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JUN 10 The Incredible Shrinking Woman If I ever have grandchildren, which seems a long shot at time of writing, I shall gather them on my knee and tell them of the General Election of 2017. "Grandpa Gladstone", their little voices will pipe; "tell us the tale of Corbyn the destroyer; of the Incredible Shrinking Woman; and of how the blazes the Democratic Unionist Party ended up in government". And I shall take my pipe from my mouth, look deep into the middle distance and try to explain how Theresa May was transformed in six short weeks from Boadicea to Jar Jar Binks; how a Labour leader whose own MPs didn't want him to become prime minister stormed the country like a tribute act to the Stones; and how an election inspired by Brexit ignored the single biggest issue confronting the country. This was a night of paradox and perplexity. The Conservatives gained their largest share of the vote since Margaret Thatcher in 1983, winning more votes than Tony Blair at the height of his popularity. Yet Theresa May emerges not so much diminished as shrivelled, her departure now a matter of time. The Labour Party lost its third general election in a row, gaining only four more seats than under Gordon Brown in 2010. Yet its supporters are electrified, its fortunes on the march and Jeremy Corbyn's leadership unassailable. So what can we learn from what happened - and where might things go from here? First, this was a good night for democracy. The two most dangerous tendencies in our political system - the long withdrawal of the young from electoral politics, and the imbalance of power between generations - have been decisively and spectacularly reversed. Young voters swept through the polling stations like an avenging army; and, far from piling up uselessly in already safe seats, their votes carried Tory citadels like Kensington and Canterbury. For this - wherever one stands on his policies - Corbyn deserves enormous credit. He set out to re-engage young people with democracy, and our politics will be healthier as a result. It was a good night, too, for Parliament. Since the referendum last year, our politics has been infected with a poisonous atmosphere of authoritarianism. Dissent has been treated as heresy and opposition as treason, while parliamentarians have been held up as 'Enemies of the People'. For our repellent tabloid press, this was to have been an exorcism, not an election: a chance to 'crush the saboteurs', impose 'unity' on Westminster and burn out of Parliament dissenting voices. Instead, May has lost her majority and must live at the will of other parties in the House. Contrary to the strange fascination with 'strong and stable government', a hung Parliament is likely to provide better government than an outright majority. The wilder fringes of the Tory manifesto - grammar schools, fox hunting, compulsory voter ID - are now surely in the dustbin. Ministers must engage seriously with Parliament over Brexit, and something will surely have to give on NHS funding, the schools budget and the wider decay of Britain's public services. A third beneficiary of the campaign is the Union with Scotland (if not with Northern Ireland). Multi-party politics are back, and the unhealthy situation by which neither the Government nor the Opposition at Westminster had any stake in the Scottish electorate has come to an end. In Scotland, as in England, the populist tide has been checked: and a second independence referendum looks more distant than at any time since 2014. Finally, the result has exposed the pretensions of our putrid tabloid press. Every drop of poison that could be wrung from the bile ducts of The Sun, The Mail and The Express was poured out upon Labour in this campaign. It proved powerless to prevent a historic collapse in the Tory lead. The tabloids' readership has been contracting for years, and is concentrated in ever smaller sectors of the electorate. If this election finally breaks their hold upon the governing classes (and upon the broadcast media), our democracy will be healthier as a result. So what of the two main parties? It hardly needs saying that this was a catastrophic result for the Conservatives and a humiliation for May personally. So it is perhaps worth reiterating that the Tories remain comfortably the largest party in the House, winning more seats than Labour, the Liberal Democrats, the SNP, Plaid Cymru and the Greens combined. A campaign of almost comic ineptitude nonetheless delivered 42.4% of the vote and 13.6 million individual suffrages. The party has rebuilt its fortunes in Scotland, increased its vote share in Wales and piled up additional votes (though not seats) in the North and the Midlands. None of this detracts from the disaster of the night, but it suggests that a more adept leader, wielding a less destructive manifesto, would have something to work with. Yet the new Tory coalition of which the party dreamed has also proven fissile - and things may get worse before they get better. UKIP voters did not march obediently into the Conservative column; on the contrary, a significant minority seems to have found in Corbyn the anti-establishment, protest figure they had previously identified in Farage. In Scotland, the Ruth Davidson effect is predicated on a model of Conservatism that has precious little in common with the Brexiteering, anti-immigrant, UKIP-lite confection served up by May - let alone with their new allies in the DUP. If Scottish Tories vote loyally with their party at Westminster, they risk destroying their brand in Holyrood; if they do not, May's troubles are only just beginning. Above all, the alliance with the Democratic Unionist Party poses real dangers to the Conservatives. A party that screamed blue murder at the prospect of a Labour-SNP alliance in 2015, and that (rightly) made much of Corbyn's IRA connections, has a great deal to lose from climbing into the lap of an extreme evangelical party, keen to funnel money to its own supporters in Ulster. The votes of the anti-gay, anti-abortion, climate-change deniers of the evangelical right may carry the Conservatives through a parliamentary session, but the damage to their reputation could be severe. What, then, of Labour? Those of us who have been critical of Corbyn should acknowledge the scale of his achievement. A party that seemed dead and buried just weeks ago has gained seats across Scotland, Wales and the South of England. It has energised young activists and voters, while posting its highest share of the vote since the landslide election of 2001. Corbyn's leadership is now untouchable, and the premiership no longer a fantasy. Yet for Labour, too, there are problems ahead. The Labour manifesto was a superb campaigning document, but as a programme for government, it had two significant flaws. In the first instance, the party has no policy of any substance on Brexit: the issue that will consume the attention of the next Parliament. Brexit was a gaping void in the Labour manifesto, that was only possible because of the comparable silence coming from the Conservative benches. A hung Parliament makes that conspiracy of silence harder to maintain, and puts at risk the alliance between Labour's Eurosceptic leadership and the young voters who have driven its revival. Secondly, the Labour manifesto - however attractive in the short-term - has saddled the party with a mass of spending commitments from which it will not be easy to resile. That's fine, if it can find the revenue to pay for them; but with a disruptive Brexit looming and a probable deterioration in the economy, tax revenues are more likely to shrink than to grow in the coming years. Labour is right to declare war on the injustices of austerity, but the call to battle has not been accompanied by any serious debate about how to finance this. Doing so will involve a more serious conversation about taxation - and about priorities - than the party has yet been willing to countenance. Finally, the coalition of forces behind the Labour vote looks almost as fissile as the Conservatives'. Labour brought to the polling stations two very different sets of voters: one, fired by enthusiasm for Jeremy Corbyn; another, that deplores the Labour leadership but was confident it would not win. That coalition may prove harder to sustain as power becomes a realistic prospect. In short, the revival of the two-party system seems to me more brittle than at first appears. Both main parties remain unstable coalitions, wheeling their rickety caravans into the storms blowing from the East. The whirligig of Brexit is only now beginning to turn; and when British politics stumbles out the other end, it may yet look very different to the present. Posted 10th June by Robert Saunders 5 View comments MAY 22 The May Illusion As David Cameron could testify, the danger of basing an election campaign on a fantasy is that it rarely survives the collision with reality. The speed with which Cameron cut the trouser elastic of his own government, barely a year after promising "competence" versus "chaos", set a high benchmark for political mis-selling; but his successors are approaching the challenge with considerable verve. In junking her flagship policy on social care - her fourth significant U-turn in ten months - Theresa May has transformed "strong and stable leadership" from a slogan into a punchline. As Margaret Thatcher could have reminded her, "being a strong leader is like being a lady: if you have to tell people you are, you probably aren't". Of all the robotic slogans currently raking their nails across the eardrums of the electorate, the "strong and stable" tag seems the most ill-judged. That's not just because it sounds like a brand of toilet paper, or one of those pills you can buy from the condom machines in the pub. "Strength" is a bold claim for a government that abandoned its budget at the first breath of tabloid criticism, and whose leader spent three days rummaging around for her backbone while others spoke out against Trump's Muslim ban. A "strong" leader does not spend an election campaign sealed in private locations in case she accidentally meets a member of the public, or refuse questions from the press unless they've been approved in advance. Nor was this strength much in evidence during the referendum last year, when May announced that Britain would be less prosperous, less secure and less sovereign outside the EU, before going into hiding for the rest of the campaign and then pivoting on a sixpence within hours of the vote. As for "stability": whatever is coming over the hill on 8 June, it is not a period of cautious managerialism. This is a government of almost staggering ambition, dedicated to the most radical, disruptive policy adventure of modern times. In just two years it plans to rip up our single largest trading arrangement, overhaul 40 years of foreign and economic policy, and reconstruct our entire system of agricultural funding, regional policy, industrial strategy and border control. When the dust has settled, we may perhaps be more prosperous, more sovereign and more "global" than we are today. But this is not a manifesto for "stability". At best, it is an exhilarating slalom-ride into undiscovered territory; at worst, a wild plunge off the edge of a cliff. Like Iron Man, facing down an alien army with a reminder that "we have a Hulk", the Tory plan for Brexit seems to go little further than to put Theresa May in charge of it and invite her to "smash". Yet there is not the slightest evidence that May is suited to the Messianic role in which she has been cast. The result is an extravagant fiction: a personality-based campaign, marketing a personality that cannot safely be exposed to the electorate. History does not record whether May is a fan of winsome boyband One Direction; yet in the very week that Harry Styles launched his solo career, the Conservative Party seemed to have joined his former employers on the scrapheap of history. At the manifesto launch on Thursday, the Tory brand was hardly to be seen. Instead, banners proclaimed "Theresa May's team" and "Theresa May's manifesto for government", while Cabinet ministers bounced up and down like love-struck teenagers, cheering "my policies", "my manifesto" and "my government". The danger is that this becomes a substitute for serious thought. May tells us, repeatedly, that "every vote for me and my team strengthens my hand in the Brexit negotiations". Yet the EU27 will negotiate on the basis of their national and collective self-interest, not on their reading of the arithmetic at Westminster. What the British government needs is not less scrutiny at home but a clearer understanding of what it is trying to achieve. May has at least begun to nod towards the risks involved. Launching the Conservative her manifesto last week, she warned that if the negotiations failed, "the consequences for Britain and for ... ordinary working people will be dire". Yet the only danger she seems willing to acknowledge is that the negotiations might be conducted by somebody else, who lacks her strength and steel. A prime minister who will not admit the trade-offs inherent in Brexit - who refuses even to acknowledge that the currency dropped as a result of the Brexit vote - is setting up voters for an incendiary collision with reality. May likes to be compared to Margaret Thatcher, the "Iron Lady" who brandished her handbag at the European Council. A more troubling precedent might be Neville Chamberlain, another politician who took personal control of foreign policy despite having no experience of diplomacy. Chamberlain is a much-misunderstood figure, whose reputation as an "appeaser" has left an unfortunate legacy in British politics. In popular memory, he has become a caricature in a political morality tale, which contrasts the "weak" diplomacy of the "appeasers" with the roar of the Churchillian lion. Yet Chamberlain's problem was not weakness but an exaggerated confidence in his own strength - and a determination to take command of a policy area he did not understand. Like May, Chamberlain marked a shift from previous Conservative leaders, and he brought to the premiership a substantial record in domestic politics. He inherited one of the great parliamentary majorities of the twentieth century; and his approval ratings reached such extraordinary proportions that pop songs were composed in his honour. Yet he had little feel for diplomacy. His brother, who had been Foreign Secretary, famously urged him to "remember that you don't know anything about foreign affairs", but the warning went unheeded. Viewing dissent as disloyalty, he actively shut down alternative sources of debate, closing the Foreign Office News Department when it reported on Nazi rearmament, leaning on newspaper editors not to report stories that might jeopardise the talks with Germany, and demanding unity behind his negotiating position. As one of his ministers later recalled, "He was so sure that his plan was right ... that his singleness of urgent purpose made him impatient of obstacles and indifferent to incidental risks". From the Munich disaster to the Suez crisis, and from Cameron's EU negotiations to the Iraq War, the cult of personal diplomacy has an inglorious record in British politics. International relations are not an exercise in will-power, and critical voices are not saboteurs. The domestic limits of our "strong and stable" government have been cruelly exposed over the last twenty-four hours, in a manner that may cost the Conservatives in the polls. If we sail the same ship into the Brexit negotiations, the consequences could be altogether worse for us all. Posted 22nd May by Robert Saunders 2 View comments APR 19 The Charge of the Left Brigade There has always been a touch of the Grim Reaper about Theresa May, and yesterday morning she sharpened her sickle, donned robes of purest midnight and came for the soul of the Labour Party. For Opposition MPs, who have spent the last six months ordering flowers, taking leave of their loved ones and polishing up the coffin lids, the coming election has all the allure of a ride into the Russian cannon on the plains of Balaclava. "Tories to right of them, Tories to left of them, Tories ahead of them volleyed and thundered ... Into the valley of death rode the two hundred". Yet the tragedy of this election is not solely its destructive potential for the Labour Party. It is the poverty of choice on offer, at a time when our politics has rarely felt more urgent. With a misfiring government careering along behind populist forces it cannot control, the case for a progressive alternative has never been stronger. Yet the options have rarely felt so inadequate. For a party that is allegedly on course for a landslide, the Conservative position is weaker than at first appears. Theresa May is a wooden performer who looks as comfortable in front of the camera as a vampire on a sunbed. Behind her looms the least talented cabinet of my lifetime, which is grappling simultaneously with a funding crisis in the NHS, the collapse of the social care system, the continuing immolation of the public finances and the prospect of a second independence referendum in Scotland. Nothing so far suggests that it is remotely adequate to the task. The Home Secretary, Amber Rudd, appears to believe that you can crack online encryption by manipulating "the necessary hashtags"; the Chancellor's inaugural budget evaporated at the first breath of tabloid criticism; and if Boris Johnson makes it through the campaign without fathering a child, declaring war or triggering an international incident, the Conservative Press Office can feel well pleased with its work. May is also straining the patience of the electorate. If she wanted a personal mandate, she should have gone to the country last autumn. Instead, she not only ruled out an election in the most explicit terms; she pinned her integrity to that decision, telling reporters that "I mean what I say and I say what I mean. There won't be an early election". Despite dark warnings of sabotage in Parliament, MPs have waved through the government's Brexit legislation with much larger majorities than in the referendum itself. That leaves only two compelling arguments for an election at the present time: the first, that Labour looks ripe for the taking; the second, a fear that the economy will deteriorate later in the year. Neither is an easy sell to the electorate, who may resent being called out for a third time in two years. The greatest danger to the Conservatives may be the management of expectations. Voters will not turn out if the result seems a foregone conclusion; and as political allegiances become more balkanized, so landslides become harder to win. In the South West, the Lib Dem revival endangers a tranche of Tory seats won in 2015, requiring them at the very least to divert resources to holding what they have. The collapse of UKIP releases more voters for the Conservative Party, but it also limits the prospect of a mass defection in Labour's heartland seats. Even the Labour Party still has one or two bullets left to fire. For the first time since the Blair era, it is flush with cash and boasts the only mass membership in UK politics. Over the last fortnight it has begun, belatedly, to assemble a serious policy offer on issues like free school meals, pensioner benefits and the living wage. It's not yet a programme for government, but the concept of a Labour Manifesto is no longer a contradiction in terms. With two dozen MPs facing prosecution; with inflation rising faster than wages; and with public services in disarray, the Conservatives should be approaching the next election with real anxiety. Instead, they have brought it forward three years. The reasons for that can be summed up in two words: The Alternative Despite the ravings of the Daily Mail, which has instructed its readers to "Crush the saboteurs", it is the weakness of the Opposition, not its strength, that has triggered this election. Not since the nineteenth century has the Opposition entered an election campaign in such an enfeebled condition. Less than two years ago, Labour was the bookies' favourite to form a government; today, it lags in the polls by as much as 20 percentage points. The party has no discernible policy at all on the two biggest issues of our times - Brexit and the public finances - and as John McDonnell made clear this morning, it does not intend to focus on these issues during the campaign. In a binary question on the best candidate for prime minister, Jeremy Corbyn achieves the remarkable feat of coming third behind Theresa May and "Don't Know". Even his own MPs don't consider him a serious candidate for office. All this is before the Conservative Press Office starts cracking its knuckles. For all the prating about a right-wing press running scared of the socialist alternative, the grim truth is that the Tories have gone easy on Corbyn since 2015. Over the next six weeks, every word that Corbyn and McDonnell have spoken for the last forty years will be pored over, ripped out of context and plastered across the front pages: the association with Hamas and the IRA; the excoriation of NATO; the swithering around on the EU; the tenderness towards extremists and the hostility towards previous Labour governments. It will be the most viciously negative campaign in decades; and the tragedy for progressive politics is that much of it will be true. Diane Abbott suggested yesterday that voters faced a simple choice: "between Theresa May's Britain and Jeremy Corbyn's Britain". The tragedy is that she's right. Despite the mild tumescence of the Liberal Democrats, there is currently a blasted wilderness in the centre of British politics, where many voters would wish to position themselves. Britain desperately needs a progressive and serious-minded Opposition: that will accept the verdict of the referendum while seeking the closest relationship with Europe; that is serious about rebuilding the public finances, without loading the costs onto the poor, the young and disabled; and that views neither Cecil Rhodes nor Hugo Chavez as the beau ideal of statesmanship. Above all, we need a liberal, progressive alternative that will stand up for a pluralistic parliamentary democracy, against the totalitarian impulses of a tabloid press that demands the silencing of dissent, the burning out of traitors and heretics, and that regards opposition and scrutiny as a crime against the people. If you see it, let me know. Posted 19th April by Robert Saunders Labels: Brexit Corbyn election GE2017 May 4 View comments FEB 28 John Major: The Dark Knight of Brexit When John Major was prime minister in the nineties, his cautious, mild-mannered persona was the stuff of legend. Such was his lack of charisma, critics jested, that "if he became a funeral director, people would stop dying". So it was a surprise to read in the tabloids this morning that the Grey Man of British politics had allegedly fired up the chainsaw and "gone tonto" against Theresa May and her government. Reporting on his speech at Chatham House last night, the Express accused the former prime minister of "a furious anti-Brexit rant". The Daily Mail called it "an incendiary speech", an "acidic and sly" intervention by the "vengeful doormat" of British politics, while the Telegraph wrote breathlessly of his "extraordinary attack on Theresa May's government". Ironically, Major had begun his remarks with an appeal to end the shouting down of contrary opinions; so inevitably, like overgrown school-boys with baseball bats, Brexiteers lined up to deliver a punishment beating. Iain Duncan Smith accused Major of "the bitter speech of an angry man", while Nadine Dorries mocked him as "a dull, irrelevant, sad, adulterous, hypocritical, pompous has-been". Jacob Rees-Mogg, an unlikely flag-bearer for modernity, dismissed his former leader as "yesterday's man with yesterday's opinions", a remark that was indicative not just of the abusiveness of the modern Right but of its curious ahistoricism. Not so long ago, it was a founding principle of *Conservatism* that "yesterday's opinions" had much to teach us. So what was the "treachery" of which Major was guilty? Far from rejecting the outcome of the referendum, or demanding - as Duncan Smith falsely alleged - that the electorate "re-run it again until they get it right", Major began with an explicit acceptance of the result in June: Eight months ago a majority of voters opted to leave the European Union. I believed then - as I do now - that this was an historic mistake, but it was one - once asked - that the British nation had every right to make. The Government cannot ignore the nation's decision and must now shape a