — more colloquially — the Battleaxe. But was Major right about their endurance? The year he made this claim, one of the last of this species left the Anglican Church for Roman Catholicism: the late Ann Widdecombe. And if the sight of the archetypal Church Lady leaving Anglicanism for Rome wasn’t enough to cast doubt on the eternity of that image of the country, the manner of Ann Widdecombe’s recent death must surely do so.

Last week, 33 years on from Major’s invocation of Eternal Britain, Ann Widdecombe was murdered in her Devon home, a bungalow in a small community at the edge of Dartmoor National Park. Just the kind of place, in fact, where Orwell might have pictured old maids hiking to Communion through the mist: and the last on earth where, you’d imagine, something so horrifying might happen (outside an Agatha Christie novel, at least). A few days later, a man was arrested in Rotherham. Subsequent statements from police have been contradictory and confusing: after local bobbies initially played down any suspicion of political motives, today Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood announced that counter-terrorism police were taking over the investigation.

Is anyone particularly surprised? Ann Widdecombe never shied away from controversy. She was a staunch social conservative, and public in other ways, too, as an unlikely, late-blooming TV celebrity. Latterly, having abandoned the Tories, she threw her weight first behind the Brexit Party and finally Reform. Her death is shocking, not just for its brutality or for Widdecombe’s symbolic loss, as the last of kind of Englishwoman that used to run Britain. But also because her murder highlights how much better, kinder, and more trusting a country Ann Widdecombe believed Britain to be, than the place we actually live in.

The Britain Ann Widdecombe seems to have trusted still, somehow, to endure – the Britain of Major’s 1993 statement – has in fact been dying for some decades. It was finally extinguished by her murder. But once upon a time, its civil society was run by people like her. The daughter of a military man, raised between ever-changing military postings and a convent boarding-school in Bath, she embodied a stoical “buck up” attitude that was pervasive in imperial-age Britain, and lingered well into my childhood and youth: one in which private suffering was simply something to be borne. During the Major years she was caricatured as the worst kind of Tory meanie, earning her the nickname “Doris Karloff” for defending the idea that female prisoners might remain manacled while giving birth.

She was also that rarest of things, a conviction politician in the Tory Party. Progressives never quit haranguing her for her views on sex, abortion, and gay marriage; and her indifference to being considered “nice” could rub colleagues up the wrong way, too. She was one of the few Tories who spoke against fox-hunting, and her successful 1988 campaign to lower the abortion term limit from 28 weeks to 24 was a nuisance to liberals on her own side.

Most famously, she quarrelled with then-Home Secretary, Michael Howard, in 1995, over the sacking of then-Director of HM Prisons, Derek Lewis. Her revenge came two years later, as the Tories surveyed the wreckage of their party following New Labour’s landslide win. Widdecombe’s speech opposing Howard’s leadership bid described him as having “something of the night about him”: an instantly memorable line credited with sinking his prospects.

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All of 19th-century British civic life was dominated by women of Widdecombe’s stripe, from the National Union of Women Workers, the Mothers’ Union, and the Women’s Institute, to church groups, Sunday school classes, schools, charities, and social reform bodies. Unkindly satirized even in her heyday as “Mrs Grundy”, the Battleaxe dedicated her life to improving, organizing, cleaning, educating, and uplifting the world around her, whether or not it wanted to be improved.

But the Britain they ran is no longer the one in which we live. The reasons for its demise are complex, though the end of the British Empire, the arrival of TV and radio, the sexual revolution and, latterly, de-industrialization and the internet all contributed. The inflection-point was also the year that wiped out Ann Widdecombe’s Tories: 1997. That August, Diana, Princess of Wales died, triggering an outpouring of public emotion which marked a watershed in British culture. For millions, Diana stood for something difficult to express in the abstract: a freeing-up of sentiment, and a new permission to feel and, importantly, to show it. Tony Blair, then just entering his pomp, rose to the occasion. She was, he famously declared, the “People’s Princess”.

If she’d been losing out since the war, the British Battleaxe was eclipsed by the death of Diana. As a public figure, she held on in the Tories in the person of Ann Widdecombe, until David Cameron — the man who arguably Dianafied the Tories — forced her disgusted departure, with her calling him “big-headed” and “dismissive of everything that had gone before”. After this, Widdecombe stood more or less alone: the last British Battleaxe in a world grown simpering, sentimental, and mandatorily progressive.

She could have slid quietly off into retirement at that point. Instead, she turned herself into a meme, before anyone else could, with an appearance on Strictly Come Dancing in 2010. There, she earned the audience’s affection by merrily sending up her own performances, and reached the semi-final as a fan-favorite despite dances Widdecombe herself described, with some justice, as “elephantine”. She became a regular on the airwaves, known for her sharp wit and self-deprecating humor: the People’s Battleaxe. But just because she could send herself up as a pantomime dame, that didn’t mean the political views were all pretend. In 2019 her convictions drove her back into politics – this time as MEP for the Brexit Party and then as Reform’s spokesperson on immigration.

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In keeping with her status as the People’s Battleaxe, as well as conviction politician, her murder has prompted an outpouring of memories. Friends and sparring-partners alike all recall her as funny, warm, and courteous even to those with whom she disagreed. This is all in keeping with the culture of pre-Diana Britain: one that saw public service as a duty, and private life and conscience as inviolably private. But this outlook has grown less common. Especially among 21st-century progressives, it has come to seem just as self-evident that private conscience ought always to conform to public duty, while the presence of any boundary between the two is cause for suspicion.

In tandem, Britain itself has grown more fractured, skint, alienated, and online. And it’s grown increasingly common for parasocial fixations on public figures to turn sour, and translate into real-world harassment or even violence. BBC Scotland presenter Ann McAlpine, Loose Women star Denise Welch, and broadcaster Myleene Klass have all been plagued by stalkers. But political figures are particularly vulnerable. JK Rowling had her home address leaked by trans activists, following her support for women’s rights. The far-Left group Just Stop Oil has advocated picketing MPs at their homes. Nigel Farage has been attacked with eggs, milkshakes, and other weaponry. MPs Jo Cox and David Amess were both murdered by extremists self-radicalized online.

This is a very different Britain from the one in which Widdecombe was born. Her comparatively homogeneous, less hyper-mediated Britain broadly assumed that private conscience and private lives were to be respected. The Britain in which she was murdered is one where this distinction has collapsed. In Diana’s image, refracted through innumerable screens, we’ve grown both more alienated and more lachrymose, volatile, and entranced by our own suffering. The perpetual, watery-eyed therapeutic emanations of Diana’s son Harry are only one of the many cases in point.

But it’s not just about blubbing in TV interviews, or on the Labour front bench, or when resigning as Prime Minister like Keir Starmer. In this inside-out culture, everything must be surfaced, posted, externalized, or it isn’t real. And the corollary is that “private” no longer exists — which means that public figures are now treated as public, even when they’re at home.

Five days before her death, her home was featured on TV, in an episode of Celebrity Yorkshire Auction House filmed in 2022. This is the kind of personal information that more savvy or internet-poisoned public figures tend to keep very much out of the public domain – because you never know who is going to see it, online. But Widdecombe clearly didn’t consider opening her home to TV cameras a safety risk.

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Perhaps she still believed John Major was right, and the place of long shadows, warm beer, dog-lovers, and Holy Communion was still Britain’s basic reality. She spent a long career publicly espousing challenging views, while trusting that other Britons would continue to respect her private life. But John Major was wrong. This supposedly eternal England was already dying in 1993 — aided, indeed, in some respects, by the Tories themselves. And even as our ever more frenzied media has turned politicians into divisive parasocial celebrities, it’s collapsed the distance between sleepy Devon villages and far more disaffected corners of the country.

Large parts of the country are now utterly foreign to Major’s sepia-tinged tableau. What will replace his vanishing version of Britain, and its battleaxes? That’s still uncertain, and will grow more bitterly contested as time goes on. Meanwhile, whether you agreed with her worldview or not, no one should remain under the illusion that we know what kind of country Britain really is, at all, any more.

Miliband, of course, occupies a uniquely hated position in the imagination of the British Right, akin to that held by Nigel Farage for the Left. But that is in large part because Miliband has been the most radical and effective minister in Keir Starmer’s otherwise pallid regime. And chances are, if Burnham’s government stands any chance of being as transformative as he has promised, Miliband will be the driving force behind it.

Over the past two years, Miliband has been unmatched in terms of political will and competence at working the levers of power. On two occasions, he fended off efforts by Morgan McSweeney, Starmer’s powerful chief of staff, to have him reshuffled to another department. Miliband not only persuaded the PM to soak up the criticism of his policies, but extracted large sums from a cautious Treasury to implement his energy revolution. He has overseen hundreds of thousands of solar energy installations, and commissioned hundreds of new wind turbines; he has loaded households and businesses with the costs of rapidly upgrading the electricity grid, and held open the door for Chinese EVs to flood the British market; he has subsidized new nuclear power and sunk money into developing carbon capture technology. It seems the notoriously difficult machinery of Whitehall poses few problems for Miliband.

Now he is reportedly helping Burnham’s team prepare for power. Though Burnham yesterday tried to dampen speculation about his pick for chancellor, his speech illustrated why Miliband is regarded as the favorite. Burnham’s stated goals of a massive social housing buildout, bringing down the costs of essential utilities, bringing those utilities under greater state management, and striving for “equivalent living conditions in all parts of Britain” are all consonant with Miliband’s politics. As for welfare reform, Miliband is likely the only candidate with the legitimacy among Labour MPs and the broader Left to see it through.

Above all, though, there is a yawning gap between Burnham’s pledge of “the biggest change in our lifetimes in the way the country is run” and the very broad, thin brushstrokes of his own political vision. The erstwhile Manchester mayor has so far relied in an almost Trumpian fashion on his supporters to project intellectual coherence onto his own intuitive style of politics. Only Miliband, it would appear, has the temperament, competence and ideas to actually deliver such an epochal shift to the Left.

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Regarding a Miliband chancellorship, a treasury official has warned Burnham that “you might as well be handing your premiership to him”. That may sound emasculating, but it is far from clear that it would be politically damaging. For if Miliband is feared by conservatives, he is also very much admired by progressives. That he struggles to connect with Middle England was made clear by his electoral failure as Labour leader in 2015; but that is where Burnham comes in. Between them, they stand a good chance of making Labour the first choice for voters who are primarily motivated by keeping out Reform UK, something Burnham has already managed in Makerfield. Given the country’s chaotic new electoral landscape, this could be Labour’s surest path to keeping power.

Whatever one thinks of Miliband’s politics — and as Badenoch’s recent comments suggest, his enemies have never quite been able to grasp him, portraying him as both sinister and ridiculous — he evidently has virtues as a politician. They include conviction and tenacity, the traits our current prime minister so conspicuously lacks, as well as a capacity for hard work and attention to detail. He first entered the Treasury in 1997, aged just 27, as an advisor to then-chancellor Gordon Brown. In 2008, when Miliband took charge of the newly formed Department of Energy and Climate Change, he set an eye-wateringly ambitious carbon target after just 13 days in the post, announcing that by midcentury Britain would reduce its emissions by 80% of their 1990 levels. (His elder brother David, the heir-apparent to New Labour who he would infamously deprive of the party leadership in 2010, had previously set a slightly more modest target of 60%.)

In 2009, when prime minister Brown decided to back a third runway at Heathrow, Miliband resisted fiercely, prompting Permanent Secretary Jeremy Heywood to ask, “why is this new minister holding up the wheels of government like this?” As the baffled Heywood later remarked, when Miliband managed to extract various climate-related concessions from Brown, “this just isn’t supposed to happen”. During his first stint as energy secretary, Miliband created the framework in which policy has developed ever since, including under the Tories. It was Theresa May, after all, who would set the still more ambitious goal of Net Zero emissions by 2050. Add to this the authority of experience which Miliband can claim today, and it’s small wonder that Starmer so often appeared to be in his thrall.

Then there is that most revered of political qualities — ruthlessness. In the grueling 2010 leadership contest, Miliband outmaneuvered not only his brother, the candidate of the party establishment, but also the domineering Ed Balls. (In fourth place out of five was a certain MP for Leigh, Andy Burnham.) For someone who learned his trade in proximity to Gordon Brown’s bitter, years-long struggle to wrestle the leadership from Tony Blair, the unseating of Starmer must have been a tea party.

Needless to say, Miliband also has flaws. Chief among them is a weakness for the feel-good politics of progressive activists and NGOs, which he has been immersed in since he first served as Climate Change secretary and, before that, as minister for the Third Sector. This is a comfort zone of blue-sky thinking and moral crusades, where idealistic academics imagine that the right combination of clever policies and exciting comms will induce the public to hold hands and strive for social justice. This dimension of Miliband’s thinking led to perhaps the most undignified moment of his career: the decision to prostrate himself before Russell Brand on the eve of the 2015 election, hoping that an endorsement from the comedian, then absurdly considered some kind of thought leader, would unlock a mythical youth vote.

Clearly though, Miliband’s ideas are not all vacuous, since much of his 2015 manifesto was subsequently implemented by the Tories, including an energy price cap, a higher minimum wage, stricter regulation of junk food and mandatory gender pay-gap reporting. The fact is that, beneath the Left-wing clichés and wonkish talk of “predistribution”, Miliband has a core insight which has proved basically correct: since the 2008 financial crisis, people have wanted a more active state to shield them from the effects of a globalized market economy. He is just unequipped to sell this message beyond a core of voters on the Left, something which Burnham might prove better at.

If Miliband does indeed become chancellor next month, his vision will probably include a strong element of “mutualism”, giving “ordinary” people a greater role in the running of companies, public services and local government. This has been a longstanding Miliband theme, present in his contributions to the 2010 manifesto through to his 2021 book Go Big, which championed policies like company wage boards and citizens’ assemblies. It is also where Miliband’s thought intersects with Burnham’s flagship idea of devolution. Mutualism has another proponent in Miatta Fahnbulleh, the MP for Peckham who worked with Miliband in the energy department, and who has allegedly become influential in Burnham circles.

But Miliband does, of course, come with big risks. Britain already has a high-regulation, low-growth economy — partly thanks to the kinds of policies that Miliband prefers — with much less financial breathing space than it had a decade ago. Like Rachel Reeves, Miliband would make a big show of committing to fiscal rules and stimulating growth through productive investment. But this may not be enough to placate the debt markets on which the state’s finances depend, and which are already suspicious of Miliband. Growth from capital investment in infrastructure and housing will take time to arrive, especially with Net Zero continuing to bear down on business through high energy costs, and with the further tax increases that will almost certainly be necessary. Financial constraints may end up trapping Miliband in an electoral no-man’s land, unable to deliver the radical policies that voters on the Left crave, while angering everyone else with regulation, taxes and unemployment.

Miliband will also face a dilemma in terms of Britain’s international orientation. The strongest case for his aggressive Net Zero drive is not an environmental one — as critics never cease to point out, Britain accounts for less than 1% of global carbon emissions — but a security one. Renewable energy, along with the electrification of the economy, will hopefully make Britain less vulnerable to the fossil-fuel price shocks that countries such as Russia and Iran have inflicted in recent years. It will reduce the tendency of energy prices to be set by the most expensive producers of natural gas, while ensuring that Britain has a stake in the technologies of the future. The Telegraph’s economics commentator Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, hardly a raging Jacobin, is among those arguing that renewables will see Britain becoming an electricity exporter in a matter of years. But Milibandism has major vulnerabilities of its own.

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The most obvious is defense. Where, among all the spending commitments that would accompany his chancellorship, should Britain find the money to prevent its Armed Forces from sliding further into ruin? Britain’s energy security would be purely notional if its allies no longer considered it worth cooperating with, and if its infrastructure open to attack by hostile states. No less important, Miliband’s economic vision is highly dependent on China, whose cheap exports to Britain, including both Net Zero technologies and other products, are preventing prices from rising as much as they otherwise would. Yet China’s goal is to use its exports to prevent Europe from rebuilding its own industrial base; that is why the EU is increasingly building tariff walls.

This is perhaps the biggest source of potential tension between Miliband and Burnham. The latter has insisted that reindustrializing Britain is crucial for providing good jobs and broad-based growth, and has strongly hinted that protectionism will be necessary to achieve it. That would require Miliband to fundamentally change his strategy, or Burnham to choose a different chancellor.

Who else could it be, though? The fact remains that, if Burnham wants to deliver on his rhetoric of national transformation, his best option is to gamble on Miliband’s experience and determination. For better or worse, a Miliband chancellorship could produce an economic and social shift on a scale comparable to the Thatcherite revolution — and especially if it manages to consolidate the nascent anti-Reform bloc of voters, thereby securing a further five years of power. But the stakes are high, and the implications far-reaching. Labour can only hope that, beneath his platitudinous exterior, Burnham has grasped these realities.

But the word “North” still rolls from the tongues of political journalists with barely concealed contempt, as if it were some minor impoverished province of an ancient empire. You’d think Burnham was coming with a pre-formed cabinet that included the Gallagher brothers, or was leading an army of zombies dressed in JD Sports gear. It feels as though Westminster journalists and politicians have suddenly discovered something they spent years ignoring: place.

And that is what is really going on here. The fascination is not with Burnham being Northern, but with how he wins. Three mayoral victories, a return to Parliament and an ability to outperform Labour nationally and limit the advance of Reform have left Westminster asking what he has that other Labour politicians don’t. They are trying to work out whether the North is acting as a laboratory for a new kind of center-left politics, or whether Burnham is simply benefiting from the wider collapse of confidence in Westminster.

And in trying to explain that, commentators have found themselves talking about things they have long ignored: belonging, identity, roots, civic pride, accents — and the North. These are not trivial things. The future of Labour may depend on them.

In 2024, I attended my first ever political event: the Labour Party Conference in Liverpool. I went to plead with MPs from what would become the Starmer government that food, farming and the environment were vital issues that needed enlightened support. It turned out to be a complete waste of time — Rachel Reeves trashed the whole lot — but it showed me a little of how British politics works. 

I got to the reception desk and collected my speaker badge. The young man that met me had a broad Scouse accent, and seemed tired of handing out passes to besuited men and women. I’d passed a couple of hundred of them on the way in, and had wondered who they were. Lobbyists? Consultants? Think-tankers? Aspiring politicians? Academics?

They all looked the same. And they all sounded the same too: modern city professionals, anything but working class. And that, frankly, is just the reality of politics. Universities and private schools are the hothouses from which a disproportionate number of MPs come from, and the industries around politics are no different. 

None of these things is a crime, of course, but it was very noticeable to someone new to this world that they weren’t living working-class lives. People laugh out loud when Starmer insists his father was a “toolmaker”: he is clearly so far from any kind of working-class experience himself, and it’s painfully embarrassing seeing him try to connect to it. When he spoke to the nation it was like someone who was used to being billed out by the hour. 

Starmer made me, and perhaps everyone else, nostalgic for the older kind of Labour, for politicians who had once been miners, or factory workers, or shop stewards. MPs who had strong regional accents, and who, even if you didn’t share their politics, seemed an authentic and genuine representation of their communities. 

I know they weren’t all like that, but some of the great ones were — Nye Bevan, Barbara Castle, Dennis Skinner, or Alan Johnson. Hell, even their nemesis, Maggie Thatcher, was a penny-pinching grocer’s daughter from Grantham. Until recently, people belonged to a class and a profession rooted in a place. People would identify as, say, a “Shipbuilder from Tyneside”. But as working-class industrial jobs have ceased to employ hundreds of thousands of people, the occupation part of such identities has faded away, replaced with the much blander and vaguer, “Northern”.  

Labour politicians were formed by their occupation, class and sense of belonging. The British people have always been quite forgiving of politicians being of a different class or status to them, as long as you don’t hide it — Jacob Rees Mogg and Boris Johnson are accepted as posh boys, because they wear it openly. But politicians being fake about their background is almost unforgivable. 

In Liverpool, the young man passed me a badge with “Labour Party Conference” written on it, and I made a joke about Labour being the party of the “working man”. He laughed. “Seen many?” I asked. He grinned and shook his head. 

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I think that was the moment I realized how disconnected from place (and perhaps social class) a lot of politics now is. And the irony with Andy Burnham is that, at least if you read his CV, he is very much a career politician. 

He is currently overplaying this image of someone Northern, rooted, local and authentic: an antidote to Westminster. Yet his biography is a textbook Westminster success story. First he went to a Catholic grammar school. Then Cambridge to read English. Then he swerved the real world and instead worked as a parliamentary researcher. From there? A special advisor, then an MP in New Labour from 2001. Then he was cabinet minister for Blair and Brown. Amid all this, he even found time to run two failed campaigns for leadership of his party. 

In short, if we are looking for fresh talents, untainted by Westminster, Burnham would be an odd choice. He isn’t a miner, a farmer, a factory worker or even an entrepreneur. He is, to his core, a politician. 