new future for our country. In other words, he did exactly what Leave voters have repeatedly asked Remainers to do: to accept the result, however reluctantly, and to engage constructively in the debate about what happens next. He then delivered a series of warnings, which the most ardent Brexiteer would be unwise to neglect. The first was a reminder of what is at stake. As Tony Blair noted in his own speech last week, Brexit was not a single moment of decision. It is a process that will unfold over the coming years, involving ministers in further decisions that will be felt across the spectrum of British politics. If that process is mishandled, the consequences could be devastating. Whatever its intrinsic merits, a botched Brexit has the potential to break up the United Kingdom and collapse the three-hundred year union between England and Scotland. It risks disrupting the fragile peace process in Northern Ireland, jeopardising a twenty-five-year struggle to bring peace to that troubled region. Failure to secure our economic links with the Continent will dislocate trade, send valuable industries overseas and put thousands of people out of work. If the negotiations fail, Major noted, it will be "those least able to protect themselves" who are "most likely to be hurt". This was not an assault on Brexit; it was an appeal to get Brexit right. The approaching diplomatic exercise is probably the most difficult in which the British state has ever engaged; yet complex negotiations are being approached with the swagger of a drunk at closing time. Like a beery football hooligan on a stag weekend, our Foreign Secretary veers around the streets of Europe shouting lewd insults, singing songs about the War and chundering over historic monuments. He has likened the EU to a wartime prison camp, got into a spat with the Italian government, and compared Brexit to the "liberation" of Eastern Europe from the Soviet bloc. Malta, which holds the Presidency of the EU Council, is dismissed by a senior Tory MP as "a tiny little island", "anxious to scoop ... some of the spoils of Brexit". Meanwhile our boorish newspapers instruct the EU to give us what we want "or you'll be crushed". All this makes a successful negotiation much harder to achieve - with all the dire consequences that involves. It also stores up future problems for the Government, by raising expectations that it cannot possibly meet. As Major put it, I have watched with growing concern as the British people have been led to expect a future that seems to be unreal and over-optimistic. Obstacles are brushed aside as of no consequence, while opportunities are inflated beyond any reasonable expectation of delivery. The electorate are told that they can enjoy all the benefits of membership with none of its costs, in a deal unsullied by trade-offs, compromise or concession. Machiavelli himself could not pull off such a deal; and when that becomes clear, Theresa May and her ministers will feel the full venom of some of those now cheering them on. Newspapers and backbenchers will cry treason; ministers' own pronouncements will be brandished in their faces; and those who voted in June - in some cases, for the first time in decades - will again feel betrayed by the democratic process. John Major can do what current ministers cannot, from fear of the tabloids and of their own supporters. He can point out the rocks that lie ahead, and seek to manage expectations among the wider public. In that sense, he and others like him are the critical friends of Brexit, who make a successful outcome more likely rather than less. Without seats or offices at risk, they can take the punishment before which MPs and ministers tremble. To misquote The Dark Knight, they are the politicians Brexit needs, if not those it deserves. For the most serious danger to Brexit now comes, not from its avowed opponents, who are divided among themselves and adrift from public opinion. It comes from the silencing of constructive debate on the choices that lie ahead. The peace, prosperity and very existence of the United Kingdom now rest in the hands of a government with little experience of foreign policy or of international negotiation. We should all hope that they succeed; but this is unlikely so long as even candid friends are denounced as traitors. Curiously, both main parties are now led by tribes that consider critical comment an act of treason. That mindset, as I have written elsewhere, has driven the Labour party into a decline that may yet prove terminal. If the Brexit Right continues down the same path, the consequences could be more costly still for us all. Posted 28th February by Robert Saunders Labels: Brexit Major Referendum 0 Add a comment FEB 24 Everything is Awesome It is hard to exaggerate the cataclysm that engulfed Labour in Copeland. Politics has no iron laws, but for an Opposition to lose a seat at a by-election to the governing party breaks every known rule of electoral warfare. Since 1945, it has happened only when (a) the sitting MP defected to the SDP and ran against his former colleagues; (b) the Labour candidate won the most votes but was disqualified for holding a peerage (yes, really); or (c) in seats with wafer-thin majorities. Copeland could not be more different. This was a fortress, a seat that had voted Labour at every general election for eighty years. The last Conservative to represent Copeland was born in the 1870s, when the very idea of a Labour Party was an absurdity. Even in 2015, a disastrous year for the party, Labour held the seat comfortably with a 6.5 point lead. It fielded a popular local candidate, and the threat to a local hospital meant it could fight on solid Labour territory. So the loss of Copeland is not a 'setback' or a 'misfortune'. For the Labour Party, it is the breaking of the seals; the opening of the books of judgement in the latter days. Blaming the nuclear issue isn't good enough: a single by-election posed no threat to Sellafield, and the local candidate could hardly have been more pro-nuclear if she had exposed herself to gamma rays and hulked out on the campaign trail. Nor should the party take false comfort from hanging on to Stoke Central, a seat won by nearly 17 percentage points in 2015. The Tories barely campaigned until the final week and the UKIP candidate ran a comically inept campaign; yet still Labour lost ground. Copeland is a beacon, not a blip. As a Liberal MP once put it, 'The angel of death is abroad in the land. You may almost hear the beating of his wings'. The response from the leadership and its acolytes has been entirely predictable. Like a man brandishing an umbrella at the Atlantic Ocean, Richard Burgon dismissed Copeland as a 'Labour marginal', rather missing the point that all Labour seats are now marginal. For Denis Skinner, the 'glaring lesson' of the result was that Labour 'isn't left-wing enough', while Corbyn himself murmured something about a victory for the Conservative government being a rebuke to 'the political establishment'. Interviewed on the Today Programme, John McDonnell blamed Brexit, the nuclear industry, Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson, before concluding that Labour must carry on exactly as before and that all criticism of the leadership must now cease. It was like watching the poor, doomed citizens of The Lego Movie, singing 'Everything is awesome' as the Kragle prepares to fire. It is difficult to be temperate about those who have brought Labour to this state. The party's problems go back far beyond 2015; but rather than addressing them, Labour retreated into a narcissistic fantasy of its own creation. Like a battered old teddy bear in a cape, Jeremy Corbyn was endowed with superhuman powers that existed only in the minds of the children waving him around. That illusion proved impervious to evidence to the contrary: whether the desperate state of the polls; the policy vacuum at the heart of the party; the chaotic incompetence of the leader's office; or its sheer irrelevance to the debate around Brexit. It's not as if we weren't warned. In 2016, almost everyone who had worked with the leadership, or who had served the Labour Party in the past, warned of the iceberg ahead. Labour MPs, MEPs, local councillors and peers all begged the party to change course. The Shadow Cabinet resigned en masse, as did Corbyn's own economic advisory team. His head of policy went to work for Owen Smith. Every living former leader of the party, from Neil Kinnock to Ed Miliband, urged a change of leadership. To which the membership replied, its fingers stuck firmly in its ears: 'we know best'. And here we are. Corbyn's position is currently impregnable, so the future of the party is for him to determine. The question is one not of personality but of purpose. What is his leadership for? If the goal is to win an internal struggle within the party, then victory is assured. The membership is larger than ever and has swung sharply to the left. Corbyn's hold on its affections is not in doubt. His critics in the parliamentary party are demoralised and directionless; all that remains is to bayonet the wounded. But a party of government must surely aspire to more. The Labour Party is not a private members' club. Its success cannot be measured by the size of its membership list, or the scale of Corbyn's victories in its own internal leadership contests. A party exists, not to make its members feel good, but to make a difference to the lives of those it claims to represent. If Labour wants to influence the shape of Brexit; to stop hospitals closing; to rescue the social care system; or to roll back the anti-immigrant mood that is engulfing British politics, it must change course. Yet the message from the bridge is "steady as she goes". In Corbyn world, as in Legoland, 'Everything is awesome'. Posted 24th February by Robert Saunders Labels: Blair Brexit Copeland Corbyn Labour 1 View comments JAN 1 2016 and the Crisis of Parliaments The Burning of the House of Lords and Commons, by J.W. Turner (1834) The year that has passed dealt three tremendous shocks to Britain's parliamentary system. Taken together, they constitute a quiet revolution: potentially the most significant recasting of how Britain is governed since the coming of universal suffrage. Understanding how this has happened, why it matters and what should be done about it is essential, if we are not to sleepwalk into new and potentially more dangerous forms of government in the year ahead. The Crisis of Parliaments The first great shock was Brexit, which struck the parliamentary system like a visit from the Death Star. The referendum lifted the biggest issue in British politics out of the hands of Parliament, then delivered a verdict that comprehensively over-rode its judgement. With three-quarters of MPs backing Remain, the vote to leave was a devastating indictment of the judgement of Parliament and of its claim to represent the people. The shockwaves will be felt for decades, as the whole cast of British foreign, economic and trade policy is reset in a manner to which MPs are largely hostile. If Brexit marked one blow to Parliament, the re-election of Jeremy Corbyn was another. For the first time in British history, the Leader of the Opposition commands no meaningful support within the House of Commons. He was placed in that role against the express opposition of MPs; and when they attempted to remove him, even serious news outlets described it as a "coup". A vote of no confidence, backed by three quarters of the parliamentary party, was dismissed as of "no constitutional legitimacy". Corbyn's re-election confirmed a remarkable constitutional fact: that the power to appoint the Leader of the Opposition no longer resides in Parliament. Labour MPs now huddle together on the backbenches, powerless behind a leader whose mandate is entirely extra-parliamentary. Only a happy accident prevented an even more serious constitutional anomaly on the Conservative benches. If Andrea Leadsom had not given a foolish interview to the newspapers, bringing a premature end to the Tory leadership race, Britain would now have its first directly elected Prime Minister. The new premier would have been placed in Downing Street, not by Parliament, nor even by the electorate, but by 170,000 entirely anonymous party members. Not since the Great Reform Act have a few hundred thousand people exercised so much unaccountable and undemocratic power. This was followed by a third key blow: the controversy around Article 50. When the High Court ruled that only Parliament could trigger the withdrawal process, the tabloids responded as if a coup d'etat had taken place. The Daily Mail denounced the judges as "enemies of the people", who had "declared war on democracy". The Daily Express dismissed MPs as a "Westminster cabal", that could not be trusted to carry out the will of the people. Even when MPs voted by a majority of 5-1 (rather larger than the majority in the referendum) that Article 50 should be triggered before April, The Daily Telegraph published the names of the 89 dissidents, accusing them of "contempt for referendum voters". Minorities must now be silenced, not simply outvoted. The most striking feature of the Article 50 case is that it is happening at all. The spectacle of MPs waiting patiently, while the courts decide whether to return powers that they are quite capable of demanding for themselves, would have astonished the Victorians. If the court finds for the government, Parliament will become irrelevant to the single biggest question in British politics. If the government loses, it will table an unamendable bill designed to prevent any meaningful parliamentary involvement. Either way, talk of "the sovereignty of Parliament" has become a quaint archaism, like singing "Britannia rules the waves" on the last night of the Proms. Does it matter? Does any of this matter? Parliament is a medieval institution in a digital age, and there have always been those who suspect that it exists rather to frustrate the popular will than to enact it. Surveys consistently rank MPs alongside journalists, estate agents and bankers as the professions least trusted by the public, a sentiment deepened by Iraq, Chilcot and the expenses scandal. Why have MPs at all when, as the Daily Express notes, we already have "a government carrying out the will of the people"? Democracy is a principle, not a form of government. It expresses a conviction that "the demos", or "the people" should govern, but says nothing about the forms through which this is done. Since only anarchists believe that "the people" can govern themselves without rules or institutions, some mechanism is necessary through which "the will of the people" can be tested and expressed. That is harder than it sounds. In all but the most primitive societies, "the people" are a chaos of different interests, impulses and identities. Human beings are not, like the Borg, mere extensions of a single, unitary intelligence; they are farmers and factory workers; old and young; rich and poor. They are shopkeepers, manual labourers and company directors. They vote for different parties, follow different religions and cleave to different values. Democracy is a process, not a body of opinion, which seeks to arbitrate between the glorious cacophony of voices within a free society. It is this that underpins a parliamentary system. The word "Parliament" comes from the French word "to speak". It is a place where the different classes and interests that make up a nation come together to parley. MPs talk, debate and bargain; they make compromises, in order to build coalitions of support. Where agreement cannot be reached, the majority must decide; but even majorities are alignments of conflicting ideas and intentions, pulling in different directions even as they coalesce around a temporary position. That's why there are 329 MPs on the government benches, rather than one MP wielding 329 votes. In a parliamentary system, dissidents are outvoted, but not silenced. They can test and challenge the majority, asking difficult questions and trying to peel off support. Opposition is not just expected; it is institutionalised. A shadow administration exists throughout the duration of the parliament, led by "the Leader of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition". The archaic title captures something important: that opposition is itself a patriotic duty. 'The true meaning of democracy' The vision of democracy currently taking root is very different. For the tabloids, in particular, "the will of the people" is clear and unambiguous. Those who oppose it are guilty of treason against democracy. "Time to silence Brexit whingers", proclaims the Daily Express. "Damn the Bremoaners and their plot to subvert the will of the British people", the Daily Mail expostulates. For a columnist in the Express, no punishment could be too severe for critics of Brexit: Here's what I would do with them: clap them in the Tower of London ... we should give them 28 days against their will to reflect on the true meaning of democracy. We're in the midst of an exhilarating people's revolution and those who stand in the way of the popular will must take what's coming to them. The Telegraph was only slightly more measured: "all parliamentarians", it decreed, must "get behind Mrs May and her ministers". After all, "why would ministers be seeking anything other than the best possible outcome for the country?" This vision of "the people" as a single intelligence, issuing instructions to politicians, is a dangerous fantasy, made possible only by the vigorous suppression of dissenting voices. The 16 million voters who backed Remain are summarily expelled from the people; they are no longer "people" at all. When Nigel Farage proclaimed, on the morning of 24 June, that Brexit was a victory for "real people", he meant precisely that. To the populist, minorities are not "real people"; they are traitors and quislings, "metropolitan elites" whose "snake-like treachery cannot go unpunished". Their views are of no consequence, except as a source of unpatriotic resistance. In truth, the voice of the people is like the announcements on the London Underground: loud but often difficult to understand, because so many people are talking at once. In populist visions of democracy, only the voice that shouts loudest deserves a hearing. Whether that means the Daily Mail and the Murdoch press or the Momentum faction in the Labour party, that is a grim prospect for our democratic future. What's next? Over the next two years, the country will confront a series of momentous policy questions, none of which was on the ballot paper in June. What trade relationship do we want with the EU, and what price are we willing to pay? How do we rewrite our laws, after 40 years of integration? What do we want to keep, and what must we replace? Our fractured politics has never been more in need of a place where competing ideas and interests can gather to argue, to educate and to inform. What we have instead is a prime minister channelling the malevolent spirits of the tabloid press, wielding prerogative powers and "Henry VIII clauses", while dissent is shouted down as an offence against the people. If we want to turn this around, we'll have to fight for it. That means demanding the right of Parliament, not just to "have a say" on Brexit, or to vote on some meaningless one-line bill expressly designed to shut down discussion, but to take the lead in determining Britain's new direction. It means not being cowed by the thugs in the tabloid press, whose language increasingly resembles that of the Blackshirts they so admired in the 1930s. It means not putting up with the delusion that Jeremy Corbyn, one of the least popular leaders in British electoral history, has an unparalleled "democratic mandate", which demands the obeisance of MPs elected by 9 million Labour voters. But it also means admitting where Parliament has been complicit in its own decline. MPs must take much of the blame for their shrunken status. Parliament was badly damaged by the Iraq vote, when too few MPs were willing to resist the pressure of government and the tabloid press. The expenses scandal did colossal damage, as did the parachuting of party apparatchiks into safe seats with which they had little connection. Above all, an indefensible electoral system has shut out from Parliament significant bodies of opinion that deserved a hearing. When 4 million people vote UKIP at a general election, and are rewarded with a solitary MP, we should not be surprised if they conclude that Parliament is something done to them by an external elite. If Parliament is to revive, we must do more than simply forget that 2016 ever happened. The culture, behaviour and institutions of Parliament all need to change - a subject to which this blog will return. But it is a fight worth having, if we are to retain a democracy that is pluralistic, discursive and respectful of minority opinions. As 2016 limps unlamented from the stage, let us take back our parliamentary democracy. Posted 1st January by Robert Saunders Labels: Brexit Britain and Europe Corbyn democracy EU May Parliament 16 View comments SEP 16 "Censoring Queen Victoria": The Men who Invented a Monarch CENSORING QUEEN VICTORIA: HOW TWO GENTLEMEN EDITED A QUEEN AND CREATED AN ICON by Yvonne M. Ward Oneworld, 208 pp., £16.99, March 2014, 978 1 78074 363 9 In his classic study of The English Constitution, first published in 1865, Walter Bagehot issued one of his celebrated obiter dicta on the paradoxes of popular monarchy. The nineteenth century, he noted, was pre-eminently the age of ‘public opinion’, when every branch of government was being opened to popular scrutiny; yet ‘the utility of English royalty’ lay chiefly in its ‘secrecy’. Bagehot was writing four years after the death of Prince Albert, at a time when the seclusion of the monarch was causing growing public anger. Invisible to her subjects and in neglect of her duties, Victoria was an increasingly unpopular figure, whom critics believed to be imperilling the monarchy. Yet in Bagehot’s skilful rendering, personal eccentricity was conjured into vital constitutional principle. Writing at the dawn of the democratic era, Bagehot proclaimed a monarchy of the imagination: a quasi-religious institution whose ‘efficient secret’ lay in its cultivated mystique. ‘Above all things’, he insisted, ‘royalty is to be reverenced’. ‘We must not let in daylight upon magic’. The challenge was to combine the mystery of distance with the illusion of intimacy, a requirement that Victoria understood better than most. Over the course of her reign she published extracts from her journal, commissioned a biography of Prince Albert, and was restrained only by the intervention of an Archbishop from writing a memoir of John Brown, her devoted ‘Highland servant’. When she died in 1901, her collected letters were issued in three handsome volumes. This was a new kind of public monument: a memorial intended, in the words of her editors, ‘pour servir the historian’. The Letters of Queen Victoria was a publishing sensation. To this day, it can be found in university libraries across the world, and it shaped historical writing for a century. And yet, as Yvonne Ward argues in this intriguing study, the woman it portrayed was as much a public construction as any statue or ceremonial arch. Her executors may have believed that ‘the truest service to the Queen is to let her speak for herself’, but her words would be selected and arranged by others. Her editors - tormented characters with their own secrets to hide - were more than simple chroniclers. They were the men who invented a monarch, and their creation has obscured the historical Victoria ever since. * The publication of the Letters was the brainchild of Viscount Esher, one of the most remarkable men of his day. Esher was the Pooh-Bah of the Victorian state, a man who could, had he wished, have been a Cabinet minister, British Ambassador in Paris, Governor of the Cape or Viceroy of India. Instead, he rejected all those posts for an assortment of more junior positions, which he wove into a spider’s web of social and political influence. He was Lieutenant-Governor of Windsor Castle, Keeper of the King’s Archives, Secretary of Works, a director of the Royal Opera House and a board member of the British Museum, the Wallace Collection and the London Museum. He served on the South Africa War Inquiry Commission, the Commission of Imperial Defence and the Committee on War Office Reconstruction. He was Private Secretary, factotum and possibly lover to the Whig magnate Lord Hartington, learning ‘to represent Hartington’s conscience when it would not otherwise have moved, and Hartington’s