Why, then, isn’t he perceived as just another career politician? The answer probably tells us more about the state of British politics than it does about Burnham himself. Westminster is so insulated from place, and so dominated by a narrow professional class, that almost any politician who even appears rooted in a community now leaps out. 

Burnham’s talent over the past decade, then, has not been to escape the political class — but to escape being defined by it. While Westminster was chewing through reputations, he was safely up in Manchester. From Brexit to the bond markets, Burnham sat most of it out. He could have been in the Trafford Centre drinking cans of lager for all anyone cared. And those 10 years away from London gave him something increasingly rare in British politics: a national political profile without the stain of abject national failure.

I live two hours further North than “Andy” (a massive Northern flex). And I’ve spent time with regular working people all week: farmers, plumbers, cleaners, wagon drivers, caterers, carers, and teachers. And Burnham has come up in conversation a lot. That’s not exactly polling, or a focus group, but it perhaps reveals a little of the mood. He clearly has some political capital up here. It helps, for one thing, that they know who he is (I often ask people to name five MPs, and they struggle to name more than two or three). They also like the way he talks. He sounds genuinely down-to-earth Northern in a way that disarms many people — perhaps because sounding Northern is still associated with being working class. London increasingly feels like it is another economic universe — with wages, house prices, and a general level of affluence that is bewildering to the average person in Carlisle or Hartlepool. When we sense a politician is lost in the London bubble, we tune out. What do they know about our lives? 

People in the North like that Burnham was supportive of the Hillsborough families, and behaved honorably after the Manchester Arena attack. He showed character speaking for Manchester when she was hurting. They suspect he’s been quite a good mayor, though no one is exactly certain what he got done, as that’s too local and specific to make the news. The general consensus is that Andy is sensible and decent, and hopefully humble enough to carry Northern common sense with him as he returns to the national stage. 

The trouble is, everyone up here knows the country is broke. They don’t need an economist to tell them. And up here, particularly in rural areas, Labour politicians aren’t universally popular. Thanks to their hapless efforts, the Starmer-Reeves government has set back the Party’s electoral prospects by about 30 years. Their 25-year Farming Roadmap was published this week to widespread derision — asking farmers to produce more food, with less help, while also restoring nature and heading off climate change, with less support and investment than ever before. Absolute bullshit (a farming term, you understand).  

Andy Burnham hasn’t been costing you or me much money over the past 10 years. But that’s about to change. It’s easy to be soccer-dad Andy, playing the Smiths on a guitar, and talking about what politics should be when you are “King of the North”. It’s altogether different when you are the prime minister. 

His big idea of a “land tax” sounds scarily like it might include farmers — if it does, he will be continuing the politically disastrous culture war started by his predecessors. Will he reset the relationship with rural businesses, or make things worse for them? A lot of people up here are waiting nervously to find out.

But the media misses something else. The North is real — but it is not one thing. The “North” that Burnham represents is fundamentally metropolitan: a product of big industrial cities and their hinterlands. This is clear enough in his language, in his talk of “growth”, “infrastructure”, “investment”, “transport”, “productivity”. Close your eyes and we could be back in 2001; he is, in fact, the last survivor of New Labour. 

Yet that reflects only one version of Northern identity. It is worth remembering there is as much of England north of Manchester as there is between Manchester and London. And many of us living up here are no more convinced that Manchester speaks for us than London does. Up here the economy is on its knees — people need manufacturing, energy, farming, tourism, forestry and the food and drinks sector to thrive, and right now, things are dire. For years, our political class has preferred to talk in abstractions: growth, productivity, migration, public services. But voters experience those things somewhere. They experience them in places. 

That is one reason Reform has been so successful. The populist Right instinctively takes the side of people who feel attached to place against the forces they believe are changing it. They understand that identity is local before it becomes ideological. The center often delegitimizes these grievances, as it did by labeling negative experiences of immigration as “racism”. This is good for shaping a Westminster/BBC narrative about ignorant Northern communities, yet fails utterly to address the long-term issues, let alone retain the political loyalty of the accused.

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Right now, Westminster appears incapable of solving the problems of our age — creating a strange moment of weakness and opportunity. Burnham is trying to seize it. He represents an idea of how that status quo might be challenged. But a Northern accent, a dark blue t-shirt, and fluttering your eyelashes will only get you so far in Westminster. 

The fantasy of the North is an imagined one, but it has a moral power. It’s an old story, one with roots far older than Barbara Castle. The North, or really the hinterland, possesses virtues that have been lost or squandered in the corrupted and decadent capital — honor, loyalty, duty and plain speaking. And Burnham is riding in to Westminster brandishing them all. How long he can retain them remains to be seen. For the South is powerful; it rarely rolls over for a northerner. And in the days since the King of the North pulled into Euston on his Avanti West Coast, you can sense it arming itself again — almost irritated that someone had the audacity to pull off this Labour coup.

Yet in this battle between the two visions of the nation, it’s ironic that Burnham himself holds the rare distinction of having been directly scolded by his musical hero. The would-be prime minister, who once rather Pooterishly wrote that while “not in tune with his views now, I can’t deny how important Morrissey was to me”,  faced the singer’s wrath for imprecisely characterizing the 2017 Manchester bomber as merely “an extremist”.

The Manchester Arena bomb, for Morrissey “England’s 9/11”, and the subject of his unreleased song “Bonfire of Teenagers” — in which “the silly people sing: ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’… I can assure you I will look back in anger ’till the day I die” — came only two weeks into Burnham’s tenure as mayor of Greater Manchester, in what already feels like a different country. Were it to happen today, it is hard to imagine a restive public responding as warmly as it then did to the comforting platitudes of swaying “togetherness” rolled out by Burnham. In his 2024 political manifesto of no-nonsense Northernness, Head North, co-written with Liverpool mayor Steve Rotherham (whose own daughter was at the concert), Burnham discusses the atrocity more or less like an unfathomable act of God. Particular censure is reserved for the slow response of the emergency services, presented as yet another failure of Westminster state capacity.

That the bomber’s very presence in this country — as a member of a family granted asylum precisely due to their involvement in jihadist opposition to Gaddafi; who was himself returned to Britain from Libya by the Royal Navy while an object of interest to MI5 for his jihadist activity; and who paid for his bomb’s components with taxpayer-funded benefits doled out to his mother — of course represents an infinitely greater state failure. None of this figures in Burnham’s manifesto. Yet it is precisely this grievance — against the strange and cruel punishments that the British state, through a perverted sense of benevolence, wreaks against its own people — that has underwritten Reform’s rise and Labour’s catastrophic fall. Only in his 2025 postscript does Burnham note that, “One of the features of the age in which we live is its extreme volatility… The appalling murder of three young girls in Southport was sickeningly exploited and, for several days after, Britain felt like a country we have not known before… it feels as though we are approaching a political reckoning.” If the numbers are right, Burnham will soon find himself ruling this strange and unknown country. Yet uneasy lies the head that wears the Northern crown: according to the polls, if he enters power at all, it will only be because the threat from Reform, in this once dependable Labour heartland, has been dissipated by the electorate’s unexpectedly strong interest in the more radical Restore party.

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Burnham himself warns of the “risk” that “a progressive government could serve only one term and be replaced in 2029 by the most right-wing one Britain has ever seen”, presenting his Northern manifesto as “the Left’s only viable answer to the radical Right.” Is Burnham’s localized success replicable nationwide? As others have noted in their dissections of Burnham’s self-proclaimed “Manchesterism”, presiding over a booming and dynamic citystate is not quite the same as being the cause of its success. That the Northwest, with its Irish links so lauded by Burnham, has become the epicenter of violent revolt against the asylum system and its unintended consequences, first in Knowsley in 2023 and then after the Southport murders, suggests other narratives are possible.

Yet Burnham’s contributions to Head North are more interesting than the Westminster discourse, focused on the economics of Burnhamism, would so far imply. Buried in the text is a one-line summation of the Nairn-Anderson thesis, in which the root of British decline, and latterly its political dysfunction, is traced to the Westminster state’s anomalous failure, when compared with peer nations, to have undergone a successful bourgeois revolution.

“Britain,” Burnham declares, “unlike other countries, has never had a moment of modern nation-building. Our system of governance has slowly evolved from the feudal state, the remnants of which are still clearly visible in Parliament today.” The result, Burnham writes, is that “Britain is one of the most politically centralized and economically unbalanced countries in the developed world.” Rather over-egging Manchester’s distance from the capital — we are led to imagine him like Robert Bruce sheltering from the rain in his cave, ruminating on London’s iniquities — Burnham declares that only in his Northern exile did he reach the conclusion that “the Westminster system was our problem and, in its current form, could never be our solution”.

While Farage and his Right-wing challenger Rupert Lowe echo, in southern English accents and perhaps unconsciously, the discourse of Britain’s peripheral nationalists, Burnham’s critique of the failing Westminster state is more startlingly explicit. The Celtic comparisons are fully intended: his “experiences outside of Westminster”, he tells us, have inspired “a much better understanding of the feeling long building in Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland”. He rails against an “establishment prepared to play public opinion against parts of the North of England, Northern Ireland, Wales or Scotland whenever it has suited them”. He claims that “they do it because they fear nothing more than the regions and nations uniting in common cause against a system that doesn’t have their interests at heart”. The Hillsborough disaster is repeatedly likened, rather dubiously, to Bloody Sunday. Northern Ireland “has big similarities to the North West of England,” Burnham asserts, without informing the curious reader what these similarities might be.

Yet Burnhamism, in its constitutional sense, represents something that does not meaningfully exist in Northern Ireland: he is an Irish Catholic Unionist, a Home Ruler through and through. This Redmondite quality comes through most clearly in his 2025 interview with Tom McTague. Proud of his great-grandfather’s self-sacrifice in the First World War, “it is Burnham’s Irish roots that help explain his British identity,” we are told, fueling “his insistence that he is British first rather than English”. Bearer of an identity more commonly found among non-white minorities and Ulster Protestants than Labour’s defected voter base, now merrily flagging their neighborhoods with St George’s Crosses, “Being British rather than English”, Burnham tells McTague, “allows him to keep all the ‘layers’ of his identity intact: British first, north-west second, Liverpool third, and English fourth.” Or English last, Morrissey might archly note.

For having outlined the similarities between the North — and for Northern England, Burnham only ever really means the urban Northwest — and the Celtic nations, Burnham suddenly tacks in a different direction: insisting that “unlike some in those places, we would never advocate for the break-up of the UK”. He thus utilizes the Nairn-Anderson thesis for novel Unionist purposes, using it to save what its originators believed could not be saved. The answer to Britain’s many problems, he argues, is a further round of devolution, breaking up England into powerful city-regions with their own hinterlands, each comparable in size to the Celtic nations. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, in turn, are to be encouraged to devolve more power away from their parliaments towards their towns and cities, which, “collaborating” across the UK’s internal borders in a hazy fashion, would weaken the “inevitably tense and political” relationships between their national governments and Westminster. For all that Tony Blair’s latest intervention in national politics is read as an assault on Burnhamism, Burnham’s own constitutional experimentation is a turbo-charged Blairism, both completing New Labour’s unfinished revolution and, Burnham believes, ameliorating the centrifugal pressures it introduced.

But it is here that we see Burnham’s characteristically Labourite weak point, his absence of national feeling except towards the very Westminster state he claims to oppose. Burnham’s assertion on the outdatedness of nationalism is not borne out by political events, as the May elections showed. The very building block of electorally ascendant Scottish, Welsh and Irish nationalism is their sense of national sentiment and the sense of political destiny it leads towards, a destiny its adherents believe to be frustrated by Westminster rule. Rather than cooperating with a Burnham government, won over by his misty-eyed Celtic reveries and performative distaste for the capital from which he must rule, Burnham’s proposed strengthening of Unionism through devolution would present peripheral nationalists with a mortal threat. Why would they give up their hard-won power to serve explicitly Unionist ends? Why would they abandon their political projects at the behest of Westminster’s latest (and surely short-lived) ruler, thrust to power only as a result of crisis and desperation in the political center?

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And what is true of the Celtic nations is also true of England. Burnham’s analysis of the urban Northwest as the artificially suppressed engine of British modernity, laid low by the rentier capitalism of Southeast England and a creaking and antiquated Westminster state, equally overlaps with that of Tom Hazeldine in his excellent 2020 book The Northern Question. Its history punctuated by occasional rebellions, its dialects divergent from the state’s prestige form, its governance marginal to distant London, Northern England in many ways presents an analog to the Celtic nations. Yet it never developed its own comparable nationalism. The reason, Hazeldine never quite clarifies, is surely that the inhabitants of Northern England are, politically, English before they are Northern. As such, Northern English dissatisfaction has always expressed itself in trying to reform Westminster rather than seceding from it: and for all that he claims to be Northern first and English second, this is also Burnham’s chosen path.

Yet to save the United Kingdom, Burnham must carve up England, an instinctively conservative country, into a collection of urban metropoles whose cosmopolitan voters will outweigh their suburban and rural hinterlands in the exercise of power. Why would Reform, with its keen if unspoken appreciation of the demographic limits of its appeal, agree to such gerrymandering? Perhaps the march of history compels us, Burnham muses: “If the nineteenth century was the century of empire, and the twentieth was the century of the nation state, the new thinking was that the twenty-first would be led by a network of cities around the world,” he declares, revealing himself as less a daring avatar of national rebirth than as a provincial Sadiq Khan.

We can, no doubt, expect all manner of constitutional novelties from a future Burnham premiership. In its terminal throes, Labour is making the explicit choice to replace a leader who believes the Westminster state still fundamentally functions with one who demands “nothing less than a complete rewiring of Britain”: even Labour now accepts that Britain needs reform. Yet beyond England — for Burnham merely an unappealing menu option between dynamic city-states, the wider Union and an even greater European union still — none of the dominant peripheral nationalist parties have anything to gain from Burnham’s vision of “the regions and nations uniting in common cause”: unless it is to accrue more power, to be utilized in the service of secession. A Westminster creature through and through, to save the Labour project it is England Burnham must dismantle, whose own brewing bourgeois revolution he feels history commands him to suppress. If Northern England is now the engine of the nation’s politics, its voters’ ever more determinedly-expressed wishes present far more of a threat to Burnhamism than an endorsement.

Nevertheless, there is something, and potentially something of great power, to be found in appealing to shared conceptions of British identity beyond the reach or confines of the Westminster system. Yet attempting to do so from Whitehall, exerting power through the same system he condemns, will prove as challenging for Burnham as it later will for Farage. Once ensconced in Downing Street, he will no longer be the King in the North, but just another Labour prime minister, trying and failing to manipulate the broken levers of the state. More likely, the English revolt will soon do for Burnham as it already has for Starmer. Even so, Burnham is significant as a waypoint on the road we are condemned to travel: it is a marker of our political moment that to rule from Westminster, our next prime minister must claim to despise it.

In this, as in so much else, the Senior Common Room revolutionary was entirely wrong. But not, the far less influential Walker Connor. The American political scientist had predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union at the hands of resurgent nationalism in his 1984 book The National Question in Marxist-Leninist Theory and Strategy. Indeed, Connor observed, rather than leading societies away from the backwardness of tribalism toward the promised land, in reality state socialism relied upon the strength of national feeling for the implementation and survival of its project, to the extent that the Soviet Union was forced to create the very structures, the semi-autonomous republics, which would end up consuming it.

Time would prove Connor correct, and the post-national fantasies of Hobsbawm disastrously wrong. Yet while any PPE graduate has at least a cursory familiarity with Hobsbawm’s writing on nationalism, the only recent Westminster allusion to Connor’s writing appears to be an AI hallucination. At our own time of epochal political change and ideological ferment, perhaps analogous to the collapse of Soviet communism, it may therefore be worth reassessing Connor’s central contribution to political science, now that it too has entered the Westminster lexicon: that of ethnonationalism.

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There is surely very little that can unite Reformers and Starmerites at the podium in shared expressions of pained distaste, other than the concept of ethnonationalism. Even the populist Right, at least in interminable online debates, is torn between rival concepts of civic and ethnic nationalism, in which the latter is seen as a dangerous and novel radicalization of the former. Alluding to Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain, Farage recently declared that, “Unless we are able to provide a proper democratic antidote” to anxieties over mass immigration, “then I fear that we will see a rise of a really worrying, dangerous form of extreme right ethno-nationalism”. The Home Secretary, for her part, has warned that British “patriotism is turning into something smaller, something like ethnonationalism,” a term Labour MPs nevertheless struggle to define. The Left-wing IPPR thinktank similarly warns that “large parts of the political right are increasingly, often explicitly, ethnonationalist”, including, it claims, 71% of Reform supporters. Reform’s Zia Yusuf, meanwhile, rather improbably accuses Rachel Reeves of being an ethnonationalist. Without being clear precisely what it means, Westminster has awoken to the existence of ethnonationalism, as a political force and as a threat to its current order.

But what is ethnonationalism, other than, as the above Westminster voices, claim, patriotism’s evil twin? In his 1994 book Ethnonationalism: the Quest for Understanding, a collection of essays spanning 30 years of careful deliberation, Connor coined the term to dispel what he termed the “terminological chaos” of writing on the subject. For Connor, all nationalism was at heart ethnonationalism, deriving from essentially emotional loyalties to the nation, itself a fundamentally ethnic category. As he puts it, “nation connotes a group of people who believe they are ancestrally related. Nationalism connotes identification with and loyalty to one’s nation as just defined. It does not refer to loyalty to one’s country.”

Most of the world, Connor asserts, “is subdivided into a series of perceived homelands to which, in each case, the indigenous ethno-national group is convinced it has a profound and exclusive proprietary claim.” For as he asks, “Who but the Scots could have plenary claim to residence within Scotland, who but Germans to Deutschland, Kurds to Kurdistan (literally “Land of the Kurds”), or Nagas to Nagaland?” This is, for Connor, simply a historical and social fact: it does not mean that members of other groups can or should not reside among them, or even be absorbed by them; but it does mean that the dominant ethnic group will always see its own group interests as paramount in its own titular homeland, and that this belief will almost always, eventually, come to shape that country’s politics, particularly if the self-assurance of continued ownership comes to be challenged.

The problem, Connor perceived, was that this basic, observable reality had become confused by the popular and lazy academic use of “nationalism” to describe the transference of such emotions, for which “poets are far better guides for penetrating… than are social scientists” to the state, a self-identification he preferred to describe as “patriotism”. Nationalism and ethnonationalism are, to Connor, exactly the same thing, with ethnonationalism his preferred term to underline this relationship; patriotism, in contrast, is limited to loyalty towards the state, which may or may not be founded on ethnic lines. Where multinational states, like Britain, have survived into the age of nationalism, they find themselves increasingly threatened from below, as with Scottish and Welsh nationalism: and in a no-longer hypothetical tussle between British patriotism and Scottish nationalism, Connor places his historical chips on the latter’s eventual victory. Rather than a benign alternative to ethnonationalism, the Westminster-approved concept of “civic nationalism” is, according to this interpretation, something between a misnomer and a category error, an attempt to harness the power of nationalism in the service of state patriotism, just as was tried and failed by the Soviet Union.

Connor’s aim was descriptive, rather than normative. “He has been relatively silent on whether constitutional engineering or astute statecraft can ever successfully manage nationalism,”  his intellectual disciple, the Irish political scientist Brendan O’Leary observes. “He has ‘quested’ for understanding, not sought to put the world to right.” Connor did not intend to advocate for ethnic nationalism as a mode of politics, merely to accurately portray the world around him. In this, he expressed frustration at the errors of academics and policymakers who, through a “tendency to perceive trends deemed desirable as actually occurring”, relegated to an atavistic past a phenomenon he believed was only growing in power.

For in his own way, Connor was just as much a modernist as Hobsbawm or Gellner. The antiquity or otherwise of nations was of no interest to him: he understood that the perception of ethnic kinship is a social fact rather than a biological one, in which “the myth of a common and exclusive descent can overcome a battery of contrary fact”. His argument was that the age of nationalism, which dawned with modernity, was a historical watershed setting us apart from all that came before. Before modernity, nations could die or meld into each other or assume new identities: after the age of nationalism, the tendency is for nations to be set into permanent, immovable forms, and for sub-state groups which had not acquired national identities to adopt them, inspired by the contact with other peoples brought about by modernity, increased mobility and the reaction to centralizing state power.

Rather than at its tail-end then, we are only part way through the age of nationalism. Yet through wish-fulfillment rather than a descriptive approach to objective reality, Connor observed, the Second World War’s “immediate afterglow lulled scholars into believing that Europeans had left nationalism behind”, while specious comparisons with the United States created the illusion of a parallel European melting pot, an analogy that nevertheless still trickles down from academia, through thinktanks and journalists directly to policymakers. Muddled thinking thus creates bad policy, leaving the powderkeg dysfunction of modern British politics as the result.