opinion when the Chief had none’. He was a partner in the great financial house Cassel’s, and became Secretary of the Memorial Commission on Victoria’s death. In the latter role, he built Admiralty Arch, redesigned the approach to Buckingham Palace and oversaw the purchase of Osborne House for the nation. Esher had many valuable attributes, not the least of which was discretion. He first came to the attention of royalty in 1889, when the discovery of a male brothel at Cleveland Street threatened to expose senior members of the Court. It was Esher who kept the story out of the papers and who spirited Lord Alfred Somerset – a friend of the Prince of Wales – out of the country. He would spend the next thirty years hoovering up evidence of the scandal, to be locked away in his own private archive. Esher could be trusted with the secrets of others because he had so many of his own. As a schoolboy at Eton, he had been trained in the Hellenic ideals of romantic boy-love and imperial service. Esher never lost his taste for Eton boys, taking a house near the school and haunting the grounds in search of ‘paramours’. He filled a closet at Windsor Castle with Eton blazers and had an unhealthy fixation with his son, Maurice. Nicknamed ‘Mollie’ – a slang word for a homosexual – Maurice was the object of an obsession bordering on mania. In one letter, Esher complains of his distress at Mollie’s ‘obvious boredom when I fetched you from the station … I suppose I was a little too demonstrative last night’. Maurice was a product of Esher’s unlikely marriage to Eleanor Van de Weyer. The couple had met when Esher was 23 and ‘Nellie’ just 13. Esher began courting her two years later, and they married when Nellie was 17. Esher seems to have regarded marriage as a necessary evil, writing grimly before the ceremony of ‘the icy shroud of matrimony’, yet the ‘gloomy event’ proved surprisingly successful. As Ward observes, ‘Nellie tolerated his dalliances, even welcoming into the household the various adolescent boys who infatuated him throughout their marriage’. She had, in any case, been obliquely warned. Shortly before their wedding day, Esher had warned that ‘[s]ome day … you will find me out and you will hate me … there is no necessity for elaborate detail’. Esher’s co-editor was Arthur Christopher Benson, son of the Archbishop of Canterbury and author of ‘Land of Hope and Glory’. Benson also spent his formative years at Eton, where he acquired the same romantic longings. As a housemaster at Eton, he wrestled with his feelings for the children in his care, writing hungrily of ‘boys with serene eyes’ and ‘low voices full of the fall of evening’; yet ‘how much pain … and no one sees the dangers more clearly than I do’. Benson blamed his education: ‘A strongly sensuous nature, brought up at an English public school, will almost certainly go wrong’. Benson relieved his feelings through writing, filling 180 volumes of diaries with almost 4 million words. He published more than 60 volumes of poetry and history, prompting wags to observe that ‘a thousand pages in his sight/ were but an evening gone’. Yet even in his diary, some feelings were not to be spoken of. There were, he acknowledged, ‘at least two thoughts often with me, that really affect my life, to which I never allude here’. ‘Anyone might think they could get a good picture of my life from these pages but it is not so’. Benson and Esher were well suited to the editing of a life, for they had carefully edited their own. It was this, perhaps, that made them so effective in their duties. Since childhood, Victoria had professed a hatred of being ‘on display’, and her editors could be trusted to show no more than seemed strictly necessary. Their task was not simply to select correspondence; it was to edit the image of a Queen. * Victoria was a prodigious correspondent, whose literary endeavours made even Benson look slack. Her journals alone filled 120 volumes, and it is estimated that her collected writings would run to more than 700 large volumes. The editors had to boil this down to just three: a daunting task, even with the decision to end the volumes in 1861. Working through the correspondence, Benson’s language became increasingly agricultural: he was ‘ploughing’, ‘hewing’, ‘slashing’, and ‘cutting like a backwoodsman’. His mood, always febrile, deteriorated as the scale of the task became obvious: ‘a very bad hour of despair, on waking’; ‘how am I to know what is interesting and what is not?’ This was not the only dilemma confronting the embattled editors. Victoria was not a private citizen. Her son had inherited the throne, many of her correspondents were still alive and there were legal and diplomatic niceties to observe. The very idea behind the project remained controversial. Critics complained that the letters were ‘never intended for publication’ and ‘would only supply matter for gossip’. Passages at which readers took umbrage included ‘The Queen anxiously hopes that Lord M. has slept well’ and her disappointment at his failure to come to dinner, suggesting a rather low threshold for scandal. Lord Stamfordham urged the editors ‘for the sake of the monarchical idea and “Cult”’ to ‘publish nothing which could tend to shake the position of Queen Victoria in the minds of her subjects’. Managing the new king was a project in itself. As Esher grumbled, All the old scandals, the Duke of Kent’s debts, the Conroy business, the Lady Flora Hastings business & so on – the King has never heard of them. He doesn’t read memoirs & of course no one dares talk to him of such things … [I]t is no good telling him that everybody who knows anything knows far more about them than he does himself; & that they won’t arouse comment simply because they are so stale. Benson wrote furiously of ‘the idiotic pomposity of monarchs’, but the King’s feelings could not be ignored. ‘We are between the devil and the deep blue sea’, Benson complained. ‘The King will be furious if we violate confidence, and displeased if the book is dull’. There were also diplomatic pressures to consider. The needs of the Anglo-French entente sat uneasily with Victoria’s strictures on ‘the wickedness and savagery of the French mob’. Her enthusiasm for ‘some great catastrophe at Paris’ (‘for that is the hothouse of Iniquity from wherein all the mischief comes’) was quietly excised. So, too, was her distaste for the Russian Emperor and her unfavourable opinion of the Irish. The censor’s pen could be somewhat haphazard: Victoria was not permitted to call the Irish ‘dirty’, but words like ‘ragged’ and ‘wretched’ were deemed acceptable. Her more sanguinary views were of course suppressed. The ‘rebellion in Ireland’, she wrote, seemed ‘likely to go off without any contest [which people (and I think with right) rather regret. The Irish should receive a good lesson or they will begin again]’. The words in square brackets were wisely removed. Sometimes excisions were demanded after the pages had been set, making it necessary to find replacements of equivalent length. Benson assured Esher that he would find ‘absolutely colourless passages’, though he had warned at the outset against ‘a colourless and official book’. He had wanted to advertise for letters in private possession and to publish ‘all the love letters to the Prince Consort in one volume’. ‘There should’, he told Esher, ‘be a little spice of triviality … to give a hint of humanity’. It was not simply the pressures of space, the needs of diplomacy or the feelings of the King that narrowed the volumes’ scope. Just as important were the biases of the editors. Ward draws repeated (and probably excessive) attention to the editors’ sexuality, but it is clear that neither knew much of women or of heterosexual marriage. Esher’s own marriage was a cover for his adolescent infatuations, while Benson was a lifelong bachelor. None of his siblings married, and his parents’ marriage had been as curious as Esher’s. They had met when Edward Benson was 23 and Mary (‘Minnie’) a child of 11. Edward pronounced her a ‘fine and beautiful bud’ and determined at once to marry her, moving into the family home in order to press his courtship. He proposed when Minnie was thirteen: ‘she sat as usual on my knee’, he recalled, ‘a little fair girl with her earnest look’. Their courtship continued until Minnie reached 18, when they married and set up home together. For a young girl coming under the power of an older and more experienced man, the emotional trauma was considerable. ‘The nights!’ wrote Minnie subsequently. ‘I can’t think how I lived’. For Benson’s parents, as for Esher, marriage was an essentially tutelary relationship, in which a young girl came under the wing of an older man of the world. Not surprisingly, this was also the model they imposed on Victoria. Esher produced an outline for the volume which was to guide Benson in his selections, exhibiting six phases in the young Queen’s life: (a) the early training of the Queen by Melbourne and Peel (b) the “coming of the Prince Consort” (c) the influence over him of the King of the Belgians and [Baron] Stockmar (d) the growth of their powers (e) the change in the relations of the Crown to the Ministers after the retirement of Aberdeen (f) the culmination of the Prince Consort’s rule 1859-1861 This was a history, not of the Queen, but of the men who had guided and instructed her. As Ward observes, this was ‘the template that made sense to Benson and Esher’. The correspondence would be used ‘to tell a dramatic story’, centring on the Victorian men who had manufactured a Queen. The bias was largely subconscious: as Ward shrewdly observes, when Benson and Esher read Victoria’s correspondence, they ‘could “hear” her male correspondents’ voices more clearly and appreciate their importance more readily’. Benson confessed that he found women’s letters ‘very tiresome’, and few of Victoria’s female correspondents made the published volumes. This excluded not only some of her closest confidantes, but also major European figures. To take but one example, Victoria and her half-sister Princess Feodora corresponded weekly for the best part of forty years, yet only four brief extracts were published in the Letters. Victoria’s nine pregnancies barely feature at all, reflecting her editors’ view of childbirth as a distasteful and mercifully private indulgence. Even the Queen loomed less large than one might expect. Of the letters published in these volumes, only 40% were actually written by Victoria; for her editors, the men in her life were simply more interesting. Lord Melbourne was a particular favourite: ‘I adore him’, wrote Benson; ‘the delicious mixture of the man of the world, the chivalrous man of sentiment, the wit, the soft-hearted cynic appeals to me extraordinarily’. The first volume reproduced just 35 of Victoria’s letters to Melbourne, but found space for 139 in the opposite direction. Family and continental relationships were also treated with suspicion. The young Victoria had been especially close to her uncle, King Leopold of the Belgians. Benson and Esher were happy to acknowledge his moral tutelage, but were less comfortable with the overtly political correspondence. Wary of overstating the Continental influences on Victoria, they preferred to foreground Melbourne, Peel and other domestic statesmen. Early on, they made the remarkable decision to omit altogether ‘a very large series of volumes entitled GERMANY’, which they deemed – quite literally – to be ‘foreign to our purpose’. No effort was made to explore Continental archives or the resources of European courts. As Ward puts it, the editors ‘were Englishmen, and did not recognise the extent to which Victoria had been a European’. * As the volumes progressed, the woman at their heart became more Edwardian than Victorian. Into the dustbin went her continental relationships, her network of female correspondents, her close attention to royal marriages and her somewhat Wagnerian view of international relations. What remained was a model of constitutional propriety; a woman tutored by the gentlemen around her, for whom England, not Europe, was the point of reference. This Victoria – the Victoria of her Edwardian designers – reigned even longer in the twentieth century than she had in the nineteenth. Esher had promised to let the Queen ‘speak for herself’; yet in death, as in life, Victoria was rarely permitted that luxury. Her words were chosen for her, and the selection has proven the more powerful because of the difficulty of accessing the Royal Archives. The 1921 biography by Lytton Strachey, for example, followed almost exactly the model set out by Esher, following what Ward calls ‘the young, innocent girl-queen’ through her tutelage by the men around her. ‘Victoria’, Strachey concluded, ‘was a mere accessory’, who could almost be written out of the age to which she had given her name. Benson and Esher were neither incompetent nor devious. They did not set out to mislead or to ‘censor’ the Queen they revered. Confronted with so great a mass of material, it was inevitable that they would draw out those portions that seemed, to them, most important. New editors would do the same, though their prejudices would be different. Ward herself would want more on Victoria the woman: her experience of marriage; her networks of female correspondents; and her complex negotiation of patriarchy. Few today would cavil at such a selection; but it would reflect the priorities of our own era as truly as Benson and Esher did theirs. Victoria remains as mysterious a figure as Bagehot could have wished; a will-o'-the-wisp, glimpsed but never captured in the pages of her letters. The pursuit almost cost Benson his sanity: he had a breakdown shortly after publication and was admitted to a clinic in Mayfair. Checking the final proofs, he confessed to his diary that 'depression lurks in the background, moving dimly like a figure in the mist'. The same might be said of Victoria herself: the Queen he had adored, but could never truly comprehend. Posted 16th September 2016 by Robert Saunders 0 Add a comment JUL 5 Flying Off the Atlas: Why Britain Needs an Election Our new prime minister arrives in Downing Street Towards the end of The BFG, by that astute political analyst Roald Dahl, the Queen sends the Heads of the Army, Navy and Royal Air Force on a daring helicopter raid. Led by the valiant Sophie, they quickly find themselves in places that even the British had never invaded: ‘This place we’re flying over now isn’t in the atlas, is it?’ the pilot said, grinning. ‘You’re darn right it isn’t in the atlas!’ cried the Head of the Air Force. ‘We’ve flown clear off the last page!’ As in all atlases, there were two completely blank pages at the very end. ‘So now we must be somewhere here,’ he said, putting a finger on one of the blank pages. ‘Where’s here?’ cried the Head of the Army. The young pilot was still grinning broadly. He said to them, ‘That’s why they always put two blank pages at the back of the atlas. They’re for new countries. You’re meant to fill them in yourself.’ British politics flew off the atlas more than a week ago, and has been without map or compass ever since. The priorities of government have been overturned at a stroke: out goes the elimination of the deficit, in comes a decade of trade negotiations. Within weeks we will have a new prime minister, leading a new government, confronting questions that were scarcely dreamed of in the election of 2015. When do we trigger Article 50? What trade relationship do we want with Europe? Does access to the single market trump control of immigration? Before confronting these issues, we urgently need an election. Our constitutional crisis has many dimensions, but the immediate issue lies with the premiership. It is entirely normal, in Britain, for a prime minister to take office without a general election. Six have done so since the coming of universal suffrage; most recently, Gordon Brown in 2007. But this practice rests on the assumption that we are a parliamentary democracy, in which consent flows through our elected Members of Parliament. For the first time, however, our new prime minister will not be chosen by MPs. The appointment will be made by 150,000 Conservative activists - 0.3% of the electorate - nominated for this role by nobody except themselves. For the first time in our history, we will have a directly-elected prime minister - placed in Downing Street, not by the electorate, not by Parliament, but by people whose names we do not know and whom we cannot hold to account. There is no precedent for this in British history, and its gravitational pull is already reshaping our politics. Leadership candidates are making pledges about the deficit, tax and spending, the rights of EU citizens and the National Health Service, pitched not at Parliament or the wider electorate but at the tiny subset of the Tory membership. This would be outrageous under any circumstances. At a moment when we are about to renegotiate the entire spectrum of our trade relations, it is absolutely intolerable. The situation arises, as so often, from the constitutional carelessness of our political class. In a laudable attempt to engage their members, parties have opened up their leaderships to the choice of party members. Yet in so doing, they have bolted on a quasi-presidential element to what is still functionally a parliamentary system - and they have done so without any of the logic or protections of presidential models. In the United States, for example, presidential nominees are chosen through party contests, but they cannot exercise power until they have run directly for election among the wider public. Before they can take office, the mandate they receive from party supporters must be endorsed by the electorate. If it is, they exercise the independent powers of that office, whatever the situation in Congress. In this way, the Constitution provides both for the popular mandate of directly-elected officials, and for the functioning of government where parties are divided. Donald Trump, for example, could win the presidency against the opposition of Republicans in the House, and each would then exercise their own independent powers. Under a parliamentary system, none of this applies. Authority - and democratic legitimacy - flow through our elected Members of Parliament. A prime minister can only govern with the confidence of the House of Commons; laws can only be passed if MPs actively vote for them. So we have developed - quite suddenly - a constitutional fiction, by which the party mandate of the leader trumps the constituency mandate of the MPs. Members of Parliament are now expected to speak, vote and act under the instruction of the activists, a far smaller cohort than those who elected them to Parliament. In this way, the pursuit of internal party democracy has blown a hole in our parliamentary democracy. If Tory activists vote for anyone other than Theresa May, both our major parties will have leaders imposed upon them against the wishes of MPs. The Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition will have been chosen by fewer than half a million people, yet will claim a mandate over MPs elected by 21 million. Let us imagine, for a moment, that Andrea Leadsom wins the leadership. In a tight contest, 75,000 votes could put her in Number Ten - roughly the size of an average English constituency. As Prime Minister, imagine that she abandoned manifesto pledges made in 2015, cutting benefits and abandoning deficit rules on the basis of the new conditions created by Brexit. Imagine, finally, that when MPs rebelled, she demanded their loyalty on the basis of her 'mandate' - a mandate smaller than her own constituency of South Northamptonshire. Left-wingers would be rioting in the streets. Yet that is precisely the position in which the Labour Party also finds itself, with a 'mandate' bestowed by 0.5% of the electorate and less than 3% of Labour voters intoned like a sacred charm, to whip our Parliamentary representatives into obedience. In the name of internal party democracy, wholly disproportionate power has been vested in the hands of self-selecting cliques. If we want a presidential system, with heads of government exercising direct personal mandates, we should do it properly and separate the executive from the legislature. Party leaders should run in national elections, with parliamentary parties seeking their own mandates as a check on the executive. There is much to be said for such a system; there is nothing whatsoever to be said for a hybrid in which Parliament is expected to prostrate itself before gangs of activists. Unless and until we establish a presidential system with proper checks and balances, we need desperately to reassert the primacy of our parliamentary democracy. In the longer term, all parties face serious questions about how they select their leaders, how we hold them to account and how we repair our battered constitution. In the short term, the issue is more acute. There is no precedent in British history for a prime minister propelled straight into Downing Street, over the heads of Parliament, by the votes of a small, unelected and unaccountable group of activists. For the sake of our democracy, and the legitimacy of our institutions, Britain urgently needs an election. Posted 5th July 2016 by Robert Saunders Labels: Brexit Conservative constitution Corbyn Labour Leadership Leadsom May 0 Add a comment JUN 27 Britain Needs an Opposition The crisis currently engulfing British politics has no precedent in modern history. In the 72 hours since the referendum, the prime minister has resigned, the shadow cabinet has declared war on its leader, and the Leave campaign has been torching its promises like a drugs cartel destroying the evidence before the police arrive. Over the weekend, as $2.7 trillion was wiped off global markets, it appeared that the Chancellor of the Exchequer had been taken to his eternal reward, leaving the Governor of the Bank of England to run the country. The scale of what happened last Thursday would be difficult to exaggerate. With one vote, the electorate knocked over the central pillar of British foreign, economic and trade policy for fifty years. That decision - whether we voted for it or not - has left our creaking institutions facing three Herculean tasks. First, they must negotiate our departure from the European Union, probably the most complex diplomatic exercise since the Second World War. Second, they must unpick 40 years of legislation, peeling apart two legal systems that have grown together like the trunks of ancient trees. Thirdly, they have to set up new arrangements to replace the old, on everything from regional aid and industrial policy to immigration and the funding of higher education. Any one of these tasks would consume the energies of Whitehall for years; coming together, they constitute probably the biggest exercise in government ever undertaken by the British state. All this will be happening at a time of exceptional constitutional volatility. If Scotland votes for independence (which is by no means certain), we can add restructuring the United Kingdom to the in-tray. Northern Ireland is going to need especially sensitive handling, something at which distracted British governments have not always excelled. Throw in a general election later this year, and there is barely a cog in the machinery of government that is not in frenzied motion. As the Chinese curse puts it, 'may you live in interesting times'. In this context, the existence of a functioning Opposition is now a matter of urgency. If Boris Johnson is not to use the country for his own personal game of whiff-whaff, we cannot go on with our second biggest party - and the only alternative government - strapped to the life-support machine. That means, with apologies to my friends who feel differently, that the Corbyn experiment must come to an end. In practical terms, the Labour Party has no leader at present. Jeremy Corbyn inhabits the office, but he cannot command his MPs. A year ago, he could barely find 15 Members of Parliament to nominate him for the role; today, he can hardly scratch together a Shadow Cabinet. The list published this morning is simply not credible as a government; if put before the electorate later this year, we could see a Conservative majority on the scale of 1931. Labour cannot go to the country behind a man whom its own MPs do not want to become prime minister. But what of his "mandate"? What of the democratic will of the party membership? The 250,000 who voted for him last year deserve respect, but the word "democratic" is being stretched to breaking point. In the General Election last year, nearly five times as many people voted for