To show the speciousness of the analogy with America, Connor approaches the problem from multiple angles. First, America’s immigrant, assimilationist society is built upon the extirpation of its native inhabitants, as “the American policy of conquest eliminated the indigenous people as cultural competitors”. Few analogies exist in Europe, and where they do they are rarely lauded, especially by the natives themselves. Secondly, he notes, the United States was, historically, explicitly understood as an Anglo-Saxon ethnic polity, in appeals to blood descent, and the bonds deriving, as striking as anything from 19th-century European Romantic nationalism. The descendants of African slaves, Connor emphasizes, though their ancestors had been brought against their will into America from its very beginning, had no say in the formation of this political identity, into which they were only lately, and partly assimilated once it had already crystallized. For those who actively forged this new world political identity, Connor reminds us: “Paeans to the greatness of the Anglo-Saxon strain said to be inherited by the true Americans were plentiful well into the twentieth century”.

Finally, Connor observes, “the pattern of early settlement created a dominant, almost exclusive Anglo-Saxon culture; upon this firmly entrenched cultural base, representatives of other cultures, on their own, were periodically added in relatively small numbers. As a result, ethnic problems in the United States have not been primarily characterized by minorities resisting assimilation, but rather by the unwillingness of the dominant group to permit assimilation at the tempo desired by the minorities.” The American model of assimilation then was, until very recently, one in which immigrants were essentially compelled to adopt a fictive Anglo-Saxon political identity, that of the staatsvolk or dominant, leading ethnic group to whom the state belonged. A modern-day example can be seen in the Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, of pure Italian descent, declaring his total self-identification with this legal and political tradition such that when he first visited England, he “felt at home”. Yet by the Nineties, Connor observed, Americans who had previously toned down their Old World ethnic identities began to reassert them, with Connor suggesting that the upsurge in ethnic self-identification, along with what he termed “black nationalism”, “a nationalism in the most correct sense of the word”, might come to challenge the American model. Even in the United States, the ideal form of the immigrant state, the melting pot may not be the final outcome.

That the belated introduction of the term “ethnonationalism” in Westminster discourse derives from the growth of anti-immigration sentiment is hardly surprising. The IPPR paper on ethnonationalism begins with what it calls “the alarming turn on the right towards policies of mass deportation”, an object of genuine surprise to its authors. They would have done well to reflect on the observation made in Walker’s little-read 1986 essay, The Impacts of Homelands on Diasporas, that “history is liberally sprinkled with cases in which diasporas have appeared relatively secure only to be faced with an unexpected outbreak of xenophobia and nativism”.

In this essay, Connor expands on the distinction between America’s unique case and that of the rest of the world, divided up into ethnic homelands. A homeland need not be an ancient state, but can be created, as in the case of Quebec, wherever new settlement is geographically concentrated: we may, here, think of European parallels in the process of becoming. The United States could only become an immigrant society because its prior native peoples were removed from the equation: in Africa, Asia, and Europe, this was not the case, with the result that the threat of expulsion always hangs over incoming peoples, however long-settled they may be, or secure they may feel.

“In such an environment, diasporas are viewed at best as outsiders, strangers within the gates,” Connor observes. “They may be tolerated, even treated most equitably, and individual members of the diaspora may achieve highest office. Their stay may be multigenerational, but they remain outsiders in the eyes of the indigenes, who reserve the inalienable right to assert their primary and exclusive proprietary claim to the homeland, should they so desire.”

Citing the example of the East African Asians, ejected after the end of British rule, Connor notes that the “benign tolerance toward the Asian migrant community did not long survive the British withdrawal from East Africa. The tolerance shown by the colonial authorities does not require explanation, since their homeland was not involved” — but as soon as the homeland peoples of the region obtained the opportunity, their long-suppressed resentments were translated into political reality. Such, Connor suggests, is the nature of human societies, however much we might wish it were otherwise.

That Westminster figures can use Connor’s terminology without engaging with his work should not, perhaps, surprise us. Writing in a 2003 festschrift for Connor, his student and colleague, the Italian sociologist Daniele Conversi, observes that British academics were uniquely blinded, through their intellectual and moral biases and aspirations, from describing objective reality. As he remarks, “A cavalier tradition of superciliousness has percolated through most post-war studies of nationalism in Western, particularly British, academia.,” partly a reaction to the horrors of  the Second World War, but “often derived from several overlapping traditions: part of mainstream Liberal thought… or of the competing Marxist viewpoint, as in the case of Eric Hobsbawm”.

The result, it is implied, is that the top-down assimilatory state-building projects suggested by thinktanks like the IPPR are as doomed to failure as those of the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia or Yugoslavia. By failing to take ethnonationalism seriously, by misapprehending its meaning, and by relegating it to a distant, shameful past, they have created a political project in direct opposition to the most powerful political force in modern history, one that brought down each of the great European empires in turn. It is remarkable that the British state can have unlearned this clearly apparent truth, for as Connor observes of Britain’s imperial collapse, “the basic cause of the disintegration of empire was the refusal of people to accept political rule by those deemed aliens.”

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But there is another characteristically Connorian observation that British policymakers may be wise to dwell on: on the legitimacy of the state. “The literature has assumed that legitimacy is necessary for a modern state to function,” Connor remarks. Where the state is reduced to coercion to survive, it is generally held, then it has proved its illegitimacy in the eyes of its people: where it is not compelled to rely on coercion, it can be assumed to be considered legitimate. Instead, Connor observes, all the state requires to survive is passivity, in which a “mélange of fear, habit, inertia, apoliticalness, political and cultural isolation, disorganization” staves off immediate collapse, without inspiring loyalty or affection. “Only passivity, not legitimacy, is essential to the everyday, humdrum functioning of a society,” he notes. “But if the state requires more than passivity, if it hopes to invoke the symbols of the state as a means of gaining positive cooperation and sacrifice, legitimacy will be sorely missed.” Beneath its unruffled surface, the Soviet empire was, Connor perceived, fatally wounded by a widespread, popular withdrawal of consent: all it took was an unexpected crisis to elicit collapse.

To stave off this outcome, O’Leary, developing Connor’s thought towards the policymaking ends his teacher spurned, proposes that “a stable democratic majoritarian federation… must have a Staatsvolk, a national or ethnic people, who are demographically and electorally dominant — though not necessarily an absolute majority of the population — and who must be the co-founders of the federation”. Such is the largely unspoken settlement that assures ethnic Russian loyalty to their multi-ethnic state, that of the Han to China or the Fars to Iran: without this predominance, they are likely to withdraw their consent from the state, and bring the whole thing crashing down around them. As Connor warns, “We know from the comparative study of nationalism that when the two loyalties are perceived as being in irreconcilable conflict — that is to say, when people feel they must choose between them — nationalism customarily proves the more potent.”

Such a rebalancing is, more or less, what Katie Lam suggested in advocating the termination of Boriswave visas for the purpose of “cultural coherence”,  a policy and phrasing directly quoted, with horror, by the IPPR. This backlash is hardly surprising: such a policy may well be successful, as O’Leary shows, in staving off political instability, but it is also “inconsistent with liberal cosmopolitan and radical multiculturalists’ hopes”. Like those before them, who believed the Soviet Union had resolved the national question, perhaps our own ideologues would rather be swept away by historical forces than give up their cherished illusions.

But then, halfway through explaining why this is so, an internal email flashed up. “PO colleagues,” it stated, “please leave the loos as you’d wish to find them”. My snort must’ve been audible. “I didn’t quite catch that,” replied my puzzled opposite number. I apologized, resuming my explanation. The whole interaction lasted seconds, but captures the sublimity and ridiculousness that comes with working in a Whitehall private office. One minute, you’re grappling with the great issues of state. The next, you’re getting reminders about flushing.

No wonder Whitehall is in trouble. For in this awkward balancing of economics and etiquette, private offices highlight a far broader problem. Instead of a relentless focus on administration and implementation, you are simultaneously swimming against a tide of lower-order corporate missives — something that stalks every corner of our rickety civil service, and which burrows to the heart of why the modern British state struggles to get anything done.

Private office is a long-standing feature of the Whitehall institutional architecture, with roots back to Victorian times. This was the era of the Northcote-Trevelyan reforms, which made civil-service appointments something obtained meritocratically, instead of happening via patronage. A small private office, with appointees supporting ministers with their duties, quickly became accepted as part of the package: especially as state capacity and ministerial workloads dramatically increased. Where there were perhaps 15,000 civil servants in the early 1850s, that number had jumped to over 200,000 by the end of the First World War.

By the Sixties, the typical private office has been staffed by small cadres of private secretaries, usually young career civil servants, whose remit is to support ministers in their day-to-day roles. The work of private secretaries varies, but usually covers administration (overseeing the ministerial diary and proof-reading correspondence); bridging (acting as the minister’s voice within their department and across Whitehall); and counsel (offering advice on a particular course of action). Private secretaries are also supported by a range of colleagues — messengers, clerks, Parliamentary staff — as well as the ubiquitous special advisers, politically appointed staff whose remits cover advising their ministerial bosses on strategy, policy, and media.

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Given private offices are one of the primary mechanisms through which our elected representatives can make good on their promises, their effectiveness has important democratic implications. The standard view, indeed, is that this arrangement works well and actually represents one of the few aspects of the British state that still functions tolerably. Reflecting on her time in government, the former Labour bigwig Patricia Hewitt has said that ministers rely on their private office “every minute of the day”.

And, certainly, when a private office works, it’s an invaluable source of support for ministers. To borrow a phrase from one ex-colleague, they’re “crack teams” of bright, switched-on public servants, who are as adept at acting as their principal’s eyes and ears as they are challenging inchoate policy proposals or working with special advisers to help unpick a particularly knotty issue. One former colleague performed heroics in bringing together official and political representatives to secure agreement on a particularly high-stakes pay proposal.

Unfortunately, self-congratulation risks obscuring several issues, both operational and cultural, all of which urgently need addressing. One of the charges that repeatedly arises is that of passivity, with some private secretaries acting in response to issues, rather than in anticipation. I won’t pretend not to have fallen victim to this, especially dealing with rail — where an absence of negative media is taken as proof that the network is “operating” (or, at least, not imploding). This creates a culture where firefighting is prioritized over longer-term thinking. I used to joke that half of my role involved coordinating responses to various leaks or instigating “who knew what, when” exercises following cost overruns.

Reactive short-termism affects vast swathes of the Whitehall behemoth, something most visibly manifested in treating an announcement as job done. Following the “Network North” announcement, a £36 billion plan to bolster transport out of London, a set of graphics was published showing the regions money from the cancelled HS2 Northern Leg would be going to. Given the uproar from Northern politicians and journalists about the economic implications of the decision for their own turf, you might have thought that, amid all the rush to get the announcement out, someone would’ve questioned the optics of a graphic proudly proclaiming that London was getting a chunk of HS2 Northern Leg wonga. Not so — much to Andy Burnham’s glee.

It’s probably telling here that ex-ministers seem particularly frustrated by the unwillingness of private secretaries to offer meaningful challenge: or even an opinion of their own. This deference is sometimes manifested in over-the-top theatrics that wouldn’t look out of place in an Oxbridge am-dram production: think unctuous nods buttressed by a performative “yes, minister”.

One explanation for this deference is the fact that many private secretaries are so young and inexperienced. I myself started when I was just 24, something that can unsurprisingly cause chaos in practice. I remember one private secretary “laying the title” for a Written Ministerial Statement. This refers to an arcane parliamentary process where a brief title — for example, “Rail Update” — appears on the Parliamentary Order Paper, signaling that a government statement on the area is due the next day.

In this case, unfortunately, the trigger-happy private secretary pressed go despite the fact that they knew the (contentious) text was still with No. 10. Far from eliciting a quick approval, then, it meant they had to frantically come up with a bland holding text to publish, fending off a ministerial dressing down from the Speaker. Parliamentary custom dictates that it is very poor form to suggest a ministerial statement is coming only for the relevant department not to follow through. Many private secretaries also lack a clear understanding of what best practice looks like, even for something as simple as penning a pithy memo.

Pairing an inexperienced private secretary with an inexperienced minister is an even bigger challenge: the former has too little knowledge of navigating Whitehall, rendering them unable to guide their principal through its byzantine acronyms and procedural vagaries. I recall a situation where a minister was pressing their private secretary on the status of clearance for a policy. The answer was that it was being held up by multiple departments, because of a system known as “write-round” (where you need to get every member of Cabinet to approve). But because their private secretary was new, they could only respond that the policy was “stuck”.

With their sharp political chops, special advisers are very good at stopping such mishaps. Yet their numerical scarcity — there are, according to recent data, less than 130 spread across 26 ministerial departments — means they can’t plug the gaps all the time. And even if a minister doesn’t rate their private secretary, or isn’t gelling with them on a personal level, it’s very hard to move them because of Civil Service rules and internal squeamishness about rocking the boat.

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If stodginess is one problem, churn is another: the Institute for Government puts the average lifespan of a private secretary at barely 18 months. It’s the same story across Whitehall. According to the Civil Service’s own data, more than a tenth of bureaucrats either moved departments or left the civil service altogether in 2024. Combined with the sensitive work of private secretaries, that only guarantees more policy cock-ups. The dubious logic of civil service hiring doesn’t help either. All jobs are classified under four professions: operational delivery, policy, functional, or specialist. Private office is technically deemed as policy, but requires a different and distinct set of skills, not least networking across government. Though the modus operandi of the private secretary is to observe from the shadows, communication remains critical.

Then you have HR — and I’m not just talking about managing the sometimes-fraught relationships between politicians and officials. In a work environment where 20-somethings are working in close proximity to each other, every day, there’s bound to be liaisons amoureuses or personality clashes. Where these get trickier is when the interactions are between junior private office staff, or between or junior private staff and seniors, especially if the latter are mandarins. These are, of course, important things to be on top of but, as with the toilet etiquette missive, the way the system is geared is that you’re sometimes asking the same 20-somethings to act as corporate gurus — quite the busted flush.

What, then, can be done? Perhaps a Club 18-30 holiday for staffers to get things out of their systems. On a more serious note, structural reform is obviously needed. This isn’t an argument for a return to the “extended ministerial offices” of the Coalition era — allowing ministers more largesse to bring external appointees into their offices — not least because that created another layer between ministers and officials. A hyper-political bureaucracy in the American mold is a bad idea too, especially when it guts institutional memory and makes appointment in effect a reward for how fervently one parrots the party line.

One alternative could be the model used in France and Australia, which blends more closely administrative and political functions. Democracies are inherently political, and to govern is to choose, with every decision sure to have implicit or explicit political ramifications. Civil servants in these places have political affiliations: and this hasn’t led to systemic collapse. But leave things as they are, and Whitehall could yet face its own implosion, whether inside the bathroom or out.

Working-class women are damned by the impossible dichotomy of the lowest expectations and the highest standards. The ruling classes will scrutinize and judge us for signs that we are no better than we ought to be, while our own will turn on us if we show any sign of ambition. Far be it from us to want to be heroines.

To thrive against these odds, and to have any hope of getting by, there are two things working-class girls shouldn’t do. The first is to leave school without any qualifications. The second is to get pregnant at 16. Angela Rayner did both. And she defied Lennon. Rather than getting stuck in a council house with a menial job, as happens to so many, she rose to become one of the most powerful women in Britain. Until yesterday, that is.

But to me, Rayner is the epitome of a working-class heroine. The odds were stacked against her, economically and culturally. She grew up on a council estate in Stockport in poverty: her mother suffered from bipolar disorder, and her grandmother worked three jobs to keep the family afloat. She worked in social care, and later entered politics not via the Oxford Union, but through union activism. She has a Northern accent, uses coarse language, and she’s a woman who doesn’t know her place.

Class, though, is not a protected characteristic and Rayner’s origins have been the easiest and laziest tool for her critics. She vapes, they gasp; she wears green trousers and leopard print, the Daily Mail howls. She’s been called “thick as mince”, criticized for drinking vodka, and has been the subject of endless abuse. And yet, she’s never tried to hide her background. She leaned all the way in, defying critics by wearing what she wanted, dancing and drinking, and instructing Hansard transcribers not to correct her grammar.

And she was useful to her party. Rayner was the rarest of representations in a party that has badly lost its way. She was a politician of a type so scarce her background had to be part of every conversation, because it is staggeringly rare for an MP to emerge from her demographic. In the Seventies, Labour could boast around one-in-three working-class MPs; in 2023, it was just one in 10. As a result, the party used her as a human lamppost flag at every opportunity, even to the last. Keir Starmer, responding to the controversy, said he was proud to sit alongside a deputy PM from a working-class background (putting his hand on her shoulder in a way I’m not sure he’d have done with a man).

Of course, Starmer was never going to be able to save her — her sin was too grave. But the irony is that she was never going to be enough to save Labour. Working-class voters don’t like Starmer; his party isn’t for them any more. A YouGov poll earlier this year found that 31% of those living in households with an income of more than £70,000 a year intend to vote for Labour, compared with 19% of those in households earning less than £20,000. It’s all a gift to Nigel Farage, who couldn’t be more delighted to declare Reform the “party of the working class” — despite being a privately-educated former banker. 

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Another gift to Farage has been the defection of the suddenly working-class politician Nadine Dorries. And the comparison is telling. The novelist and former Tory MP defected to Reform this week and ran her working-class credentials up the flag-pole in the Daily Mail, reminiscing fondly about her Dickensian childhood. “My father, a bus driver,” she wrote, “suffered from Raynaud’s disease, an agonizing circulatory disorder that led to the amputation of his toes. It limited his ability to work. There were many times when I would be dragged under the kitchen sink to hide from the rent man as he banged on the front door or peered in through the window.” In the excitement that followed Nadine’s conversion to Nigel, few remembered that Dorries herself had been entangled in financial controversy not so long ago. But luckily for Dorries, she was the right sort of working class. She talks the right way, wears the right clothes, and doesn’t wear her class on her Boden sleeve (unless it suits her).

Yet only a year ago, Dorries had the gall to attack Rayner for “weaponizing her working class roots”. To me, this is the most frustrating insult of all: the one that comes from inside the house. It goes to the heart of the working-class woman’s paradox. Rayner has betrayed circumstances she didn’t choose in favor of those she did, and that is treachery. “She’s worse than a hypocrite, she’s a working class traitor”, insisted Lisa McKenzie, an anarchist and lecturer, during a recent LBC interview. McKenzie doesn’t believe in social mobility, saying it’s “essentially cherry picking individuals and allowing them into the middle class from the working class”. 

Obviously, I too, would like to live in a country in which there are ample opportunities for everyone regardless of birth circumstance; but surely those opportunities are allowed to include things such as “becoming a politician”, “earning money” and “buying property”, ambitions no one much minds when they’re chosen by someone who went to private school and is in line for a nice inheritance. It’s what’s expected, the natural order of things. But Rayner is an aberration.

The real test then, will be how Labour treats Rayner going forward. When Peter Mandelson resigned in 1998, following a furor over a £373,000 loan to buy a home, he was out for just 10 months before triumphantly returning — only to resign again in 2001 after being accused of interfering in a passport application. He then enjoyed a lucrative tenure as a European Commissioner before returning to government in 2008 as business secretary and the warm welcome of a peerage. He’s now happily hobnobbing with Donald Trump in another addition to his portfolio: a fancy mansion in Washington. The chances of Rayner following are non-existent; there is little chance of redemption, regardless of atonement — she simply doesn’t fit the mold.

Rayner’s opponents have long had it in for her, and she foolishly handed them the weapon. Sure, we could blame the complexity of our tax laws, but the truth is her stamp-duty downfall this week was quite simply the sort of mistake a working-class woman cannot afford to make.

“Inside the intelligence services,” Cummings writes, “special forces, […] bits of Whitehall, and those most connected to discussions away from Westminster, there is growing, though still tiny, discussion of Britain’s slide into chaos and the potential for serious violence including what would look like racial/ethnic mob/gang violence, though the regime would obviously try to describe it differently.” As Cummings notes, the Government’s panicked response to last year’s ethnic riots, and its fear of their recurrence, derives from “incoherent Whitehall terror of widespread white-English mobs turning political and attracting talented political entrepreneurs… The last thing they want to see is emerging networks that see themselves as both political and driven to consider violence.” And yet instead, Cummings claims, “As Tories and Labour have continued their deranged trajectory, they have provoked exactly the reactions they most feared including the spreading meme that our regime itself has become our enemy and the growing politicization of white English nationalism.”

Much of this analysis I agree with. Certainly, the events that followed the parade crash in Liverpool this week provided a glimpse of a country, and government, on edge, waiting for an explosion it is either unwilling or unable to escape. Unlike after Southport, the perpetrator was swiftly revealed by the state to belong to Britain’s ethnic majority (or rather, Liverpool’s Irish one). This information was revealed so rapidly precisely to ward off another wave of riots, the prospect of which hangs over the Government like a deferred death sentence. Yet even still, simply revealing the facts of the case was not enough for many, who saw it as another instance of two-tier policing: we have, unfortunately, entered a situation where for many the police, and state, can do no right.

Fears of a second round of riots may have been overblown in this instance — the incident was, fortunately, not fatal, and the current inclement weather, as the Police Service of Northern Ireland well know, is an inhibitor to mass street violence — but the initial tension of the moment provided a vivid portrait of a country on edge. The Government is held hostage to factors outside of its control: the possibility of a mass casualty attack that can be linked to mass migration, as now commonly occurs throughout Europe, and a simultaneous extended spell of good weather in Britain, which is less common. One may, as I do, believe that sustained bouts of civil conflict are not the most probable outcome of Britain’s current unhappy circumstances, but the revealed actions of the British state suggest that they are highly possible.

The state’s official report on the policing of the summer riots observed that police forces were nearly overstretched by the scale and geographic dispersal of the events, characterized as “exceptional levels of violence” in which “offenders attacked police officers with missiles, including petrol bombs”, and which saw 54 police officers hospitalized. The report briefly considers the use of baton rounds in any repeat of the disorder, and suggests that “it may be timely to explore whether current and foreseeable circumstances might render the use of water cannon conceivable”. For the authorities, then, the retention of coercive power sufficient to suppress probable future disorder is a process still being refined. The question now is how to arrest the tailspin of the British state to render these refinements no more than a latent, unneeded capability.

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Starmer’s late-stage pivot on mass migration, using language that would have Hope Not Hate chasing him if he were an anonymous blogger rather than a center-left prime minister, is one such attempt to steer away from disaster. But Cummings too has evolved in this regard. Two years ago, that he was ultimately a reformer, aiming to save Westminster from itself, rather than a revolutionary. Yet now, for Cummings, the Westminster state is “the regime”, and a failing, pre-revolutionary one at that. As he observes in the Sky News interview, the attitude of British voters towards their political system is one of “hate, contempt and disgust”, adding that “it’s now very common to have discussions outside London with normal people where they talk about the coming civil war, about how their area is going to crack up, what they see around them, and how frightened they are for the future. That’s not an abnormal conversation to have now.”

Cummings’ newest musings on civil war are an elaboration of his February observation, glossed over by lobby journalists in favor of SW1 gossip, that the next election presents the last opportunity to install a reformist Right-wing government before 2032, “by which time many problems will be profound and serious violence harder to avoid”. For Cummings, as he says to Sky News, Britain’s current political system is already dead: “the old system can keep struggling and fighting, but it’s not going to win that battle in the end, it’s only a question of how destructive that transition is.”

In his follow-up this week to his now-viral essay and interview (referenced by Cummings) assessing the likelihood of civil war in Western nations, including Britain, David Betz, the King’s College London Professor of War in the Modern World, claimed that “At the time of writing the countries that are most likely to experience the outbreak of violent civil conflict first are Britain and France”, as “governments under increasing structural civilizational distress and having squandered their legitimacy are losing the ability to peacefully manage multicultural societies that are terminally fractured by ethnic identity politics”. Cummings now claims that Betz “reflects similar discussions I’ve had with people in intelligence, SF [Special Forces] etc about the dynamics pushing the UK towards civil violence”. Betz’s suggestion is that “Generals should be formulating strategies to respond to the reality of civil conflict now. At the very least, should they fear for their careers lest they begin to plan for the outbreak of civil war without a civilian political directive, they ought to seek such a directive.”

But is this actually true? It is certainly true that a sense of foreboding has settled over the country, that these conversations are now being had, from previously unexpected quarters. But there also remains the opposing feeling that much of this derives from the circular reasoning of the Right, a handful of people referencing each other, talking themselves into an unnecessary disaster. Would the Army leadership seeking a political directive to plan for civil war, as Betz suggests, ameliorate a looming disaster, or would it summon an avoidable one into being as the plans are leaked and the nation’s already fraying social fabric tatters even further?

Accepting their framing, how can disaster be averted? Cummings cites the existence of unnamed “Political entrepreneurs arguing explicitly for radical change”, claiming that “There are, though, for the first time embryonic networks inside both old parties starting to grapple with the themes of this blog and ask themselves: perhaps we need to change our mental pictures radically and side with voters against the NPC mainstream…? And very powerful forces will keep pushing this way regardless of how the NPCs scream ‘fascist’.” Who are these “political entrepreneurs”? He surely does not mean Farage, who appears more like the last vestige of the old regime than its replacement. What are the “embryonic networks” and “very powerful forces”?

When Cummings claims that “deep state discussions about the growing prospect of violence… have seeped through to few MPs or hacks”, is this the same “deep state” that fears seeing networks emerge combining explicit anti-Islam, explicit violence/sabotage, and competent organization?” Is it the same “deep state” as in his claim that “the last thing any part of SW1 (outside some of the deep state) wanted to see was the Tories transformed into a different party that was super-tough on crime and immigration, super-focused on productivity and science-technology-startups-investment, super-disruptive of Whitehall’s core institutions, and supported by a national coalition uniting parts of the working classes and middle classes”? Exactly what or who this “deep state” is is never revealed, but it sounds strikingly close to his own view.

Whitehall, Cummings implies, is divided between those that are preparing “to sabotage Farage, copying their friends in Europe who routinely sabotage political threats to the old system” and those, “particularly in security and intelligence”, who will respond to this disintegration. How do the repeated references to the SAS, which is, he claims, “under attack from its political bosses today” and “watching carefully who keeps quiet and who speaks out in their defense” fit in? Does this relate to his assertion in the Sky News interview that during Covid “we put the former commanding officer of 22 SAS in there… and then things actually worked, we sent his mates from the SAS around the country and they actually built stuff […] while all the other useless wankers in Westminster were just sharing powerpoints”? How does all this relate to his claim that dissatisfaction within the Army “is one of those invisible-to-SW1 tidal waves with potential to be a huge crisis — sudden and ‘unforeseen’ in SW1 but obvious long before if you were looking in the right place… bubbling out of control for Whitehall”? Does this fit into his previously expressed suggestion to place “Army heroes” into his reformist Right-wing government? If so, aside from anything else, this idea assumes a higher degree of competence in the Army’s leadership than its ongoing procurement woes (which Cummings unfairly places squarely on the MOD’s shoulders) would suggest.

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The suggestions Cummings makes here are far more interesting than gossip about the dying days of the Johnson government — and consequently, have been ignored by the Westminster lobby. The cumulative effect is like reading political fiction about the alleged plot against Harold Wilson, or, as noted above, a Right-wing conspirator in a David Peace novel: it reads, at times, like a Left-wing fever dream of Right-wing politics. Without Cummings’ access to the inner workings of the British state, it is impossible to form an opinion on the veracity, or otherwise, of these doom-laden “deep state” conversations. Betz, for his part, puts the likelihood of civil war in Britain at around 18% over the next five years, certainly much higher than one would like, but far from likely — and even Betz would agree that his stance is a minority opinion. Either way, both Betz and Cummings address themselves directly to security elites within the heart of the British state in an attempt to either avoid or ameliorate the effects of serious civil disorder they place on a sliding scale from possible to near-inevitable.

That these claims can be made seriously, by credible people, is testament to the failure of Britain’s political system over recent decades. Certainly, urgent reform is needed before the country descends further down a dark and slippery path. But we are not there yet, and disaster is very far from inevitable. Even should civil conflict occur, it would, I suggest, look more like the Northern Ireland of 2025 than that of the Seventies: Britain’s politics gummed up with the petty narcissism of unresolvable ethnic factionalism, with only sporadic and brief outbursts of violent disorder. This would be a mark of historic political failure, but is a far more palatable scenario than the refugee flows and Army-protected “secure zones” Betz envisages. The more likely scenario is the three main parties competitively outbidding each other on immigration, in a Rightward shift with no functional Left-wing opposition, the focus of which will eventually turn towards mass deportations, as now underway in the United States.

Cummings is probably correct that a Reform government, representing a last-ditch protest vote by Britain’s voters, would be the final gasp of Britain’s political system in its current ailing form. The stakes of British political reform are now uncomfortably high: if the system cannot reform itself, it will break. Cummings concludes his Sky News interview by saying that “the forces now in play will express themselves one way or another. The old system’s going to get much worse before it gets better, chaos is coming in all sorts of ways… But how that all works itself out, it could work itself out in different ways.” The lesson is either banal or profound: something will happen, unless something else better does. But in averting disaster, reformists on the Right should be careful not to talk themselves into one.

Healey was no doubt a professional politician. He became an MP at the age of 35 after studying at Oxford and serving with the Royal Engineers during the North African campaign of the Second World War. But he was also a keen amateur photographer, painter and piano player. His view was, as he noted in his cultural anthology, My Secret Planet, that it is not possible to understand modern politics without knowing something of history; that it is not possible to command foreign affairs without knowing something of the culture of other peoples; and that poets and novelists can teach us more than so-called political scientists. Perhaps only Healey could, as he did, watch a four-hour production of Hamlet in the middle of a financial crisis.

Healey was such a larger-than-life character, full of quips and acerbic put-downs — he once described the performance of Geoffrey Howe in the Commons as “like being savaged by a dead sheep” — that it’s easy to imagine that he was a one-off, and that having such an extensive cultural life and a range of experiences beyond politics was quite rare even in those days. But other prominent politicians show an equally broad array of influences — in particular, Roy Jenkins and Tony Crosland.

It was Healey who took over from Roy Jenkins as shadow chancellor in 1972 when Jenkins resigned over the issue of — what else? — Britain’s position within Europe. Jenkins, who believed that membership of the Common Market was essential to Britain’s future prosperity, was incensed that Labour Party leader Harold Wilson was whipping his opposition MPs to vote against the government, led by Edward Heath, which was driving through the European Communities Bill. Like Healey, Jenkins studied at Oxford. Like Healey, he contributed to the war effort, and he entered politics at an even younger age. He had a deep knowledge of fine wines and he was a prolific biographer, writing accounts of the lives of Roosevelt, Gladstone, Balfour and countless others.

His early career in politics was nothing short of astonishing. As home secretary in the mid-Sixties, he pushed through a sweeping range of reforms which saw a huge upheaval in the structure of the police force, the ending of theatre censorship, the decriminalization of homosexuality, the legalization of abortion, and the end of the death penalty. Arguably no home secretary since then has transformed Britain to anything like the same extent.

Jenkins was also a man of prodigious appetites, said to have had an affair with Jacqueline Kennedy’s sister, Lee Canfield, as well as with Caroline Gilmour, the wife of a fellow MP. And many people, including his biographer John Campbell, believe that Jenkins’s close friendship with Tony Crosland had a sexual dimension while the two were at Oxford together.

And it is Crosland who forms the third leg of our political tripod. He was 32 when he became MP for South Gloucestershire. A devoted football fan, he took American Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to see Grimsby Town play at home while serving as foreign secretary. He was also seen as the intellectual leading light of the Labour moderates: his book, The Future of Socialism (1956), is considered a seminal work.

The professional and personal lives of these three men intersected in fascinating and provocative ways, defining the Labour Party to this day. After Wilson’s shock resignation, all three stood for the leadership, but none made a strong showing, and James Callaghan was the eventual winner. Eventually, hard-Left Michael Foot became leader, defeating Healey in a narrow contest. But he was unable to make a dent in the side of Mrs. Thatcher. After she had swept to power in 1979, it would be 18 years before another Labour leader became prime minister.

As playwrights, we were fascinated by how these three close friends, all aligned in their values, all such vibrant personalities, could have failed to prevent the party they loved from becoming so hopelessly unelectable. The result is our play The Gang of Three, currently playing to gratifyingly packed audiences at the King’s Head theatre in Islington.

While we’ve tried to follow the advice of Samuel Goldwyn to all writers — “All I want is a story, if you have a message, send it by Western Union” — we’re aware that a play like ours is going to reflect matters closer to home. When our version of Crosland berates Healey during a conversation about the IMF crisis, telling him “We can’t become the party of cuts”, an audience which has just read newspaper headlines about Keir Starmer’s Labour Party reducing benefits to disabled people chuckle ruefully or sometimes groan in despair. Life, maybe especially political life, is cyclical, and the same problems come up again and again. Can you have true friends in politics? Is politics an addictive drug? Do the ends justify the means? But perhaps the most enduring theme is that when sensible people fail to put aside their own self-interests and unite, extremists and idiots can triumph.

One question which might occur to those watching the play is: why doesn’t politics seem to make politicians like this any more? While on the one hand there is always a tendency for the human brain to imagine that the golden age of anything was about 50 years ago, usually consonant with one’s own childhood, it is hard to imagine that in 50 years’ time people will be creating theater about Robert Jenrick, Alistair Carmichael, Bridget Phillipson or Kemi Badenoch, to name a few. Do we find in these politicians an interest in the arts, a devotion to philosophy, a library of publications, or a previous career in some other field of endeavor? In every case, hardly.

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Where are the Jenkins, Healey and Crosland of our political generation? In some ways, the question is unfair: the motivations and actions of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, for instance, will surely be pored over for decades to come. And yet ours is clearly a political generation in search of a hinterland.

Perhaps this is in part because earlier generations of politicians had been shaped by wartime service. Crosland was commissioned in the Royal Welch Fusiliers, seeing combat in Italy and France, while Jenkins worked as a codebreaker at Bletchley Park. Even more impressively, Healey was a beachmaster at Anzio in 1944. This period may have given them all a sense of perspective in later life — allowing Healey to stand muster with the admirals he later found advising him at the Ministry of Defense and giving him the self-assurance to fire Lord Mountbatten as Chief of the Defense Staff.

Or perhaps it’s because the frenetic nature of politics today, with its 24-hour cycle and the endless delights of social media, just doesn’t allow time to build an intellectual and cultural hinterland that can season political minds. And with any slip of the tongue, unfortunate juxtaposition or foolish remark flashed around the world in seconds, it’s maybe no surprise that many modern politicians try to stick to the very center of the road whenever they’re out of the house. After all, a bacon sandwich was all it took to depth charge Ed Miliband’s general election campaign.

And when one does consider politicians who use their extravagant personalities to connect with voters, one is drawn not to principled campaigners, but self-centered populists like Boris Johnson or Nigel Farage. All three of the characters in our play were motivated by passion and ambition, but the conflict between what they agreed on politically and their inherent rivalry led to all sorts of poor decisions. Not least their failure to combine forces, so that one of them could become Labour leader and form an election-winning alliance.

When he lost the Labour leadership, Jenkins decamped to Europe, becoming president of the European Commission. By the time he returned to British politics, Healey had completed his stint as chancellor and Crosland had died in office as foreign secretary. Unable to prevent the Labour Party’s lurch to the Left, Jenkins launched the SDP in 1982, while Healey remained on the Labour benches until his retirement in 1992.

How different might British politics have looked today if Crosland had lived and challenged Michael Foot for the Labour leadership? Or if Healey had joined Jenkins at the formation of the SDP? Or if Jenkins had continued his fight for moderation from within the Labour Party. These events shaped the political landscape as it is today, and we think there is much to be learned from this period in history, as well as great entertainment to be derived from it. So while we resurrect these giants of the past upon the stage, we still hold out some hope that the next generation of politicians might bring something to Westminster other than bureaucratic competence or an unseemly lust for power. After all, the pendulum always swings, so maybe we will yet see the return of the hinterland to British politics.

***

The Gang of Three is playing at The King’s Head Theatre in Islington until 1 June.

I was here to hunt down one particular life: John Barnard Jenkins. “I think he works down Blackwood,” said one man, referring to a neighboring town. One woman was sure Jenkins lived at the far end of the village. A group of teenagers shouted “cachau bant!” when I asked them. I’ll leave you to translate. Most people had never heard of him. The fact is that John Barnard Jenkins died in 2020, aged 87, in Wrexham. But he grew up in Penybryn, where he moved with his family aged seven during the Second World War. It was a comfortable and “an idyllic childhood” he later wrote, with his “modern” home complete with back garden and indoor toilet.

That life would soon transform into something less savory. During his teenage years, Jenkins began reading books on Welsh history, concluding that his nation had been “downtrodden”. Within a few decades, he would become for a brief period the UK’s most wanted and well-organized terrorist, as leader of Mudiad Amddiffyn Cymru (Movement for the Defence of Wales). The flooding of Tryweryn Valley in 1965, to make way for a private reservoir in Liverpool, and the Aberfan disaster a year later both pushed him into action. In 1969, when the then Prince Charles came to Wales for his investiture, Jenkins tried to kill him with a homemade bomb.

As I discovered at Penybryn, all that is ancient history now, as is the fervency with which nationalist sentiment exploded in Wales in the last century. You won’t find many people willing to kill for Cymru today. But you will find a growing nationalism which is finding ever-greater resonance among young Welshmen and women. Together with a rise of Welsh political identity, it could yet burst out from behind the Severn and leave Westminster reeling.

Nationalism always begins with history. But before 2022, Welsh history wasn’t a mandatory subject in the nation’s schools. Instead, students learned about King Charles I and the Battle of Hastings, of The Canterbury Tales and Henry VIII (with only a murmur of his Welsh heritage). Many here say that’s a legacy of English colonialism, deployed to prevent the formation of Welsh identity outside the community. To explain what they mean, some mention the so-called “Welsh Not”. The wooden tokens hung around the necks of students who dared speak their native tongue in class remained common into the 20th century.

Today, generations of Welsh men and women have been left bereft of any stories onto which they can fix themselves. In the south of the country, especially, the most discerning embodiment of Welshness I found was rooted in the fact that people weren’t English. But now, social media is changing that. There has been an explosion of accounts promoting the splendors of Welsh culture: Roseanne Garcia explores the country’s natural hidden beauty; Doctor Cymraeg details the origins of the Welsh language; Diwydiant Bythynnod reimagines ancient Welsh tales through stunning paintings.

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Samuel Talbot, the 27-year-old creator of TheSilureAdventurer (“Silure” refers to an ancient Welsh tribe), only got thinking about the past after his teacher told him that Welsh and English history were identical. “I remember thinking: I don’t like that,” he tells me. Talbot combines photographs of natural and historic sites with myths, legends, and folklore to create a digital window into Wales’s forgotten past, emphasizing that his is indeed a country with its own identity.

“Wales is the forgotten nation of the British Isles,” Talbot says, his voice so urgent you feel his life depends on it. He speaks in sharp, fierce bursts. “We’ve been persecuted for the longest, but we’ve the widest history. I want to honor our people, the heroes in our history that people don’t know about. I want to change our country’s course.”

Much of what Talbot talks about happened centuries ago, but he’s not alone in looking back. Many here remember fondly Llywelyn ap Gruffydd, the last native prince of an independent Wales. Drive through many parts of Wales, meanwhile, and you’ll increasingly see the red and yellow coat of arms of Owain Glyndŵr’s, the 14th-century Welsh nobleman who defied English rule. Michael Sheen, for his part, will play Glyndŵr in the Welsh National Theatre’s first production in 2026, while the medieval soldier regularly comes out second only to Aneurin Bevan in polls on Wales’s national heroes.

Some suggest the long march of devolution has triggered this increased fervor about identity, and with it a meditation on the past. Others look to an awakening in pride through sport, particularly after Wales’s outsized performance at the 2016 European Football Championship, when The Dragons reached the semi-finals. Adam Price, the former leader of Plaid Cymru, believes this sense of feeling is bound in Wales’s tradition of storytelling. “These figures,” he says, “give people a way to make sense and meaning of their present-day situation.”

Yet whatever the truth, it’s also clear that, amid the romantic wallowing, social media allows an increasing number of Welshmen and women to see their history in far starker hues. Dale Hughes runs the King_chrxn Instagram page, which has almost 20,000 followers. The 29-year-old’s feed is mired in disgust at the nation’s recent past. From Tryweryn to Aberfan, Hughes creates close-to-the-bone videos of the events combined with unsettling archive footage. The strategy’s clearly popular. One look at King_chrxn’s comment section finds a deluge of supportive messages.

Hughes doesn’t speak Welsh, like 74% of people in Wales. Yet, like Talbot, he feels an urgency in spreading Wales’s history to the masses. “Before I knew it, I’d fallen into a rabbit hole,” he says, after learning about Tryweryn. “I couldn’t believe what I hadn’t been taught about. I just thought: how has this been hidden from us?” He’s not alone: Hughes receives messages every day from people furious with what they call “Westminster colonialism”. To his delight, he also says his videos have inspired many to take direct action in their own ways. “People send me photos of their nationalist graffiti all the time. Whereas before they would write, ‘David sucks dick’, now there’s cultural symbols. It hit me as, ‘Yes, this is working.’”

I wonder at what point these small acts might turn into bigger things. “Let’s just say, if Meibion Glwndŵr was recruiting, and I didn’t have kids, I’d probably take it into consideration,” Hughes tells me, referencing the paramilitary group that carried out arson attacks against English-owned second homes in the Eighties and Nineties.