the Green Party as voted to make Corbyn leader. Ten times that number voted for the much-derided Liberal Democrats, whom we are constantly told are now an irrelevance. What of the mandate of the Parliamentary Labour Party, for whom more than 9 million people cast their ballots? It is an offence against democracy that the second party in Parliament - and the only alternative government that can be put before the voters - can be held captive in this way. If we have learned one thing in this referendum campaign, it is that our parliamentary democracy needs to reassert its legitimacy. A party of government cannot become the plaything of Momentum. Corbyn himself seems a decent man, though manifestly unsuited to leadership. That the second half of that sentence weighs so little with his supporters is at the core of the problem. Labour is not a cult and it does not exist to make its members feel good about themselves. It exists to protect the poor and vulnerable; to build a better society; to challenge inequality and extend opportunity. Indulging an incompetent leader, because he makes us feel good, is a betrayal of the very people Labour exists to serve. We are told this morning that Corbyn will fight; that he will force a leadership election and run as a candidate. There is a good chance that he would win such a contest. But what then? Labour MPs will not serve under him. They cannot campaign for him at an election. The new Shadow Cabinet released this morning is an an embarrassment, a public declaration of incapacity to govern. I, and millions of other Labour stalwarts, simply will not vote for it. The Corbyn experiment has brought to the leadership some noble impulses: a more positive attitude to immigration; a desire to rebuild Labour as a campaigning vehicle; and a determination that Labour should protect the most poor and vulnerable. John McDonnell's economic advisory committee has been a positive step, which has brought new intellectual firepower to the party's policymaking. Too often, however, Corbyn has indulged the worst of Labour's traditions. The first is sectarianism: the view, famously expressed by Nye Bevan, that Tories are 'lower than vermin'. For the Corbynistas, 'Tory' is a word to be spat out, loaded with such venom that those who utter it must have asbestos lips. On social media, Corbyn's critics are subjected to a vicious torrent of abuse, actively stoked by some in Momentum. Any one who dares to question the leader is told to 'f**k off and join the tories'. The problem is not simply that the charge is untrue, or that handing out membership forms for your opponents seems a curious electoral strategy. It is that millions of good and decent people across the country really are Tories, usually for good and decent reasons. They care about their friends, their families, and their country. They want a better future for their children - and for others, too. We may feel that they have backed the wrong horse; but it is our job to persuade them of that fact, not to treat them as traitors and bigots. Most Labour leaders have understood this. Clement Attlee had been a Tory himself earlier in life; Harold Wilson was married to a Conservative; Tony Blair (though this won't help...) was the son of a Conservative. By contrast, Corbyn seems unable even to muster the courtesy to speak to his opponent at the state opening of Parliament. In the most important election campaign for a generation - on a subject they actually agreed about - would it really have killed him to share a platform just once with David Cameron? When Sadiq Khan, who would have better reasons than most for standing aloof, appeared alongside the prime minister, John McDonnell accused him of 'discrediting' the party. We now have a leadership team that shared platforms with the IRA during the Troubles, yet regards contact with Conservatives as a form of ritual pollution. That takes us to the second besetting sin of the left: its capacity for self-delusion. There is no need, we are told, to win over Tory voters. Instead, like the ghost army summoned by Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings, a seething tide of non-electors will surge out of the darkness to overwhelm the Tory degenerates. I applaud the desire to reach non-electors: we should be appalled that so many opt out of our democratic process. But the notion that they are all secret socialists, waiting like the Knights of the Round Table for the return of Arthur, is a fantasy. On Thursday, traditional non-electors did come out - and many of them voted for UKIP. Here, too, there is a giant work of persuasion to be done. Finally, we have been treated once again to the historic preference of the left for moral victories over, well, actual victory. Some will remember the dreadful election of 1983, when Labour suffered its worst defeat since the 1930s. Tony Benn told The Guardian that it was a triumph: Labour might have collapsed to its lowest level since the War, but the remnant that remained had voted for a genuinely socialist alternative. It must have been a difficult time for Margaret Thatcher, but she consoled herself with a landslide majority and eleven years of uninterrupted government. Likewise, in spring of this year, Labour actually lost seats in the local elections - but told its supporters that it had made progress on the road to government. Worst of all, on Friday morning, as the party's heartland seats revolted en masse against the party line, a press statement proclaimed that "Jeremy Corbyn has showed that he is far closer to the centre of gravity of the British public than other politicians. He is now the only politician who can unite a divided country". Britain needs an opposition that acknowledges reality; that speaks to those who disagree with it; that is competent to govern; and that can face an election in the next nine months. This is now only possible if Corbyn stands aside. If he does, he will be remembered as an honourable man who made a noble sacrifice. If he does not, as Chris Bryant wrote last night, "I fear you will go down in history as the man who broke the Labour Party". Posted 27th June 2016 by Robert Saunders 1 View comments JUN 26 The Cameron Illusion On 15 June 1988, the telephone rang at Conservative Central Office. It was answered by the deputy director of the Research Department, who was about to interview a fresh-faced recruit named David Cameron. The call was from Buckingham Palace, and contained an extraordinary message: I understand that you are to see David Cameron. I’ve tried everything I can to dissuade him from wasting his time on politics, but I have failed. You are about to meet a truly remarkable young man. To this day, the identity of Cameron’s royal referee is shrouded in mystery - partly because there are so many contenders. Was it Sir Alastair Aird, Equerry to the Queen Mother and husband to Cameron’s godmother? Or Sir Brian McGrath, a friend of his parents who was private secretary to Prince Philip? Cameron himself had been at prep school with Prince Edward, and the Queen was sometimes to be seen dropping off her children or enjoying a cup of tea with the headmaster. Did Her Majesty spot the potential in the infant Cameron, as he bustled merrily along the corridors? It is a tale that captures much of the essence of the Cameron story. No prime minister of modern times has been so deeply rooted in the Establishment. None has been so routinely tipped for greatness. And yet few retain such an enduring air of mystery. David Cameron has been the longest serving Tory leader since Margaret Thatcher. He has led his party for nearly eleven years and his country for more than six. Yet he remains curiously undefined in the public imagination. He has published no speeches, acquired no nicknames and is associated with no ‘project’. It would be difficult to quote anything he has ever said, and the nature of his Conservatism remains almost wholly obscure. As his premiership draws to a close, who is David Cameron? And what does he believe? I From 1965 to 2001, every Conservative leader was of relatively humble stock. Ted Heath was the son of a carpenter; Margaret Thatcher grew up over the grocer's shop, while John Major's parents worked in the music halls. In this respect, Cameron marked the re-emergence of an older tradition of Tory leadership. His childhood, in rural Oxfordshire, had a distinctly ruritanian character: a world of nannies, country houses and afternoons shooting rooks and pigeons. At his prep school, Heatherdown, the parental roster included two princesses, a viscount, an earl and the reigning monarch. Visitors to the school sports day passed through one of three entrances, marked respectively for ‘ladies’, ‘gentlemen’ and ‘chauffeurs’. It was a place of ‘endless pillow-fights and non-stop ragging in the dorm’. Matron patrolled the corridors, and ‘Cameron more than once felt the sting of the clothes brush’.[1] Yet if Cameron's background appeared quaintly archaic, his entry to Conservative politics was thoroughly modern. Like so many politicians of the Blair era and beyond, he went straight from university to the Conservative Research Department, where he was immediately identified as a star in the making. Maurice Fraser, who worked with Cameron in the 1992 election, was 'totally convinced this guy was going to be Conservative Party leader one day. In drafting or advising on the key point to take, it would just trip off his tongue, the right thing to say in a given context'. Cameron matched an inexhaustible capacity for work with keen political antennae, and he added to this an easy, though apparently selective, charm. Colleagues noted his 'emotional intelligence', his ability to find the right words in dealing with the media, and embattled ministers began asking for Cameron by name. By the time he left Central Office in 1994, to become head of corporate communications at Carlton, Cameron had worked at every great department of state except the Foreign Office. He had worked closely with John Major, Norman Lamont and Michael Howard, and played a central co-ordinating role in the 1992 election. After seven years in the private sector, he was elected to Parliament as MP for the safe seat of Witney in Oxfordshire. He was still just thirty-four years old. From the moment he entered the Commons, in 2001, Cameron was identified as a future prime minister. Yet to the proverbial visitor from Mars, it would not be easy to explain why. As late as 2005, Cameron had no legislative achievements, no experience of office and no significant public profile. Though he had entered the Shadow Cabinet in 2004, he had done so in a party role – as head of policy co-ordination – rather than in a leading ministerial portfolio. He declined the role of Shadow Chancellor in 2005, apparently believing that the education brief would better burnish his modernising credentials. For all his obvious talents, Cameron had shown no evidence that he could run a ministerial department or operate the levers of government. Yet these were not the attributes his party required. Cameron’s talents lay in marketing: he knew how to package a product for public consumption. It was Greg Barker, a fellow member of the 2001 intake, who spotted Cameron’s own ‘marketability’: I had come to the view that the Tory Party needed to skip a generation. We needed telegenic, charismatic, modern – not in a grumpy, tortured, Portillo way, but in a relaxed, effortless comfortable-with-themselves sort of way. And he seemed to fit the bill very closely. Cameron was of the same opinion, and within two or three years of entering Parliament had quietly constructed a leadership team. Yet when Michael Howard resigned in 2005, his support within the party remained thin. When The Sunday Timespolled 100 MPs early in September, it found only nine who favoured Cameron. Recruitment foundered on a perception that Cameron ‘had been over-keen on impressing his seniors’ and ‘aloof and dismissive towards … his peers’. For most of the summer he had fewer than 14 supporters, at least four of whom were fellow Etonians. This wasn't a leadership bid; it was a high school reunion. But as Cameron himself understood, the parliamentary party was no longer the critical audience. If Cameron could establish himself as the frontrunner with the public - and if he could present himself as a potential election winner - the party