Perhaps John Barnard Jenkins shared similar initial reservations before sliding into terrorism. He did, after all, join the British Army and later the Territorials to serve the UK abroad. But there’s a fine line between anger and action. Talking about his Welsh history books, Jenkins himself conceded: “As the years went by, my feelings intensified, leading me to believe, more and more, that it was up to me to do something about it.”

Still, despite the tub-thumping of people like Hughes, there’s little sign the Welsh are planning to reach for their longbows. In the long term, a more ominous development for the Westminster establishment is the rising popularity of Welsh culture. Music is undergoing something of a revolution here. Over the past decade, there’s been no end of singers, bands, and even rappers keen to pick Welsh over English in distilling meaning into their art. Welsh crime novels are thriving and TV shows such as Game of Thrones have drawn deeply on Celtic mythology.

And where culture leads, politics has followed. According to one recent poll, a full 72% of Welsh people aged 25-35 back independence. Soon enough, that could bring a political earthquake. For if Wales is still passionate about its working-class roots — it’s still the only UK nation to have voted Labour at every general election since 1922 — Plaid Cymru is waiting in the wings. It comfortably leads Labour in polls for next year’s Senedd vote, and Rhun ap Iorwerth, the party’s leader, is already talking about potential independence referendums.

But if Hughes’s flirtation with arson tells us anything, it’s that nationalism can easily tip from pride into violence — just ask John Barnard Jenkins. The likes of Iorwerth say the work of Jenkins and others in the 20th century didn’t reflect the Welsh nationalist mainstream, hence why their groups no longer exist. But people still look to them for inspiration, and still see Gruffydd and Glyndŵr as heroes.

The reality, of course, is that all these people did bad things. Jenkins blew things up and wasn’t afraid to kill. Gruffyd and Glyndŵr slaughtered their own, with the latter’s efforts leading to widespread famine. What’s indisputable, meanwhile, is that even peaceful nationalists such as Iorwerth are increasingly resentful about Wales’s place in the UK’s political pecking order. Wales, he says, isn’t working, pointing to the estimated £3.9 billion of Welsh money going on HS2 — a railway project that doesn’t have a single track west of the Severn. There are other things, too, from an NHS starved of central government funding to the recent defunding of Welsh language radio stations.

Then there’s the broader economic malaise, accelerated by Thatcherism and the dismantling of the country’s industrial economy. Today, one in five people in Wales lives in relative income poverty. The overall poverty rate is 23%, higher than anywhere else in the UK. While England boasts a GDP per capita of £34,241, the average Welshman brings home just £24,443. That’s even as Wales remains the hardest part of the UK for first-time buyers to get onto the property ladder.

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In other words, there are plenty of more abrasive causes Welsh nationalists could yet latch on to. But there’s another possibility too — one where Welsh emotions are fired not towards the red dragon but to the Union Jack. Wales has been tied to England and Britain for hundreds of years, and its people share many of the same grievances felt by their English, Scottish, and Northern Irish kin. In recent years, much of that anger has come because of immigration. And though Wales has largely escaped the sorts of numbers settling in England, annual arrivals did rise by almost 50,000 in the decade to 2022. It should come as no surprise, then, that Reform is on the rise here too — polling at 25% for next year’s Senedd elections. And if John Barnard Jenkins has now passed into history, imprisoned in 1970 for treason before dying in obscurity, the valleys have long hosted other forms of extremism too.

In 2001, sociologist Marie Gillespie undertook a fieldwork study in South Wales exploring the rise of racism in former industrial communities. Noting the presence of far-Right graffiti, she wrote: “A subtle racism bubbles in the dark underbelly of these communities. The strength of feeling is difficult to assess, unpredictable, but potentially explosive.”

Though there was an influx of English and Italian migrant workers in the early 20th century, Gillespie’s words arrived at a time when immigration into Wales was almost non-existent. Walk through somewhere like Ystrad Mynach today — a town just 10 minutes from John Barnard Jenkins’s old stomping-ground of Penybryn — and you’ll find Vietnamese nail bars, Kurdish barbers, Iraqi mini marts. All have appeared in just the last decade.

If there was a dark underbelly in 2001, what will become of these communities when they are faced with a tangible presence of immigrants? While Iorwerth is confident that “this kind of nationalism has never been Wales”, I can’t help but think back to Jenkins, and how his history books ultimately led to homemade bombs. Yes, it is a different kind of angst. But fed up with rising costs, and grappling with the highest unemployment rate in Britain, might some young Welshmen look to a radical form of British nationalism?

Just beyond Penybryn sits Gelligaer, another former mining town, and home to a sprawling council estate. As I approach its worn, green sign, I see graffiti scrawled across a nearby wall. The words become clearer as I get closer: “No dinghy divers!” It’s a stark, sour reference to migrants arriving here on small boats — and one that could foreshadow the kind of action that propelled John Barnard Jenkins to infamy.

This change illustrates a strange paradox in British politics: while the public grows ever more socially liberal, politics appears to be heading in the opposite direction. Reform UK’s polling regularly hits 25%, far outstripping the popularity of hard-Right parties 40 years ago. And a newly ascendant Blue Labour movement speaks in increasingly sympathetic terms of Donald Trump and JD Vance.

Hence the EastEnders paradox. Four nights a week, viewers tune in to the BBC One soap, which now includes an LGBT club and a far more diverse range of characters and issues than in 1987. But come polling day, they opt for the nativist Right, which many Brits would never have dreamed of doing back then. In this context, it’s easy for liberals to feel an irresistible pull: if voters keep asking for the same thing, then surely politicians owe it to them?

Perhaps it is only TV producers who’ve become more liberal. Perhaps elites are imposing political correctness on conservative audiences, as the Right claims. Perhaps. But, for the most part, the numbers tell a different story.

In Britain, support for same-sex relationships doubled between 2000 and 2022, while support for abortion rights increased by 22 percentage points between 1998 and now. The proportion of Brits who are “very concerned” about the environment has nearly doubled since 2010. And the proportion “strongly disagreeing” that you must be white to be British rose by 29 percentage points between 2008 and 2020. The number of people who would mind a foreigner living next door is now negligible. Support for the death penalty is falling fast.

The headwinds, in other words, are blowing against Reform. And these headwinds exist, to some degree, across all social demographics and all political allegiances.

Many of today’s Right populists aren’t claiming to be socially conservative on every issue, of course — at least not in the ultra-traditionalist, religious sense. But it’s noticeable that the trend is especially marked on immigration — the signature issue of the Right. A 2024 report from the British Social Attitudes survey (BSA) — the UK’s gold standard in social research — revealed that the proportion of Brits saying immigration was good for the economy had risen from 17% to 40% between 2002 and 2024. The proportion saying it enriched our culture went from 33% to 43%.

A particularly notable finding here is that race and immigration have seen a de-coupling. The proportion of Brits who wanted inward immigration by white ethnicities cut to “none” fell 22 percentage points, from 35% in 2002 to 13% in 2021. But it fell by even more — 33 percentage points — when it came to non-white migrants: from 49% in 2002 to 16% in 2021. There is now virtually no difference. This pro-migrant sentiment appeared to peak immediately before the cost-of-living crisis set in, and has since fallen. But it remains much higher than a generation ago.

This implies that today’s immigration debate isn’t a proxy for nativist views. As polling expert Peter Kellner pointed out recently, voters are often positive about immigrants as people but negative about immigration as an idea. Antipathy stems from a fear that more arrivals put more pressure on public services, as well as from a specific frustration with the continued arrival of small boats, which implies to voters a broken system.

If the public is becoming more liberal, then how do we explain the drift towards the Right? The bleak state of the economy and low trust in politicians doubtless play a role — although there’s no reason why such factors should point in a Right-wing direction rather than a Left-wing one. But a large part of the answer lies, the BSA report suggests, in the differing pace of changes in attitudes, particularly over the past 15 years. The whole country is becoming more liberal, but at different speeds. And it’s this discrepancy that creates political tension and rewards parties like Reform.

The Silent Generation (born before 1945) became 12 percentage points more positive toward immigration during the 2010s (from 7% to 19% support for “allowing many” into the country), for instance. But Millennials (born 1986-1995) became 21 percentage points more positive (from 19% to 40%).

During the Brexit years, meanwhile, those with no qualifications became 16 percentage points more likely to say immigration made the country a better place (from 20% in 2014 to 36% in 2021). But degree holders became 23 percentage points more likely (from 50% to 73%).

The same goes for political allegiance. In the decade after 2011, Tory supporters became 20 percentage points more likely to say immigration was good for the economy (from 15% to 35%), but Labour supporters became 36 percentage points more likely to say so (from 29% to 65%).

To explain this, Professor Rob Ford, who co-authored the BSA report, describes a “two-speed liberalization”. The 2010s saw the mean average move in a progressive direction, but with a wider gap opening up between those making this transition quickly, from a fairly liberal start-point, and those making it more slowly, from a less liberal one.

This gap is the terrain on which Britain’s culture wars are often fought. And part of the reason they are often so unpleasant is because they frequently involve fast liberalizers accusing slower liberalizers of bigotry. The latter, who have usually witnessed and often themselves welcomed massive social changes during their lifetimes, take umbrage at this.

If you look at the generational gap over time between liberal and authoritarian attitudes, you can see it closing between the Eighties and 2000s, as older generations embraced more liberal attitudes during a permissive period. But this was followed by a resurgence of the gap in the 2010s and the era of social media: younger generations moved rapidly in more progressive directions, but older generations did not follow.

There are many causes of this two-speed process, several of which are described in detail by Maria Sobolewska and Robert Ford in their book, Brexitland. Growing regional inequality means the experience of living in large cities like London and Manchester has become increasingly different from that of living elsewhere. Higher levels of university education have also created more liberal norms — especially in these big cities.

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Then there’s the fact that migration itself has led to more diversity. This has increased the size of the target for the radical Right, even if the strength of public feeling is milder.

Added to this, the First Past The Post electoral system has skewed politics in favor of slower liberalizers, who are more evenly spread across the country. And the presence of social media has amplified every difference within the population, making it easy to mischaracterize the view of others as either “snowflakes” or “gammon”.

If you take a step back, the reality is that the British electorate holds a remarkably moderate set of views, wherever you look on the political spectrum. The inference is not that “progressive elites” must reconnect with anti-migrant majorities. It’s that the pace of social change requires leadership, public faith in the system, and a shared sense of direction and control.

We have seen none of this in recent years — the belief instead being that loud mood music, tough rhetoric or promises to “slash” immigration numbers can win the day. Bad money is thrown after good.

Instead, the gaps which two-speed liberalization opens up must be reconciled, with coherent positions arrived at which are in the national interest. Some of these are thorny, requiring concessions from both sides to find common ground. Freedom of speech and equalities are two such areas. On the former, clear rules are needed about what’s sayable and what really is hate speech; within these parameters a less judgmental debate should be encouraged. On the latter, we need to be clear about goals and definitions.

On immigration, meanwhile, the most contentious of the lot, a position is needed which commands wide support. In my view this ought to combine higher migration with greater control. Britain could publicly promise more migration in key sectors — alongside a more humane asylum system — while also offering the control which would-be Reform voters and many others are clearly desperate for, such as through the introduction of ID cards to tackle illegal working. After all, control appears to be more important to the public than reducing the number of immigrants, and the hard-Right’s obsession with the latter should be challenged.

Such a position would require both fast and slow liberalizers to take certain elements on the chin. But it would be reasonable, fair and in the national interest. It could be defended in good faith.

I don’t doubt that some people, looking at the rise of the populist Right, will see a term like “two-speed liberalization” as a piece of progressive jargon, designed to evade tough questions. But the goings on in EastEnders’ Albert Square over the past 40 years tell a different story. If the Left is to engage with Reform’s appeal, we need to start by seeing the British people for the social liberals they are.

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.

The chances are that Rishi Sunak won’t end up trading punches in the toilets with hostile MPs, but the atmosphere in the Conservative Party is taking on a familiar hue. Where once Labour was a byword for factionalism — with a dizzying array of Bennites, Tribunites and other “tendencies” — so the Tories today present a kaleidoscope of “New Conservatives”, “National Conservatives”, “Common Sense” Conservatives and self-styled “research groups”, all battling for control of the leadership. And where once a Social Democratic Party fought to “break the mould” of British politics, today the Right-wing Reform party proclaims a “realignment” intended to sweep the Conservatives from the electoral landscape. Over all this hangs the stench of electoral death, as the party contemplates defeat on the scale of 1983 or 1997.

But the Conservatives can still learn from Labour’s agonies in the Eighties. Then, Labour faced three interlocking crises. The first was electoral: from 1979 to 1992, Labour lost four general elections in a row — something that had never happened before in the democratic era. The fear was not simply that Labour was losing, but that its traditional electorate was disappearing. Deindustrialisation was shrinking the manual working class, trade-union membership was in freefall, while non-unionised workers seemed increasingly drawn to Thatcherism. The challenge for Labour was both to reclaim its old electorate and to build a new one, at a time of disruptive sociological change.

The second crisis was political, with the formation of a breakaway party by former Labour grandees. In David Owen, Shirley Williams, Bill Rodgers and Roy Jenkins, the SDP could boast the youngest foreign secretary in history, one of the most popular female politicians in the country, a skilled party organiser, and a former Chancellor, Home Secretary and President of the European Commission. Even under the pressures of First Past the Post, the SDP-Liberal Alliance won more than a quarter of the vote in 1983, coming only 2% behind Labour. In his first term, at least, the challenge for Kinnock was not to defeat the Conservatives. It was to stave off the threat from the Alliance.

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The third problem was intellectual. Parties do not often rethink their core principles, but the questions being asked of Labour during this period were genuinely existential. Was socialism still relevant, in a world where workers were buying their own homes and filling them with consumer goods? Could one talk meaningfully about “working-class solidarity” when the long-term unemployed were so distanced from those in work? Was parliamentary socialism still possible, given the cultural and media power of the Right, or did industrial action pose a surer route to victory? From the hard-Left to the old-Right, there was universal agreement that Labour must change. What was so disruptive was the direction of change, and the principles on which it should be based.

For the Conservative Party today, the challenges are slightly different. Unlike Labour, modern Conservatives are accustomed to winning elections, but that makes the prospect of defeat all the more terrifying. Three-quarters of the parliamentary party, including all but six of the Cabinet, have no experience of opposition, yet the party has now trailed in the polls for more than two years. Those voters who remain loyal are heavily concentrated among the elderly. Labour leads in every cohort below the age of 65; and even the next oldest cohort, from 55-64, has the Conservatives at just 20%.

As for party competition, Reform cannot match the polling figures of the early Alliance, which peaked at more than 40%. Nor has it drawn heavyweight defections of the stature of Jenkins, Owen or Williams. But if Nigel Farage were to return to the leadership, it would boast a consummate campaigner with strong support among Conservative voters: Farage now polls more strongly among 2019 Conservatives than the current prime minister.

Underpinning both these problems is an intellectual dilemma. What is the Conservative Party for? And what, if anything, does it seek to conserve? Under First Past the Post, parties have to construct broad coalitions to be electorally competitive. At its best, that is a source of strength, expanding the range of ideas on which a party can draw and bringing different interests into partnership. At its worst, it generates unstable compounds that can explode at any moment. While Labour struggles to hold together Fabians, Left liberals, ethical socialists, trade unionists and social democrats, those jostling within the Conservative coalition have ranged from free traders to protectionists, libertarians to moral conservatives, Atlanticists to Empire loyalists, and institutionalists to radical populists. The surprise, perhaps, is not that such fissile materials sometimes combust, but that they do not do so more often.

For most of the 20th century, Conservatives could rely on two gravitational forces to keep their centrifugal tendencies in check. The first was a shared hostility to socialism. At a time when the Cold War dominated political alignment, fear of a common enemy was a potent unifying force. The party was also anchored in a set of common institutions: the Church of England, the professions and the institutions of the party itself, which boasted more than two million members at its peak. It was no accident that the party lost coherence after the fall of the Berlin Wall, as its own institutions shrivelled, and as it became either detached from or hostile to the institutions of state and civil society. The effect was to leave the party both socially and intellectually unmoored.

More recently, in 2019, the party could deploy two unifying forces: the desire to “Get Brexit Done”; and a determination to keep Jeremy Corbyn out of office. Neither exerts much power today. Britain has left the EU, and Labour is almost neurotically averse to reopening the question. Those Brexit questions which remain live are as likely to divide Conservatives as to unite them: notably, the status of retained EU law; the future of immigration policy; and the Northern Ireland border. As for Corbyn, he is no longer even a Labour MP. The current Labour leadership defines itself as much against Corbyn as against the Conservatives, and attempts to present Keir Starmer as a secret revolutionary have gained little traction with the public.

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As its unifying elements weaken, other forces are driving the party apart. A tradition that once prided itself on its suspicion of “ideology” increasingly demands “true Conservatism” from its leaders, while disagreeing furiously on what that might be. Loyal newspapers that once catered to millions have become more sectarian as their readerships have shrunk, while new TV stations offer rich rewards for rebels and mavericks. The moderate, pragmatic MP who votes loyally with her party is unlikely to follow Nadine Dorries, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Lee Anderson and Esther McVey into the presenter’s chair at GB News or Talk TV.

All this puts a premium on skilled party management, yet there is little in Sunak’s past that has prepared him for this task. Jim Callaghan, who led a government with no majority at all for two years, had spent 30 years in Parliament, including 20 years on Labour’s national executive and a period as party chair. He had held four great offices of state and began his career as a trade-union official. By contrast, Sunak only entered Parliament in 2015, spent his short ministerial career at the Treasury and previously worked at a hedge fund. In a party that has disposed of four prime ministers in six years, even a majority of 60 has strained his powers of party management. Nor have the party’s strategists served him well, for the fashion for seeking “wedge issues” and “dividing lines” has inflamed divisions within the party, rather than establishing clear blue water with the opposition.

Yet as Labour’s experience demonstrates, division need not be terminal; and the Conservatives enjoy a number of structural advantages that were denied to Labour in the Eighties. That includes a largely sympathetic press and a donor base that can outspend their opponents even at the nadir of the party’s fortunes. The Right is in the ascendant across much of the West, and may soon take back the presidency of the United States. And in an age of short political careers, the Tory factions have no equivalent to Benn, Jenkins or Healey — household names with careers stretching back decades. The heavens do not tremble at the thunder of Sir Simon Clarke; nor do the mountains smoke at the voice of Robert Jenrick. That makes the party’s factions more volatile, but also less deeply entrenched.

Moreover, for a party accustomed to government, opposition may also have a galvanising effect. A Labour government would confront a grim inheritance: a public sector on fire, a financial crisis in local government, a stagnant economy and a perilous international situation — perhaps made more difficult by the return of Donald Trump. If there are good elections for the Conservatives to lose, 2024 may be one of them.

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But if the party wishes to restore its intellectual vitality, it will need to face some uncomfortable truths. If the tax bill has risen under five Conservative leaders drawn from across the party spectrum, that is not because they lacked conviction or were secret socialists. A party that wishes to cut taxation must wrestle honestly with the dilemmas of an ageing population, a stagnant economy, a surging bill for social care and pensions, and growing pressure on the defence budget. If younger voters are abandoning the Conservative Party, that is not because they have been brainwashed by their teachers or indoctrinated on TikTok. It is because Conservatism has offered them little but mockery at a time of decaying wages and an impossible housing market.

As the once-great Liberal Party could affirm, parties do not have a divine right to survive. Those that cannot contain their divisions, that look inwards rather than out, and that blame the electorate for their own misfortunes are rarely rewarded at the polls. Like Labour in 1979, the Conservatives may soon be out of office. Unless they learn the lessons of the Eighties, it could be some time before they return.

So much of our political commentary is spent speculating about how these absurdist battles will play out. Will Keir Starmer’s judgement over Gaza be vindicated come election day? Will Rishi Sunak prove us all wrong? Is the Prime Minister showing courage or weakness in sacking Suella Braverman and bringing back David Cameron? What we all seem to agree is that history will be the judge, that when the general election comes around we will have our answers. Somebody will win and somebody will lose; one will have ridden the tide of history and the other will end up as mere flotsam. But there are currents in politics pulling at events far below the surface, often more powerful than those we obsess about in our day-to-day coverage.

“The success of… movements of protest cannot be measured by their immediate political failure,” wrote Lord Blake, the great biographer of Benjamin Disraeli, who in his earlier career led the rebel alliance of romantic Tory ultras called Young England who worshipped the old aristocratic order. By any metric, Disraeli’s Young England failed politically. And yet, for Blake, these movements cannot be understood solely by their parliamentary success, but must be regarded “as symbols and examples that lend an imaginative glow to the dull course of party politics; showing that there are other ways to fame than conformism, diligence and calculation”. The same is true today.

We must shake ourselves from the notion that victory and defeat are the only things that matter. There are other ways in which the course of a nation is affected, often with more profound consequences than what a leader says or does.

Britain’s relationship with Europe is the perfect such example. Between the Schuman declaration of 1950 — the foundational moment of today’s Europe — and Brexit, there were any number of apparently decisive moments which turned out to be less decisive than they first appeared. In 1971, the House of Commons finally voted to join the Common Market and that was that: a long-running drama came to a conclusion. Harold Macmillan, who had failed to lead Britain into the EEC the previous decade, waited in Dover to hear the news and lit a beacon to announce the historic turning point, which was then answered across the water in Calais. Four years later, the British public ratified the decision by a crushing margin in the country’s first ever referendum. The end.

As Robert Saunders captures in Yes To Europe, a triumphant Harold Wilson was hailed a political giant for his skilful handling of events. A cartoon in The Daily Express portrayed him parading in triumph through the streets of London, a Roman emperor in a chariot drawn by Ted Heath and Roy Jenkins with Margaret Thatcher throwing flowers from the sidelines. Behind him were the poor, huddled masses of Labour eurosceptics dragged along in chains. The Sunday Times summed up the wisdom of the day: “If politicians are to be judged by their ability in the end to get what they want, Harold Wilson is a great politician.” But politics has to be about more than this. While Harold Wilson got what he wanted, within a year he was gone, a broken man.

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Suellaism is here to stay

By Tom McTague

We never seem to learn this lesson. In 1977, Professor Anthony King published the first history of the referendum campaign, painting the “Yes” victory as a triumph for the moderate political centre against what would now be called the populists. King speculated what might have happened had there been a No vote: it would have undermined Wilson and Callaghan while strengthening the Labour Left. As Saunders says of King’s argument: “Benn or Foot might have become leader, opening a fissure between ‘the moderate centre’ and the ‘extreme Left’. Roy Jenkins and Shirley Williams might have left to form a new party, carrying many of their most popular colleagues with them, all of which could have had the cumulative effect of banishing Labour from power ‘for at least a generation’.” But as Saunders puts it: “This, of course, was almost exactly what happened a few years later.”

By 1980, Michael Foot was leader of the Labour Party and Thatcher had become prime minister. By 1990, Thatcher — who had campaigned for a Yes vote — had become euroscepticism’s first martyr. By 2000, the Conservative Party was preparing a “Save the Pound” election campaign and by 2010 its leader was vowing to veto the new European treaty if elected. And we all know what happened in 2020. The great current of history can move in the opposite direction from how it looks on the surface; a political riptide difficult to spot from the shore, but powerful nonetheless.

Sometimes political decisions move in one direction but the mood of a party or country moves in another. In retrospect, the Labour Right won their struggle with the Left in 1975, but were seen to have betrayed the soul of the party. Something similar happened for the Blairites after the Iraq war and for unionists after the Scottish referendum in 2014. Perhaps we are also seeing that play out now after the Brexit referendum of 2016.

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By Richard Vinen

While this week in Westminster was extraordinary, perhaps that’s not for the obvious reasons. Suella Braverman was sacked, the Tory right had the wind taken out of its sails by the Supreme Court, David Cameron returned and Keir Starmer saw off the Left of his Party. The centre is back in charge of both political parties and, by extension, the country. Whatever happens at the next election, there will be no great changes. Our relationship with Europe, Ireland, the Middle East, China and the United States will largely remain as is. We will maintain our nuclear deterrent, the rough balance of tax and spending, education and health policies. All will be well for those who prize macro stability.

But what is happening under the surface? Who is winning the battle for the soul of each party? First, let’s take the Labour Party. The obvious point is that Starmer has emerged from this week with his authority intact and his chances of becoming prime minister enhanced. His party is now even further ahead in the polls than it was before. As things stand, he stands a very good chance of not only being elected, but serving as prime minister well into the 2030s. All this can be true and important — and for it to also be true that having a third of your parliamentary party rebel on an issue of core judgement before you’ve even become prime minister is a warning of problems to come.

Should Starmer become prime minister, foreign policy will quickly intrude on his premiership. Donald Trump might well have already won the presidency or could do so soon afterwards. It goes without saying that a Trump presidency will present particular challenges for a Labour prime minister leading a pro-European, pro-Palestinian movement. Let’s remember that Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza may still be raging in a year’s time — or even in five year’s time. The humanitarian crisis may be even more acute, the pro-Palestinian Left even more angry. Looking at the Labour party today, its foreign policy remains remarkably similar to what it might have been under Clement Attlee, Harold Wilson or Tony Blair — and yet culturally the Left has become more more anti-American, anti-Israel, and pro-European. These are not things Starmer can simply lead in another direction, only manage.

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On the Conservative side, it is hard to know where to start. There is more than a passing resemblance to John Major in the mid Nineties who, like Sunak, was more in line with establishment thinking than his own supporters’ instincts, and was forced into pathetic shows of nationalism to compensate for his overall failures of policy.

This week, Sunakism took control of the Tory party, with Cameron and other centrist figures brought into the cabinet. The prime minister’s Rwanda policy was then thrown out by the Supreme Court, who said it breached a whole array of international treaties that Britain had signed up to. In response, rather like Major’s doomed beef war with Europe, Sunak has gone to war to defend the policy, with the absurd notion that he will pass a law to simply declare the country safe. Like Major in the late Nineties, the likely result is that this will do little to ameliorate unhappiness within the Conservative Party or increase his chances of holding back the tide of support for Labour, which has declared its opposition to the scheme.

Perhaps the most important thing here is not whether Sunak will succeed or fail with his approach, but what will happen to the mood in the Conservative Party. From 1997 onwards, Britain’s place in the European Union seemed to grow ever more secure as Tony Blair triumphed signing up to one treaty after another, only for the Conservative parliamentary party to grow ever more sceptical until, eventually, the sceptics won.

Today, you have to wonder what is going to happen to Britain’s membership of the European Convention of Human Rights. Suella Braverman has been kicked out of the cabinet, but will Suellaism eventually take hold of the Conservative soul? This will not be decided in a single election, or even multiple elections, but by trends working away under the surface, buffeted by events, stories, scandals and political groupings operating beyond the remit of mere leaders, lending Blake’s “imaginative glow to the dull course of party politics”.

Braverman may never become Tory leader. She may end up leading a faction in parliament that suffers defeat after defeat, like Bill Cash in the Nineties or Tony Benn in the Eighties. But that doesn’t mean her politics will die or Britain’s membership of the ECHR will remain secure. The same is true of the Labour Left, which will not disappear simply because Keir Starmer triumphs in 2024 or does not.

Politics is not some placid, obedient sea able to be parted by whichever Moses is in charge at that moment. It is tidal and choppy, issues, constantly being shaped not just by leaders and calculation, but by events, scandals, ideas and, yes, the losers of politics.

The preferred idiom was very sweary. According to Cummings’s communications from 2020, government ministers and civil servants dealing with the Covid crisis were “useless fuckpigs”, “morons”, and “cunts”. Everyone mentioned seemed to have a nickname, as if planning a heist: “Sonic” the Hedgehog Special Advisor; “Frosty” the Snowman Minister of State at the Cabinet Office; “Trolley” the Problem Prime Minister, and so on.

Sexist bravado also apparently abounded, with Cummings threatening, in one exchange with Trolley and Director of Communications Lee Cain, to “personally handcuff” Deputy Cabinet Secretary Helen MacNamara and “escort her from the building”. In cadences reminiscent of a made man arranging concrete shoes for a troublesome foot soldier, Cummings continued: “We gotta get Helen out of [the Cabinet Office] She’s fucking up Frosty. She’s fucking up me and Case. She’s trying to get spads fired and cause trouble on multiple fronts. Can we get her in Monday for chat re her moving to [the Ministry of Housing, Communities, and Local Government] … we need her out ASAP. Building millions of lovely houses.”

Yet in the flesh at the Inquiry, Cummings was more penitent schoolboy than would-be gangster, apologising repeatedly for his previous “terrible” and “appalling” language. And the contrast was also stark with his written submission, in which, as others have also noted, he came across more like Adrian Mole than Harvey Keitel. (A characteristically mournful extract: “Although I was/am often described as ‘all powerful’ in No 10 in 2020 this is false and very misleading regarding Covid… For example, in January 2020 I could not even stop Chris Grayling being appointed by the PM to chair the Commons intelligence committee”.)

Equally, when the next day MacNamara herself appeared at the Inquiry, giving us first sight of Cummings’s much-maligned female nemesis, the deep histrionics running through his communications about her became even more discernible. For if his own fictional lodestar seems to be Nineties Tarantino films, MacNamara’s seems to be Bridget Jones Diary — even down to the fact of having once brought a karaoke machine to a lockdown party at Downing Street.

Though appearing calm and self-assured on the stand, MacNamara’s reported messages to fellow officials seemed almost parodically self-deprecating and tentative — perhaps partly due to the calibre of the individuals she was dealing with at the time. One email to the Cabinet Secretary from 2020 about the inadequate fit of most PPE with female bodies started with the words “Just when you thought you were out of the woods on annoying emails from me” and closed with “I didn’t know who to annoy with this so chose you”.  She signed off with a fist emoji but immediately felt the need to explain, quasi-humorously: “that’s a fist bump not a punch”.

And as the mostly male officials around her focused their attention on managing manly pursuits like “football, hunting, shooting and fishing” — ignoring trifling issues like women being locked down with no escape from violent partners, or having to give birth alone — with touching optimism MacNamara bought “multiple copies” of a book about male bias in policy for her colleagues to read. Indeed, it seems increasingly likely that, when Cummings furiously said of MacNamara, “we cannot keep dealing with this horrific meltdown of the British state while dodging stilettos from that cunt”, he was really trying to get out of reading Invisible Women by Caroline Criado-Perez.

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Some dissatisfaction has been expressed among the commentariat about the extent to which the Inquiry’s KCs — often sounding like gently disappointed headmasters — have focused on the bad language of dramatis personae like Cummings. Writing in The Spectator, witness Professor Carl Heneghan complained of the Inquiry that he “had submitted a 74-page statement on what I thought it should discuss. Instead the main topic was rude words in old WhatsApp messages.” For many, understandably tired of endless trivial complaints about hurt feelings stemming from inappropriate word choices, it perhaps feels like a capitulation to focus less on what a person said or did and more upon how, exactly, he said it.

Still, I don’t think that focusing on the way Cummings and others expressed themselves at work is wholly tangential to the main business of the Inquiry. For a person’s words are one of the main sources of evidence we have in judging their character, understood as a relatively fine-grained collection of personality traits. And there is a definite public interest in knowing which characters, precisely, are supposed to be running the country.

It is why a public inquiry’s unusual access to an individual’s emails and private messages is often so potent — for we get to find out, relatively directly, what sort of people are behind the public actions that affected so many lives. When combined with witness statements, cross-examination transcripts and other material, onlookers can get genuine insight, not just into what a person said or did, but also into who they are: their intellectual obsessions, quirks, and blind spots; their talents and inadequacies; their vices and virtues; whether they are funny or charming, or pompous or boring, or patronising or evasive, or whatever. No wonder other public figures apparently get so worried about WhatsApp disclosure.

In Cummings’s case, there are also hundreds of blog posts over the years to add to the overall picture. To read one of them is to travel on a syntactically unexpected, invective-laced and often hysterical emotional journey — full of quotes from famous men, head-spinning new ideas (“It would be great if Oxford created alternatives to PPE such as Ancient and Modern History, Maths for Presidents, and Coding”); undecipherable technical jargon; and deep gloom about the future, assuming the world continues not to listen to him (“such is life in a country that increasingly resembles the trajectory of the Austro-Hungarian Empire”).

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Cummings’s musings existed in the public domain well before any of his high-profile public appointments. It still astonishes me that anyone reading them could excitedly call off the search for their next political adviser. It’s hard not to wonder whether his appeal was so great for his employers because, though they personally couldn’t understand what he was on about, they were still impressed by the superficial signs of cleverness and staggering self-belief and desperately hoped it all made sense to someone else.

We are, after all, in a strange place these days, in which we pretend we can understand everything relevant about another person’s motives and meaning from just a small, context-free snippet of their discourse. And yet we tend to pay little attention to the obvious warning signs embedded in much larger chunks of publicly available information (such as, for instance, the fact that Cummings reportedly used to sign himself into No. 10 as “Osama Bin Laden”). Perhaps it is partly just a matter of not having enough time or a long enough attention-span to do the reading. But perhaps another reason for myopia in higher Tory echelons about Cummings’s evident weak points was that they felt his swearing, scowling presence there was a comforting counter to a general atmosphere of stifling political correctness and conformity.

If so, I understand this impulse. The more that mindless progressive types try to micromanage language and instil irrational guilt in their traditional po-faced manner, the more tempting it is to stick two fingers up at the lot of them and to start striking deliberately offensive poses just for the hell of it. And if you can’t do that, perhaps the next best thing is to hire someone who will do it for you; someone whose socially transgressive interventions will act as satisfyingly irritating provocations to any mealy-mouthed, rule-quoting pencil-pushers in the vicinity.

In a microcosm, this is the dynamic that appears to be inhabiting large parts of the Right-leaning political spectrum at the moment. The unstated ethos seems to be that if my attitude-policing, finger-wagging political enemy is against something — in this case, using outrageously rude and bullying language at work — then I must be for it; and vice versa. And of course it doesn’t hurt that large swathes of the electorate are similarly fed up with being told off by self-righteous missionary-types.

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But to base your current political sensibilities on what your opponents hate is to court destruction, whether on the Right or the Left. It gives the enemy effective control of the political agenda and can end with some deeply counterproductive, incoherent decision-making. Just as no Home Secretary supposedly interested in free expression should be talking about banning Palestinian flags just because some deeply revolting people currently want to wave them, no government minister should ever employ a loose cannon with an apparent case of oppositional defiance disorder, just because it tends to set the teeth of members of the Blob on edge. As the Trolley knows all too well by now, such initially tempting ideas tend to come back to haunt you.

We have yet to understand the full cost to Britain of having had such an anarchic crew at the heart of government during one of its worst crises in recent history; nor of the way that degraded norms in workplace communication enabled other forms of dysfunction to proliferate there. At the very least, it is already suggested from MacNamara’s testimony that the atmosphere resulted in some chaotic and damaging choices. As she said at the time, in an email to superiors about the lack of options for victims of domestic violence during the first lockdown: “It is very difficult to draw any conclusion other than women have died as a result of this.”

Perhaps the Inquiry will eventually shed some light on this. But either way, Cummings doesn’t seem to have learnt much from the experience. The day after his Inquiry appearance, he was back on social media in his more familiar Lord of Misrule guise, responding to criticism by asking: “so is the problem a/ me calling Hancock ‘a lying cunt killing people’ or b/ Hancock actually being a lying cunt killing people?!” And it doesn’t seem to occur to him that the answer might be “both”.

As one rather less complacent insider once put it to me, the Conservatives effectively “behaved like a disappointed middle-aged wife whose husband’s just run off with his PA and thinks: ‘Well, give it three or four months and when he needs his socks darned and a home-cooked meal, he’ll come crawling back, begging for forgiveness.’”

It didn’t happen, of course. Blair went on to win two more general elections and it took the Tories the best part of a decade-and-a-half to make it back into Downing Street — and even then, without a majority to call their own. So hapless was the Tory party’s initial response that it arguably offers one of the best guides to what-not-to-do for any political party booted out of office.

With the Tories facing the prospect of another sojourn in political wilderness after next year’s election, the current crop of Conservatives should be trying to learn their lessons from 1997. If what happens next is anything like the period from 1997-2005, after which the Tories eventually took a punt on a shiny young moderniser called David Cameron, then they’re in for seven years of seriously bad luck.

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By Tom McTague

Anyone who thinks that a huge defeat would be a wake-up call for the Tory party should think again. The atmosphere post-1997 was one of complacency, especially among smug Tory MPs who had managed to hold onto their seats and put their defeat down to a temporary swing of the political pendulum.

Of course, the rational thing for a defeated party to do would be to conduct a comprehensive post-mortem; perhaps one overseen by former MPs who lost their seats or have no intention of running again. But since when has politics been a rational business, or one untainted by overweening ambition?

A defeated party is far more likely to jump straight into a leadership contest (especially these days, when defeated prime ministers tend not to stick around). That almost inevitably involves the candidates telling the selectorate exactly what they want to hear. In 1997, for example, Tory leadership candidate William Hague told the party faithful that Labour only won the election because it had accepted the Thatcherite settlement. The only thing the Tories needed to reassess, he reassured them, was their creaky organisation not their outworn market-liberal ideology.

Defeated parties can also be far too reluctant to face up to the fact they’ve made a duff choice after rushing into a leadership contest — even when opinion polls make it clear that the public thinks their new leader is a hopeless loser. It was obvious within weeks, days even, that the Tories had lumbered themselves with a dud not just in 1997 but in 2001 too, when they replaced William Hague with Iain Duncan Smith. But it took years to get rid of them.

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In political exile, opposition parties tend also to worry (not unreasonably) that donations are going to dry up, making them excessively wary about spending money on expensive, in-depth research into public opinion. This leaves them trying to put right what they think they got wrong rather than realising what their real mistakes were — not a great basis for making a comeback.

All that research and innovation takes time as well as money, however. Easily one of the worst things about being in opposition, as veterans won’t hesitate to tell you, is that voters and the media don’t care much about you anymore. But trying to make them take notice by adopting headline-grabbing, populist positions is a dangerous game. For one thing, it makes you look desperate. For another, it leads to parties adopting potentially stupid stances that they will struggle to row back on and prioritising attention-seeking stunts: whether it’s an ill-advised photo shoot — Hague’s team wearing cagoules and baseball caps as they splash down a theme-park log ride springs horrifically to mind — or, in the case of Duncan Smith, insisting the party oppose adoption by same-sex couples.

Just as bad, opposition parties have a tendency to double down on issues that are assumed to play well for them, rather than engaging with the issues of the day. This is especially true when the economy is strong, as was the case between 1997 and 2005, when the Tories fell back on the so-called “Tebbit trinity” of tax cuts, Europe and immigration. It’s not that these issues don’t matter, but they are unlikely to appeal to voters more than the promise of rising living standards and visibly improving public services (particularly “schools n’ hospitals”).

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Another temptation that a recently defeated party can fall prey to is to look back with excessive pride on all the supposedly great things they did in government, believing they have nothing to apologise for. Adopting New Labour strategist Philip Gould’s “concede and move on” mantra would be a much better course of action — a lesson not lost on Keir Starmer, who lately has seemed prepared to throw pretty much any commitment overboard if polling and focus groups suggest that it’s a problem. But that requires an ability to let go, that, especially in the early days, defeated politicians find it incredibly hard to demonstrate.

Even harder for politicians is to face the fact that it’s almost impossible to shape voter preferences when you’re in opposition. Rightly or wrongly, that means accommodating them — moving to where they actually are, rather than where you’d like or imagine them to be. Anyone who doesn’t get this is best sidelined in shadow cabinet. That said, it’s never a good look if wounded big beasts aren’t brought on board; Ken Clarke in 1997 and Michael Portillo in 2001 are stand-out examples.

Perhaps the final lesson for opposition is not to allow success in so-called “second order elections” (by-elections, local elections, and referendums) to fool you into thinking you’re on the right track. At the locals in May 2000, Hague’s Tories gained nearly 600 seats, and yet polls later that summer showed Labour streets ahead. Which was the better guide to the 2001 election result?

The Tories aren’t guaranteed to learn from their 1997 mistakes — especially given the tactics Rishi Sunak has adopted ahead of next year’s election. With the economy failing to come to his rescue, Sunak looks set to play as many populist, anti-woke and “green-crap” cards as he can in order to stop the party being deserted by voters who are feeling the cost-of-living crisis and seeing public services come under serious strain. Even if his strategy ends in defeat, it’s not clear that the rest of the party will get the message. We’re far more likely to see a central-casting culture-warrior like Kemi Badenoch take power instead, perhaps after beating Penny Mordaunt in a race that could see all the serious contestants up the populist ante by pledging to take the UK out of the European Convention on Human Rights. If so, it’ll be déjà vu with the Conservatives, as they did for nearly a decade after 1997, looking obsessive, irrelevant and, sometimes just plain nasty.

There is, though, some hope for all those Tories praying that their party hasn’t entirely abandoned the mainstream centre-right. And it lies in Badenoch’s response to criticism from backbench Tory MPs over what they saw as her failure, last month, to purge each and every bit of retained EU legislation from the UK’s statute book. “I am not an arsonist, I’m a Conservative,” she shot back, suggesting that there may, in fact, be rather more to Badenoch than meets the eye.

Anyone wanting to see the Tories spend as little time out of office as possible after 2024 should pray that’s the case. If voters do decide to cast the Conservative Party into the wilderness next year, then the last thing it will need is a leader wedded to the same quasi-austerity and performative populism that it’s currently foisting on the country. As Winston Churchill, one of the party’s more successful leaders of the opposition, is routinely reported to have said, “Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”

Then his neighbour in the first-class carriage leaned over and tapped him on the knee. “You are Baldwin, aren’t you?” the man said. “You were at Harrow in ’84.”