would reposition itself accordingly. Even in the early days of the campaign, when Cameron's parliamentary support was in single figures, Barker recalls that ‘We were getting by far the best media profile’. The fresh, young and personable candidate came across well on camera; and as some journalists acknowledged, he simply offered a better story than his rivals. As one reporter told the political scientist Tim Bale: David Davis: we were used to him; we were bored with him; he’d been quite high-handed and arrogant with lots of journalists. Dave: we didn’t really know – young, modern; there’d be all sorts of interesting stories about cocaine and drugs … he was attractive, and his picture looked better on our front pages. For the campaign launch, Cameron spent £20,000 on a media event pitched far beyond the parliamentary party. On arrival, journalists were handed strawberry smoothies and chocolate brownies. As they settled in their seats, they took in the room, white and circular, and the ambient music – “lots of little chimes and bells”. It was all very different from David Davis’s launch in the fusty oak-panelled surroundings of the Institute of Civil Engineers. Davis’s message might have been “Modern Conservatives”, but that was just a slogan: this was modern. Having redefined ‘modernity’ as fruit smoothies and groovy music, Cameron engineered a brilliant piece of theatre at the party conference. His media-savvy team managed to reserve the front seats for their own supporters, ensuring that TV footage recorded their muted response to Davis and enthusiastic ovation for Cameron. They were boosted by controversial pollster Frank Luntz, whose Newsnight focus group revealed extraordinary levels of enthusiasm. With successful appearances on Question Time and Newsnight, Cameron overhauled the frontrunners to secure a thumping victory, first in the MPs’ ballot and then among the party membership. II Cameron had established himself as a brilliant public performer, who both looked and sounded like a leader. What was less clear was the direction in which he intended to take his party. Cameron has never laid claim to an ‘ism’ and he wears his convictions lightly. ‘I’m not a deeply ideological person’, he told Andrew Rawnsley; ‘I’m quite a practical person’. Even as a student, his tutor recalls, Cameron ‘didn’t lose sleep over philosophical problems’, and he acknowledges a preference for instinct over introspection. As he once asked Dylan Jones, ‘Is that entirely logical? Not really, but it’s what I feel’. At first glance, this locates Cameron within a healthy tradition of Tory scepticism; a line of descent stretching back to David Hume and beyond. Yet scepticism is itself a philosophical position, founded upon a relentless questioning of established truths. Cameron, by contrast, has tended to drift along behind the conventional wisdom of his ‘set’. Like most Tories of his generation, he believes in lower taxes, less regulation and a smaller state. He has an almost religious faith in markets and competition, which he has applied indiscriminately to the forests, the National Health Service and the education system. Even on gay rights – a subject on which he was ‘surprisingly squeamish’ in the 90s – his position has evolved largely in step with fashionable, metropolitan opinion. From this perspective, Cameron seems guilty not of ‘scepticism’ but of what his biographers call a ‘heroic incuriosity’. He takes no interest in the arts; has only the haziest grasp of history; and cheerfully admits that he ‘doesn’t really read novels’. Far from liberating himself from ‘ideology’, he has simply ceased to ask meaningful questions of it. In an incautious remark to newspaper executives in 2005, Cameron presented himself as ‘the heir to Blair’; another leader who was scornful of ‘ideology’. By a pleasing irony, earlier generations of Camerons lived in ‘Blairmore House’; and one of the more endearing sights of Cameron’s leadership came at Blair’s final appearance in the Commons, when the Tory leader leapt to his feet to lead the ovation. Yet the comparison is less compelling than it appears. Unlike the Labour leader, Cameron is not temperamentally drawn to change. He surrounds himself with familiar faces from his past; likes hunting, shooting and other country pursuits; and is openly affectionate towards his old school. He enjoys ceremonial, and one of the few subjects on which he admits to becoming ‘furious’ is the ban on hunting to hounds. As his friend, Nick Boles, once noted, ‘The fundamental difference between David and Tony Blair … is that David is absolutely, cut right through him, a total Conservative. He was born into it, he loves it, it’s embraced him, he’s not the outsider’. In this respect, Cameron is not by temperament a ‘moderniser’. Though he accepted that his party must change, he was a reformer by necessity, rather than conviction. The result was a curiously ambivalent message. In 2001, for example, Cameron urged his party to ‘change its language, change its approach, start with a blank sheet of paper’. Yet there followed a remarkable caveat: Anyone could have told the Labour Party in the 1980s how to become electable. It had to drop unilateral disarmament, punitive tax rises, wholesale nationalisation and unionisation. The question for the Conservative Party is far more difficult because there are no obvious areas of policy that need to be dropped. In 2005, again, he insisted that the party needed ‘fundamental’ change, not just ‘slick rebranding’. But what was change to mean, if the policies remained the same? The dilemma was sidestepped, rather than resolved, by ‘the politics of “and”’ - a strategy that sought to pair Thatcherite policies on tax cuts and Europe with more fashionable positions on the environment and social justice. Declaring war on Britain’s ‘broken society’, Cameron promised to be ‘as radical a social reformer as Mrs Thatcher was an economic reformer’. He visited the Arctic to see the effects of global warming, and promised ‘the greenest government ever’. Yet these were rhetorical positions, not policy platforms. When Nick Clegg made his own pitch for the green vote in 2008, Conservative staffers were scathing. ‘He can have that’, an advisor joked; ‘we were doing youthful vigour a couple of years ago … we’re on to flags and fireplaces now’. Cameron had secured for his party ‘the right to be heard’. But having cleared its throat and stepped up to the microphone, it appeared to have nothing much to say. The ‘Big Society’ was a slogan in search of a policy. ‘Broken Britain’ was a protest, not a programme. The mood was summed up by Rupert Murdoch, in an interview before their relationship turned sour. Cameron, he told the New Yorker, was ‘charming, he’s very bright, and he behaves as if he doesn’t believe in anything. He’s a PR guy’. It was in this context that the financial crisis erupted in 2008. Despite his period as a Treasury advisor, economic policy was not an area to which Cameron had devoted much thought. He had declined the post of Shadow Chancellor in 2005, and made no reference to the economy in a list of ‘the big questions facing our country’ in 2008. Amidst justified criticism of Labour, it almost went unnoticed how chaotic was the Conservatives’ response to the crisis. Likening Gordon Brown to Castro, Osborne warned that nationalising Northern Rock would take Britain ‘back to the 1970s’, while Quantitative Easing was ‘a cruise missile aimed at the heart of recovery’. ‘Printing money,’ he intoned, was ‘the last resort of desperate governments’. Yet the financial crisis temporarily resolved the central dilemma of Cameronism. With the bail-out of the banks and the escalation of national debt, a failure of the private sector was transformed into a crisis of public expenditure. The need to ‘pay down the deficit’ finally gave Cameron the direction he required. It also allowed the party to reactivate its preference for shrinking public expenditure, without having to make the ideological case for a smaller state. As his biographers put it, Cameron was in a sense lucky with his economic inheritance since it gave him a ready-made definition. “If the Fates hadn’t handed him that hand, and he didn’t have the deficit, what would he be doing instead? I don’t think people have got any idea”. III The failure to win a majority in 2010 came as a shock – and posed a graver threat to Cameron than was acknowledged at the time. Cameron had won the party leadership on the strength of his electoral appeal; but faced with an unpopular government and a widely derided opponent, he had failed to deliver. Lacking any particular personal following, Cameron’s leadership depended upon restoring the Conservatives to government. As a colleague put it, Cameron’s ‘bollocks were on the line. He had to think very quickly how he and George were going to get out of this alive’. The solution, of course, lay in coalition. With his ‘big, open and comprehensive offer’, Cameron played a difficult hand with considerable skill - and the results offered rich rewards. By pooling responsibility for the cuts, coalition actually strengthened Tory claims to be acting from necessity rather than zeal. The alliance shielded Cameron from his own right-wing, while shutting down the Liberal Democrats as a repository for disaffected voters. The scale of the deficit – and the willingness of both parties to blame Labour – established a common purpose that went beyond the formal coalition agreement, and which enabled it to hold together despite inevitable tensions. Cameron was also lucky in his opponents. After Tony Blair resigned in 2007, the Labour Party chose three leaders in a row who were unlikely ever to win an election. At a time when economic competence was the central battleground of British politics, it never shook off the perception that it had caused the crisis in the first place. The party had naively assumed that it would benefit from the collapse of the Liberal Democrats; instead, it was the Conservatives who prospered, vacuuming up Tory/Lib Dem marginals where the Labour Party barely existed. Facing an opposition party that was collapsing in its Scottish heartlands, lead by a man whom few voters could imagine anywhere near Downing Street, Cameron succeeded in 2015 where he had failed five years earlier. With victory at the general election, he became the first Conservative leader for 23 years to win a parliamentary majority; the first since 1900 to increase his share of the vote after a full term in office. Standing on the steps of Downing Street, he told journalists that 'I truly believe we are on the brink of something special'. Yet nemesis was lurking with the frying pan. Like Thatcher and Major before him, Cameron has seen his premiership destroyed by the European question. No issue has been more toxic for the Conservative Party or more corrosive of party loyalties. It has been especially destructive for Cameron, because it played to none of his strengths and all of his weaknesses. The first was the shallowness of his modernisation project. Cameron famously said that he wanted the Conservative Party to stop ‘banging on about Europe’ – but this, as ever, was a change of tone, not of policy. There was no question of challenging the Eurosceptics in his party, or of restating what had once been the Conservative case for Europe. Instead, he fed their appetite. He pulled the Conservative Party out of the moderate EPP bloc in the European Parliament, in favour of a ragbag alliance of unsavoury populist parties. He promised a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, then dropped it shortly afterwards. He introduced the referendum lock, vetoed treaty change on the Eurozone, and repeatedly assured colleagues and voters of his Euroscepticism. Since he kept giving, the sceptics kept asking. And after ten years of speaking their language, his almost missionary zeal for the EU during the referendum campaign rang strangely on the ear. A second problem was his tendency to deal with short-term problems by kicking them down the line. The Bloomberg speech, in which he promised a referendum in 2013, got him over a temporary difficulty with his backbenchers, but there would always come a time when they banked the cheque. His opponents used that time to prepare; Cameron, it appears, did not. It wa…

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