The Prime Minister nodded. The man sat back, satisfied. Then, a minute or so later, the man leaned forward and tapped him on the knee again. “Tell me,” he said affably, “what are you doing now?”

Even if that story isn’t true — and if it is, it could only have come from one person — it tells you something about the modest man who first became Prime Minister on 22 May 1923, exactly 100 years ago.

In many ways, Stanley Baldwin dominated the first half of the 20th century. He was Prime Minister three times in the Twenties and Thirties, for a total of more than seven years, and co-ran the country alongside Ramsay MacDonald for four more. He was the first mass-media premier, with a grasp of radio unmatched by his contemporaries, and appealed to a new, genuinely democratic electorate, including women as well as men. He stood for democracy in the age of the dictators, and steered his country through the General Strike, the Depression and the Abdication. And he weathered the storms of office to step down in 1937 at a moment of his own choosing, admired and respected even by his opponents.

That Baldwin is barely remembered today, then, could hardly be more unjust. His reputation took a crippling blow when he was traduced as one of the so-called Guilty Men, savaged in a thoroughly mendacious short book for his supposed appeasement of Nazi Germany. Even now some writers, foolishly parroting the clichés of the past, accuse him of sending Britain defenceless into the Second World War, even though Baldwin actually commissioned almost 100 new RAF squadrons in the teeth of fierce opposition from a near-pacifist Labour Party. And when he appears on television or in films, it is only as a dithering foil for the dynamic Churchill, never as the brilliantly canny operator who effectively invented modern Conservatism.

Yet whenever people lament the passing of an age of decent, serious, public-spirited politicians, they could be talking about Stanley Baldwin. In almost every respect, he was a walking rebuke to his modern-day successors. And what’s more, he was a far more interesting character than almost all of our current MPs put together.

Born in 1867, the son of a paternalistic Worcestershire industrialist, he did indeed go to Harrow, where he got into trouble for writing his own pornography — this was, of course, an age before teenagers were spoon-fed — and sending it to his cousin at Eton. This cast a serious blight over his schooldays, and young Stan hoped to make a fresh start at Cambridge.

But then — disaster! His old headmaster, who despised him, was appointed as Master of Trinity, Stan’s college. More misery. In the end, he graduated with a Third in history, having made virtually no impression on his contemporaries at all.

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When he got back home to Worcestershire, his father Alfred — a stern and serious man — said grimly: “I hope you won’t get a Third in life.” Fortunately, he didn’t. Quite the opposite.

Baldwin didn’t inherit his father’s Bewdley constituency until he was nearly 41, having spent the intervening years working for the family iron-making firm. No doubt today he’d be mocked as a nepo baby. But like his father, Stanley was a deeply dutiful man, who prayed on his knees every night and took his Anglican faith enormously seriously.

Perhaps the best illustration of his sense of national responsibility was his letter to The Times on 24 June 1919. Baldwin, who was now Financial Secretary to the Treasury, noted that the country had run up colossal debts to pay for the Great War. This, he said, gave “the wealthy classes … an opportunity of service which can never recur … Let them impose upon themselves, each as he is able, a voluntary levy.”

For his part, he announced that he was giving up 20% of his fortune — a donation worth about £33 million today — to pay off the debt and relieve poor taxpayers of the burden. A nice gesture — but there was a twist. Baldwin didn’t sign his name: indeed, he made the editor of The Times promise not to tell anybody who had written the letter, because he didn’t want the attention. If you want to make your head ache, just try to imagine Matt Hancock doing that.

Even at that stage, nobody would have tipped Baldwin as a future PM. Compared with the man of the hour, the charismatic, flamboyant, monstrously priapic David Lloyd George, he seemed utterly ordinary. But Baldwin’s ordinariness — or his appearance of ordinariness, which isn’t the same thing at all — was his superpower. At the crucial meeting at the Carlton Club in October 1922, when the Tories decided to ditch Lloyd George and break up the wartime coalition, it was Baldwin’s voice that carried the day.

In private, Baldwin thought “the Goat”, with his taste for flogging peerages and interfering with other people’s wives, a “corrupter of public life”. And so, calmly, devastatingly, he plunged in the knife. Lloyd George, he told his colleagues, had once been called a “dynamic force”. But, said Baldwin, “a dynamic force is a very terrible thing; it may crush you”.

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That was the end of Lloyd George — and the making of Baldwin. Less than a year later, after an election had smashed the Liberals and brought the Tories a crushing majority, George V invited him to become Prime Minister. Once again our hero stepped over the bleeding body of a flashier, louder rival — this time Lord Curzon, former viceroy of India, the most arrogant man on the planet. Curzon thought Baldwin a man “of the utmost insignificance”. When the King told him that he was picking Baldwin anyway, he burst into tears.

So, armed with his religious faith, his boringness and his Cambridge Third, Baldwin ascended to the highest office in the land. In reality, of course, he wasn’t boring at all. Time magazine called him “a perfect John Bull in physical and mental makeup”; but as any lecturer in beauty therapy will tell you, makeup takes work.

Baldwin’s background was in industry, but he was brilliant at playing the country yeoman. In his most famous speech, a paean to romantic nostalgia, he evoked “the sounds of England, the tinkle of hammer on anvil in the country smithy, the corncrake on a dewy morning, the sound of the scythe against the whetstone, and the sight of a plough team coming over the brow of a hill”.

All this was pure fantasy. The sounds of Baldwin’s England were record players, radios, motorbikes and vacuum cleaners. They were motor cars chugging through suburban estates, builders hammering away at Tudorbethan semis. But as he realised, if only unconsciously, middle-class suburban modernity came with a deep longing for what had been lost.

Baldwin offered his voters stability, rootedness, a sense of tradition. Watch one of his YouTube clips — my favourite is this tremendously endearing speech at a retirement home for elderly actors — and it’s hard not to feel immediately reassured. He seems the very embodiment of old England. But of course the whole thing is a performance — and given the medium, a very modern one.

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To some of his better-remembered contemporaries, Baldwin’s success was utterly baffling. Churchill, when playing chess, would gesture at his opponent’s pawns with the words: “Bring out your Baldwins.” Orwell said that he was “simply a hole in the air”. They were both wrong. Voters in the Twenties and Thirties understandably shrank from the reckless, belligerent adventurism that had sacrificed so many lives at Gallipoli. Most voters were more like Bilbo Baggins, the very personification of Baldwin’s England, who made his first appearance during the great man’s final months in office. “We are plain quiet folk and have no use for adventures. Nasty disturbing uncomfortable things! Make you late for dinner!”

As for being a hole in the air, that too was all part of the performance. Baldwin’s appeals to unflashy common sense were a brilliant way of presenting the Conservatives as the sensible, unthreatening, alternative to Labour’s supposed crypto-Bolshevism. And in reality, he was a much more nervous, restless figure than people realised. Colleagues watching him on the front bench noticed how he would twitch and fidget with nerves, exhibiting tics you can still detect on YouTube today. His oddest quirk was his habit of picking up books, lifting them to his face and sniffing them, which has never been properly explained. Some strange Harrovian fetish?

A century on, then, Baldwin ought to be much better known. To academic historians like his biographer Stuart Ball, his accomplishments are obvious. In an age of seething political turbulence, he turned the Tories into the dominant party of government, enlisting working-class and middle-class voters beneath the banners of common sense. His affable, consensual style meant Britain entered the late Thirties as a relatively contented, cohesive country — especially when compared with future allies such as France and the United States, let alone Germany and Italy. There will always be questions about the pace of rearmament. But Baldwin’s contribution to victory was arguably deeper and more important. Thanks to him, Britain entered the war united — perhaps the greatest asset of all.

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Today people love to judge our predecessors according to our own moral and cultural standards – and here Baldwin also comes out remarkably well. His eldest son Oliver, traumatised by his experiences in the trenches, became a Left-wing Labour MP, opposed to everything his father believed in. Stanley confessed to his daughter that he “nearly died” when he first saw Oliver glaring at him from the Opposition benches. But he was not a man to hold a grudge; father and son were reconciled eventually, and their letters make for deeply moving reading.

And there’s something more. Oliver wasn’t just a socialist; he was gay. Some Conservative MPs would have had a stroke at the very thought, and Stanley’s cousin Rudyard Kipling was so appalled by such “beastliness” that he severed all relations with his nephew. But Baldwin remained the ever-loving father. Whatever his personal convictions, he accepted his son’s partner, John Boyle, as part of the family, and would often drive over to visit them at their Oxfordshire farmhouse. If he ever murmured the slightest syllable of criticism, there’s no sign of it.

So perhaps the last word should go to Oliver, whose memoir of his father’s final days in December 1947 is reprinted in Philip Williamson’s wonderful collection of Baldwin’s letters. “He died as he would have wished,” Oliver wrote, “peacefully in bed. No bed-clothes were ruffled, no attempt made to ring a bell or turn on a light.”

That was entirely in character, and perhaps that’s why he’s barely remembered today. But Stanley Baldwin deserves better. He wasn’t just a great politician. He was a great man.

But this sporting oddity is only a pale reflection of the UK’s political and constitutional complexity. While it is one sovereign state with one King, it has two established churches, three judicial systems, four home nations, and a whole host of crown dependencies and overseas territories which form part of its single, royal realm. (Are you following at the back?) And that’s before you consider the fact that the King of the United Kingdom (not England) is also king of lots of other countries with lots of other titles, which were once also part of the UK’s single royal realm but are no longer. 

To some, the impenetrable complexity of the UK and its royal family is part of its strength. Nations aren’t “rational” constructs but the products of history and human imagination; old trees which suit the soil in which they grow, not brutalist modern buildings rising from concrete. In fact, often the more arcane a country’s political order, the better. The Holy Roman Empire was impenetrably messy but gloriously superior to many of the Germanies which followed its violent destruction. 

This is the Burkean conception of constitutions, anyway: organic orders which contain much that cannot be justified in simple rational terms but nevertheless provide the shelter under which nations live freely and in harmony — often more freely than those constantly forced to cut down and rebuild their societies based on some abstract principle. As T.S. Eliot wrote, art does not “improve” with time but simply changes to reflect the new material. So, too, with constitutions.

While I agree with much of this Burkean analysis, it also seems clear to me that the British constitution today is not some glorious old oak left to grow naturally, but the product of half-arsed topiary. The UK has been robbed of much of the organic strength of a traditional constitutional order without gaining the simplicity of a revolutionary constitution; we have the constitution of Ted Heath, not Edmund Burke or Napoleon Bonaparte. 

Nothing better illustrates this reality than our impenetrable local democracy. Occasionally, someone or other tries to call Britain’s local elections our “midterms”, but they are nothing of the kind. In the United States, every seat in the House of Representatives is up for grabs every two years — as well as a third of the Senate. The midterms are a chance for the American public as a whole to grant or deny the President legislative control. They are an important moment in the life of the nation, part of its ever evolving story. In Britain, meanwhile, local elections happen every year in some form or another and are so arcanely complicated that almost nobody understands what is going on. Today, for example, around 8,000 councillors will be elected from around two thirds of our 300-plus local authorities in England. Why some councils vote in this four-year pattern and not another is largely just chance. Scotland and Wales will not be voting; Northern Ireland will vote in a couple of weeks.

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The map of British local democracy makes the principalities in the Holy Roman Empire look positively geometric. In some parts of England there are “county councils” and “district councils”; in others “unitary” authorities; and in others metropolitan boroughs. Some of these hold elections for a third of their councillors each time, some for half. Some parts of the country also have “metro mayors”, some of whom double up as local police and crime commissioners. There are fire and rescue authorities, sui generis councils such as the City of London and the Council of the Isles of Scilly as well as the Greater London Authority and, of course, the devolved parliaments and assemblies in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Each body has different powers and responsibilities, each funded according to different formulas described by the House of Commons library as “extremely complex”. Meanwhile, voting systems differ across the nations.

The problem is not so much the complexity of Britain’s political order, but the fact that it just doesn’t hold together: partly the product of tradition and partly of supposedly modernising reforms which have just been bolted on here and there. The result is a whole array of competing bodies with criss-crossing lines of responsibility and legitimacy, a mishmash of incohesion that robs the country of shared national moments, customs and stories. A country needs more than an army and king to hang together. 

Roger Scruton wrote that most beliefs necessary for the functioning of society are both “unjustified and unjustifiable” in purely rational terms; try to rationalise them, and you’ll end up losing them. National customs are justified not through reason but rather “as an anthropologist might justify the customs and rituals of an alien tribe”.

The House of Lords, rationalised to the point of illegitimacy, illustrates this perfectly. It once represented the landed interests of Britain, a national class stretching from Orkney to the Scillies, bound in a physical connection to the parts of the country that they owned and ran. In 1999, Tony Blair’s reform seemed necessary because much of this class’s old power and authority had gone. But what replaced it has made the Lords even more absurd: a House of inherited privilege has been replaced with an instrument of political corruption shorn of all power, responsibility and justification. The body which fused the powers of state more than any other — king, church, law, legislature and executive — is now a dead and rotting organ at the heart of Britain’s constitution. 

Something similar has happened with local democracy, which lost much of its autonomy and connection to the traditional boundaries of Britain with the local government reform act of 1974. This did away with many of the old county boundaries, replacing them with new more “rational” ones which might have looked good on a map, but did not plot onto the real-life loyalties of the people actually living on the land. The old counties of Britain could easily have formed the basis of a new class of elected peers for the House of Lords — or for a layer of English local democracy to match the parliaments in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Instead, new ones were created and crowbarred into the old system, neither rational nor traditional. 

There is something of the ancien regime to Britain’s local democracy. In pre-revolutionary France, there were more than 300 different legal codes. By the time Napoleon began reforming the system there were still over 40. And by the time he’d finished reforming the system there was one. “Napoleon instinctively understood that if France was to function efficiently in the modern world, she needed a standardised system of law and justice,” wrote Andrew Roberts. “Uniform weights and measures, a fully functioning internal market and a centralised education system, one that would allow talented adolescents from all backgrounds to enter careers according to merit rather than birth.”

Like post-revolutionary France, paradoxically, we are also in need of someone who can make sense of it all over again — a Napoleon to reinvigorate the British political order, to prune it back to give it life. Napoleon created a strong, unified nation state from a place even more diverse than the UK today. From a population of 28 million, some six million could not speak a word of French and another six million could only just understand it. After the chaos of the revolution, the population wanted conservatism, and Napoleon gave it to them. 

Today, Britain also needs a reforming state to once again bind the country together, to protect the things we have — nation, state, constitutional freedom and prosperity. We need more shared rituals, irrational or otherwise; more shared institutions; and more shared endeavours in order for us to keep telling a national story and not multiple little sub-national novellas that are unintelligible to the other. The old oak needs cutting back to be able to grow again. Vive L’Empereur! 

Theddlethorpe has always had an industrious underbelly. Between 1972 and 2018, it was known for the Theddlethorpe Gas Terminal, where natural gas gathered from beneath the North Sea was collected, then fed into the National Grid. At its peak, Theddlethorpe handled around 5% of the UK’s gas supply, but with the shift away from fossil fuels, the plant became redundant. In 2021, just as locals were feeling grateful for the site’s long-promised return to agricultural use, came news that the terminal might have an unwelcome afterlife — as the landward end of an undersea nuclear waste dump.

It is one of four sites being considered by the government for a Geological Disposal Facility (GDF), the others all being on the far side of the country, near Sellafield, a huge nuclear site in Cumbria. The idea is that vast storage caverns would be blasted into bedrock up to 1,000 metres under the sea, several miles offshore. “Higher activity” radioactive waste would then be transported to Theddlethorpe from 23 surface storage locations across the UK, and trundled out along a tunnel, to be walled up and forgotten.

The news was as unexpected as it was unpleasant. The nearest nuclear power station to Theddlethorpe is in Suffolk, 96 miles away as the fallout flies, 145 miles along often poor roads. The nearest train stations to which waste could be brought are Grimsby or Skegness, each about 20 miles away and both at the end of lines in need of upgrading. Economically, the area is dependent on tourism and agriculture, both of which could clearly be affected adversely by real or even imagined proximity to vast amounts of toxic substance. And the Lincolnshire coast is incidentally famous for its large numbers of migratory birds, who could carry toxins hundreds of miles.

So, the prospect of the area becoming not just a major industrial locus, but one dedicated solely to the handling of waste with a hazardous half-life of up to 100,000 years, filled locals with puzzlement as well as dread. “Why here?” one teacher asked wonderingly. “What possible economic, logistical or political justification could there be for such a scheme in a place like this?”

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The Theddlethorpe site lies above potentially exploitable energy reserves of gas and oil, and below them, coal; such geology is supposed to preclude the presence of a GDF. Nuclear Waste Services (NWS) recognises this as a problem: “Possible exploration in the future in this area means that it is more likely that future generations may disturb a facility.” As local resident and geologist-ecologist Biff Vernon points out: “Of course, we don’t want to extract these resources now, but thousands of years in the future, a civilisation might think differently. In their own literature, the GDF people rule out a site that overlies potential economic resources.”

And surely it makes sense to localise the inevitable risks of a subsea GDF. There hasn’t been an accident at Sellafield since the fire of 1957, but the beaches nearby nevertheless need to be combed constantly for radioactive objects, with 98 recovered during 2021. The immediate vicinity of Sellafield is already unfit for many other purposes; why contaminate hitherto unaffected areas? Especially because it would clearly be much cheaper to store waste close to its sources. NWS admits: “The transport provisions to the Theddlethorpe GDF Search Area are currently limited” and “significant works” would be required. The Government proposal suggests these works would cost between £20 and £53 billion — although as the tale of HS2 shows, the cost of extending transport networks is liable to gross underestimation. This throws up a question considered taboo in the discourse around large infrastructure projects: would expansion of either railways or roads really “benefit” an area whose residents generally value its rural character?

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Consider the human cost of the GDF construction, which would go on for many years prior to the arrival of waste — years of 24/7 disruption, heavy traffic, noise and huge spoil heaps. Much of this work would need to be carried out by brought-in specialists operating on short-term contracts. Any real jobs that may ensue would probably not materialise for at least a decade. As local Labour leader Tony Howard told BBC Radio Lincolnshire in 2021: “You’re not going to convert people from serving ice cream into nuclear waste specialists overnight.” Nevertheless, the NWS is promising thousands of new jobs for an area plagued by high seasonal unemployment. Older locals remember similar promises of skilled jobs being made when the gas terminal was first proposed. They were never kept.

Few in Lincolnshire feel compelled to martyr themselves for the sake of national sustainability. Investing in nuclear energy is part of the Government’s 10-point plan to achieve Net Zero by 2050, but according to new UnHerd polling, Lincolnshire is apathetic towards this ambition. In Louth and Horncastle, the constituency that Theddlethorpe sits in, 30% of respondents agreed that the Government spends too much time on green issues (and a further 28% didn’t know). No wonder, given that a Government proposal threatens to destroy their environment rather than protect it. This scheme is in many ways just another example of the clumsiness of too many “levelling up” projects — a top-down, bean-counting, crassly reductionist exercise in national political management, in which local character, local feeling and even local realities are largely side-lined.

And in the meantime, uncertainty reigns. There is no deadline yet for the final decision, although the sites are supposed to be narrowed down to two in 2026. In an already economically depressed area, local businesses are in limbo, and growth has been stunted. What tourism-related enterprise would invest in a coastline where the number of visitors might abruptly and markedly decline? What food processor or retailer would actively seek out produce from anywhere near a nuclear facility? How can councils plan long-term strategies? What about residents who wish to improve or sell their houses? It is too easy to dismiss local objections as selfish NIMBYism, but some of today’s protestors will not even be around if or when construction starts. They are doing it for others, and for posterity.

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NWS is clearly aware that its plan possesses few obvious attractions. It states that nothing will be built unless there is community backing, formalised by a “Test of Public Support” — a poll or referendum. It has accordingly set up the Theddlethorpe GDF Community Partnership to make its case (chaired by a former leader of Nottingham City Council, with a reported salary of £750 per day). So far, it has papered the area with thousands of handsomely-produced newsletters, promising that at least £1m will be distributed to local causes. Given that eastern Lincolnshire is facing permanent transformation, this doesn’t seem like much.

Where is local politics, in all of this? Some councillors have not helped themselves, by claiming to have no view on the GDF, despite joining first NWS’s Working Group and now the Community Partnership. Indeed, county and district council officers were in contact with NWS long before the scheme became public knowledge, a fact that inflames local cynicism. One understands the need for confidentiality in some council business, and that councillors may be well-intentioned, but to many voters, the optics aren’t good. Locals may have the chance to air their views during this May’s local elections, as objectors plan to ask certain candidates to clarify their views of the scheme. But as one of the respondents to the GOTEC questionnaire reflected: “I honestly don’t think our opinions matter to the powers that be.”

Some say the Theddlethorpe scheme is a gesture towards “levelling-up” this overlooked part of England: a feint to obfuscate Whitehall’s underlying commitment to expanding the Sellafield site. If so, it is Lincolnshire councillors who run the risk of being out-manoeuvred, and becoming unpopular. As elsewhere in Britain, this vast infrastructure project simply highlights the naivete of some local politicians, the weakness of local government, and London’s contempt for communities of all kinds.

For this is a tale of many towns. An alliance of experienced politicians, full-time administrators and a rich and secretive industry take on volunteer activists who are largely without funds and unversed in the arts of persuasion. A glacial decision-making process, with tedious procedures and slippery language, wears down local opposition. There are not even events against which opponents can mount demonstrations. It would be appallingly easy for Lincolnshire locals, who all have other lives to lead, to lose sight of the scheme, while behind the scenes, in dozens of dull meetings, it builds up steam and ultimately goes through by default. That would be a black day for all of Lincolnshire — and a poisonous precedent for other areas in danger of being altered forever against their will.

Today, both secessionism and unionism feed off the other’s incoherence. Sturgeon’s press conference in Edinburgh compellingly proved this: she described her decision in ways that made it sound as if she were some kind of martyr. Under her leadership, she said, the cause of Scottish nationalism had suffered because it had become caught up in the irrational partisanship of her opponents, who had grown to dislike her so much that they could no longer judge Scottish independence on its own merits. She was, she intimated, sacrificing herself in the hope that a new leader would be able to bring more people into the tent of Scottish nationalism. Unionists should not be complacent about this prospect — she may actually be correct — but the structural problem for Scottish nationalism is not the prejudice of its opponents, but the failings of its own offer.

Brexit has made Scottish independence a far more complicated prospect than it was before. It is now possible that we will look back on the referendum in 2014 as the moment Scottish independence made the most sense. Fair or not, Brexit means that Scotland cannot dilute the dominating reality of England simply by leaving the union and joining the rump UK in a wider EU. If anything, Brexit has made England’s hulking presence next to Scotland even more pronounced, while demanding answers from the SNP that it does not seem ready or able to provide. What happens at the border with England? Will Scotland introduce the euro? Will Holyrood accept common European debts? Will it rejoin the Common Fisheries Policy? For the SNP, Brexit has turned out to be both the casus belli for its second push for independence and a strategic disaster. The best thing that could happen to Scottish nationalism would be for Britain to rejoin the European Union.

For unionists, however, Brexit might be an unexpected weapon in their constitutional arsenal, but it is one whose very existence is a reminder of the union’s inherent Englishness. Today, it is impossible to escape the reality that the UK has ceased to function in any meaningful sense as a unified British state; it now operates as an incoherent and imbalanced union of separate entities whose English character has not been softened by devolution, but incalculably sharpened. The fact is, the more Holyrood dominates Scotland’s national life, the more English the actual national parliament in Westminster becomes. This is a hole in the national barrel, draining the legitimacy of parliament and in time the union itself. The irony, then, is that just as Brexit acts as both an irritant and a salve to the threat of Scottish independence, devolution itself is a prime source of the union’s instability, the unbridgeable fault line in the body politic which no-one in Westminster is prepared to confront.

Watching Sturgeon’s resignation, I was reminded of the late Tom Nairn, the great academic pin-up of Scottish nationalism whose book The Break-up of Britain argued that the British state was destined to collapse like the Hapsburg, Tsarist or Prussian regimes of the 19th and early 20th centuries. “It is a basically indefensible and unadaptable relic, not a modern state,” wrote Nairn. “The only useful kind of speculation has assumed a geriatric odour: a motorised wheelchair and a decent funeral seem to have become the actual horizons of the Eighties.” Nairn’s book was published in 1977 and yet the geriatric old relic endures, still supported by half  of Scottish voters, despite Brexit and the political crises in Westminster that have followed.

Yet Nairn cannot be dismissed as a false prophet. As a political force, Scottish Nationalism has been transformed since 1977. The SNP is now the dominant force in Scottish politics, with independence supported by almost half the population and most of the young. As a result, Britain is easily the most fragile power in western Europe, or indeed the wider Western alliance. Almost no other country — apart from Canada or Spain — is as close to breaking apart.

Nairn was also right to argue in the 2002 edition of his book, when devolution was being hailed as a great reform which would permanently obstruct the demand for independence, that the British state remained structurally unstable. “A new tide seeking real independence is forming itself beneath the facade of Blairism,” he wrote. “It will rise into the spaces left by New Labour’s collapse, and by the increasing misfortunes of the old Union state.” Thirteen years later, the SNP expelled Labour from Scotland, winning every seat but three.

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Nairn, in my view, was right to see long-term structural challenges to the British state, but wrong to believe that this made it uniquely outdated, or somehow destined to collapse. The fact that after eight years as First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon has resigned, still unable to answer how Scottish independence will be enacted, is testament to the inherent challenges of secession, not just continuity.

When I asked Nairn a few years ago about the challenge Brexit posed to Scottish nationalism, he was thoughtful and reflective, arguing that it changed the type of relationship an independent Scotland would have with the UK after the latter’s inevitable collapse. In his last interview before he died, Nairn argued that what would eventually replace Britain was still being worked out. “We’re trying to replace Great Britain… with something else, but what that is, there is no ready and living example of it to which we can turn. We have to make it up as we go along, because there is nothing else.”

In this he was right, but the truth is both sides are making it up as they go along. None of us have been here; everything is new. Unionism has yet to offer coherent answers to the problems posed by devolution to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland but not England; Brexiteers have yet to offer coherent answers to the problem of Northern Ireland and its border with the Republic; and Scottish nationalists have yet to offer coherent answers to the problem of seceding from Britain after Britain has seceded from Europe. Nicola Sturgeon departs as First Minister of Scotland having failed to find them. But her opponents should not crow, for they have not succeeded in this task either.

Over the past few months, researching a book on Britain’s long, troubled relationship with Europe, I have found a strange solace in the almost seasonal nature of our national life, with its endless wintery crises (usually involving the weakness of the pound and our ability to pay our way) that eventually give way to spring-like calms. Ben Pimlott’s biography of Harold Wilson, for example, is like a thunderstorm of charm and disorder, short fixes and political escapism. There was, of course, plenty of honour and achievement along the way, but as you turn the final page, you cannot help but wonder what it all amounted to. Here was a magical politician who dominated British politics for more than a decade, only to fade from national consciousness with alarming speed, his ghost barely even troubling the minds of his successors let alone haunting them. Today, Wilson is back in vogue as the man who finally ended 13 years of Tory rule, a favourite of Keir Starmer and some Sixties nostalgics, but this was a man almost broken by his own decline — and his country’s.

Wilson, though, is the rule in this regard, not the exception. A similar air of despondency hangs over almost all of Britain’s post war leaders up until 1979, each of whom fixated on the notion of British decline but were unable to escape its clutches.

And yet, here is the strange reality: despite it all, the country continued its slow, steady trudge over the fells, never veering much from the path it had been on before, the economy growing at much the same rate, only more slowly with each passing decade. Britain’s decline was largely relative, the living standards of people in Britain improving year on year.

Anyone scanning the record of British economic growth from 1949 to 2022 would be hard-pressed to spot any transformative moment. From our entry into the Common Market in 1973 to the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979, or, indeed, the referendum to leave the EU in 2016, we continued plodding along largely as before, however transformative we convinced ourselves one set of leaders or another was at the time. To the casual observer, it is the recessions which catch the eye more than the booms, most of which blew in from abroad, largely beyond the control of our leaders, the pandemic just the latest example. For Britain, the truth is that our crises are never quite as important as we imagine — and nor are our leaders.

To illustrate the point, here’s a challenge: when was the last time a British government or prime minister pro-actively achieved something of lasting importance, addressing some great strategic threat before it became an existential challenge? The disasters are far easier to list, but not the lasting achievements. Did any of Gordon Brown, David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson or Liz Truss leave us with any lasting monument to progress? It is hard to think of one. They largely managed crises — or, more often, caused them.

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Johnson took Britain out of the European Union, of course, but that hardly passes the test. The best that can be said for his Brexit negotiation is that it acted as a kind of emergency stent, unblocking the arteries of British democracy at a time when they had become fatally obstructed by the political failure to enact the result of the referendum. In itself this was no small thing, perhaps even a service to democracy, but it was an operation to deal with an emergency health crisis — not to stop one from happening in the first place. It also came at the obvious cost of creating a whole series of other crises that we are still living with today. Besides this, what else does Johnson have to show for his time in office that would not have happened without him? Ukraine has benefited from his instinctive, full-throated and continuing support, but let’s be honest, it is not British support which makes the difference in the Donbas — but American.

Johnson’s one strategic offer was his promise to use Brexit as a spur for a great national reset: “levelling up”. But what has happened since? Less than a year after he left office this policy already seems dead. Again, though, Johnson’s failure is not exceptional. In politics, turning the tide is almost impossible. Anthony Eden tried to protect Britain’s global status from the post-war reality only to reveal its decline at Suez; Harold Macmillan attempted something similar by trying to join Europe, only to be rejected by de Gaulle. Wilson’s grand plan to revolutionise the British economy with planning and science was then mugged by reality, while Ted Heath’s great corporatist alternative was similarly ended by events. All failed.

Even Margaret Thatcher, who is widely thought to have succeeded in her mission to radically reform Britain, is flattered by the narrative. A quick glance at Britain’s economic growth before and after she became prime minister suggests a far less revolutionary reality than we often imagine. Overall, Mrs Thatcher spent 11 years in power, her time defined by a period of decent but by no means extraordinary growth bookended by two deep recessions. In reality, her great success was relative. Britain grew faster than its European counterparts during her time in office, which had not been the case beforehand.

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Today it is hard to look back at the premierships of those who came next and think of a single lasting endowment. Perhaps Cameron can put gay marriage on his ledger, but once again, it is hard to believe that had he not existed, gay marriage would be illegal today. As brave and principled as it was, the reform was largely a reflection of the great social change happening across the Western world. The banal truth is that our prime ministers spend most of their time surfing the zeitgeist, not making it.

I remember challenging Boris Johnson about this very point after travelling with him to Northern Ireland a couple of years ago. He’d told me he was reading James Shapiro’s 1599: A Year In The Life Of William Shakespeare (I later realised this must have been research for his biography). The book spends much of its early pages detailing the trouble Queen Elizabeth was facing that year in Ulster. And there we were, I thought, four centuries on, and the British prime minister travelling back and forward to Northern Ireland still unsure how to handle events there. “It’s very, very hard to change the fundamentals,” Johnson told me. Yet he was confident that he could. Quaint, really, and yet he is still trying to bend history to his will.

Blair is closest to Thatcher in leaving relics which continue to shape our world. And yet even his greatest legacies are now either crumbling or ambiguous. The Good Friday Agreement remains a source of almost mystic reverence — despite (or largely because of) the reality that few seem to know what it contains. But even this great covenant of peace is now barely functioning as a result of Brexit and the Northern Ireland Protocol (though the peace it helped bring about still holds). Devolution, meanwhile, that other lasting legacy of Blairite reform, has lost its halo, no longer the stabilising constitutional act it was once supposed to be, but something closer to the opposite. Regardless, however profoundly important these two achievements were — and are — they were only parts of a wider strategy to turn Britain into what he saw as a modern European state. And if we judge him on this score, he failed just like the rest of them.

When surveying our political past, then, it’s hard to avoid the sense of an undercurrent pulling us along slowly, whatever frothy chaos we endure on the surface. When we are outperforming our European counterparts, we mistake the swell for normality, only to sink back down in time. Then, when we are being outperformed, we fret about permanent submersion. Over the long term, though, we bob along, like Poohsticks in a stream, change happening to us more often than not.

All of this might seem reason enough for despondency. But in a sense, it is evidence for hope. Britain might be in a tough spot right now, but the current flows on. Prime Ministers are never quite as transformative as they seem — for good or bad. In Westminster, managerial normality is already reasserting itself after the years of Johnson. What many hoped would be a great reset in national political and economic life has proved anything but. There has been no revolution in the country’s social and economic model, no great reduction in migration, or taxation, regulation or trade — so far only the old system, but with worse trading conditions.

To my mind, Britain should fear less calamitous, irreversible decline than soul-sapping unchangeable continuity. Leaders are rarely successful in diverting the great global currents that shape our world, but they must at least offer hope that they can be managed and used to the national advantage. Right now there is a dispiriting paucity of ideas about how Britain is supposed to do this today, or even a story for us to make sense of it all. Neither Keir Starmer nor Rishi Sunak has yet to show a way through the fog ahead.

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The tragi-comic figure of Liz Truss briefly tried something radical — and was quickly removed under pressure from the international markets. She may console herself that she is this country’s Barry Goldwater, the hero of the American right who lost in a landslide to Lyndon Johnson in 1964 only to inspire the conservative revolution that eventually swept all before it. All defeated leaders turn themselves into prophets in this way. Such a fate is unlikely to be Truss’s however. But still, another lesson from Britain’s post war history is that the ideas which grow to define our national story often begin their lives on the fringes, dismissed and rejected until eventually they are adapted and then adopted. This was the case with pro-Europeanism once upon a time and then much later on anti-Europeanism.

In Robert Blake’s masterful biography of Benjamin Disraeli, he tells the story of Disraeli’s early radicalism in a group of like-minded Tory ultras known as Young England who opposed free trade and the erosion of the old order. “The history of Young England has all the charm and nostalgia which attend tales of forlorn hopes and lost causes,” Blake writes. “[But] the success of such movements of protest cannot be measured by their immediate political failure. They must, rather, be regarded as symbols and examples that lend an imaginative glow to the dull course of party politics; showing that there are other ways to fame than conformism, diligence and calculation; showing that a gesture, however absurd it may seem to contemporaries, may sometimes live longer.” Is there a more uplifting message? Young England lost — and won. Disraeli became prime minister, created a new Toryism that continues to shape our political world but also accepted defeat in his opposition to free trade.

The search is on for the Young England radicals of today, the forlorn dreamers and romantics who will shape our future, alongside the diligent conformers who will manage it. The eurosceptics were once this band, but are no more — having secured almost complete victory after their years of seemingly hopeless retreat. But who will take their place today? Who will offer the country an imaginative glow to light the journey ahead? Right now, it is hard to see them emerging from either Labour or the Conservatives. But they will come. They always do.

Starmer and his Shadow Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, spent the past week in the somewhat unlikely setting of Davos in Switzerland. Their reason for attending the World Economic Forum — that exclusive club of business magnates and like-minded politicos — was clear: to demonstrate that Labour had moved back to what is euphemistically described as the “centre ground” (the “centre” is wherever an exclusive set of pundits and politicians decide it to be). Clearly now in better, more refined company, Starmer, in an interview with Emily Maitlis, rather let the cat out of the bag: “Westminster is too constrained,” he said. “Once you get out of Westminster, whether it’s Davos or anywhere else, you actually engage with people that you can see working with in the future. Westminster is just a tribal shouting place.”

I have known every Labour leader since James Callaghan (who gave me my first job interview and then thought better of making an offer), worked for one (Gordon Brown in his UN capacity), and for a number of years shared an office with another (Michael Foot). In that time, I have voted for every Labour leader who attained the office bar one, Tony Blair. I thought the latter was a phoney the moment I met him for a coffee in his Islington home shortly after he became leader. That feeling about Blair never escaped me in the years I spent on the party’s ruling National Executive Committee, before the disastrous Iraq war forced me to quit.

When running for the party leadership, Starmer was asked which former leader he most identified with. He settled on Harold Wilson, who still holds the record for winning four out of five General Elections for Labour. Wilson was, of course, the consummate party manager. On occasion he would do battle with the Left, but essentially took his cue from the inimitable Ian Mikardo, the Jewish Tribunite MP and the Commons’ resident unofficial “bookie”. The Mikardo maxim was that “in order to fly, Labour needed both a Left and a Right wing”. Sadly, few leaders have been able to free this old bird as Wilson once managed. But following the extraordinary toxicity that had characterised the relationship between the parliamentary Labour Party and Jeremy Corbyn, Starmer’s call for “unity” and his commitment to broadly social democratic policies was enough to persuade many, including me, to vote for him. Since then, however, he has picked his side and is ferociously pinioning the Left of the party.

“These are my principles,” Groucho Marx is said to have remarked. “If you don’t like them, I have others.” Starmer, after being reminded recently by the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg of some of the pledges he had made when standing for leader (or which there were at least ten), looked her in the eye and said: “When I was running for leader, I made pledges reflecting my values. Since then, a lot has changed.”

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Indeed it has. Each of his pledges, let alone his values, has since been discarded, along with the party’s former leader and a significant portion of its fee-paying membership. Most political leaders U-turn to an extent, but few with such lack of guile and poor dexterity as Starmer. Take Brexit: first he accepted the referendum result, before demanding a second one, and now apparently accepting it (at least for the time being). His interview in March 2020 with Andrew Neil will doubtless be mined to exhaustion by his opponents for maximum effect ahead of the next election.

Neil: “You made 10 policy pledges — including that energy, rail, water, the Royal Mail will be taken into common ownership; so, will they all be in Labour’s next manifesto?”
Starmer: “I’ve made that commitment — the pledges I have made indicate the direction of travel.”
Neil: “So, those four industries will be in the Manifesto, for nationalisation, in 2024?”
Starmer: “They will. They are baseline indicators for where we are going. I think that we’ll need to think about how we will do it.”
Neil: “What about abolishing university tuition fees then?”
Starmer: “They are all pledges, Andrew, so the answer to these questions is ‘yes’.”

On the privatisation of the NHS (firmly ruled out), Starmer now looks to the private sector to remedy the crisis. Elsewhere in recent months, the shapeshifting has moved with some abandon. Having garnered union votes for his election, Starmer subsequently criticised Shadow Ministers joining picket lines. Someone could have shown him the pictures of Labour Ministers, Shirley Williams, Denis Howell and Fred Mulley, no militants they, on the Grunwick picket line in the late Seventies, or a photo of Harriet Harman and the sadly missed Jack Dromey, in matching duffle coats, doing the same.

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Can Starmer pull off his Jekyll and Hyde act? Here he is when he was questioned about his predecessor during the leadership contest: “I want to pay tribute to Jeremy Corbyn, who led our party through some really difficult times, who energised our movement, and who’s a friend as well as a colleague!” Fast forward a few years, and Corbyn has become the object of the now-obligatory “six minutes of hate”; doubtless we shall soon hear that he has been blocked from standing in his Islington constituency.

The Forde Report, commissioned under Starmer into allegations of bullying, racism and sexism during the Corbyn era, produced enough uncomfortable truths that the leader and his consiglieres want to see buried. For instance, after claims of antisemitism dogged the Labour Party, Starmer resolved to tackle the crisis. So, according to Jewish Voice for Labour, under Starmer, an entirely disproportionate number of Jewish members, some 59 in total, are currently suspended, have now resigned, been expelled or been auto-excluded. A few were “cleared” and others received a “reminder of conduct”. Most have been investigated for allegations of antisemitism, which often means that they have been critical of Israel. The party membership, as a whole, is under unprecedented surveillance.

Members seeking selection locally or nationally have always been vetted for the more obvious misdemeanours that could rebound on the party. But, as Michael Crick has observed, the process has taken a sinister turn, with a number of individuals being blocked from standing for seemingly minor infractions, such as wishing Nicola Sturgeon a swift recovery from a bout of ill-health, or for once liking a post from a proscribed organisation before it had actually become proscribed. This process of filtration has been remarkably successful. Crick recently observed that out of the more than 70 or so parliamentary selections so far, only one contender from the Left of the party has managed to get through.

Under Starmer, it is estimated that 137,000 fee-paying members have either left, been suspended or expelled. There may be more, since the party is slow to cancel direct debits and we have less of an idea of how many new members may have joined. Practically, with fewer members and unions issuing blank bank transfers, Labour is potentially being led down the Tory route of “dark money”, with all of the pitfalls. Look no further than the recent row involving Wes Streeting, Dan Jarvis and Yvette Cooper, who all denied they did anything wrong by accepting tens of thousands of pounds from a company, MPM Connect, which is part-owned by Peter Hearn, a Labour donor, but does not have any obvious line of business.Meanwhile, Starmer is insistent that all Front Benchers now contribute to fundraising efforts. He has also recently recalled the services of Blair’s former chief fundraiser, Lord Levy, who was the centre of a “cash-for-honours” investigation in 2006. What could possibly go wrong?

Starmer has wisely drawn from Gordon Brown’s work around further constitutional reforms, and he is coming under pressure from his MPs to offer a Green manifesto. But where are the meat and potatoes; the bold vision that was at least encapsulated in Wilson’s promise of the “white heat of the technological revolution”? There are still two years until a General Election, one that comes with boundary changes that do not work in Starmer’s favour, a Scotland that has stopped sending large numbers of Labour MPs to Westminster, and an economy that may be beginning to recover. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde may be able to control the Labour Party, but that doesn’t mean they are certain to win an election.