A Reporter
at Large
What Have Fourteen Years of Conservative Rule
Done to Britain?
Living standards have fallen. The country is exhausted
by constant drama. But the U.K. can’t move on from the Tories without facing up
to the damage that has occurred.
By Sam
Knight
March 25,
2024
My life
divides, evenly enough, into three political eras. I was born in 1980, a year
after Margaret Thatcher entered Downing Street with the prayer of St. Francis
of Assisi on her lips: “Where there is doubt, may we bring faith. And where
there is despair, may we bring hope.” The Conservative-run Britain of the
eighties was not harmonious. Life beyond the North London square where my
family lived often seemed to be in the grip of one confrontation or another.
The news was always showing police on horseback. There were strikes, protests,
the I.R.A., and George Michael on the radio. My father, who was a lawyer in the
City, travelled to Germany to buy a Mercedes and drove it back, elated. Until
Thatcher resigned, when I was ten, her steeply back-combed hair and deep,
impossible voice played an outsized role in my imagination—a more interesting,
more dangerous version of the Queen.
I was
nearly seventeen when the Tories finally lost power, to Tony Blair and “New
Labour,” an updated, market-friendly version of the Party. Before he moved to
Downing Street, Blair lived in Islington, the gentrifying borough I was from.
Boris Johnson, an amusing right-wing columnist, who was getting his start on
television, also lived nearby. Our local Member of Parliament was an
out-of-touch leftist named Jeremy Corbyn.
New Labour
believed in the responsibility of the state to look after its citizens, and in
capitalism to make them prosper. Blair was convincing, even when he was wrong.
He won three general elections in ten years and walked out of the House of
Commons to a standing ovation, undefeated in his eyes. I was turning thirty
when Labour eventually ran out of road, undone by the Iraq War, the global
financial crisis, and the grim temper of Gordon Brown, Blair’s successor. He
was caught in a hot-mike moment describing an ordinary voter, who was
complaining about taxes and immigration, as a bigot.
Since then,
it’s been the Conservatives again. In 2010, the Party returned to government in
a coalition with the Liberal Democrats. Since 2015, it has held power alone.
Last May, the Tories surpassed the thirteen years and nine days that New Labour
had held office. But the third political era of my lifetime has been nothing
like the previous two. There has been no dominant figure or overt political
project, no Thatcherism, no Blairism. Instead, there has been a quickening,
lowering churn: five Prime Ministers, three general elections, two financial
emergencies, a once-in-a-century constitutional crisis, and an atmosphere of
tired, almost constant drama.
The period
is bisected by the United Kingdom’s decision, in 2016, to leave the European
Union, a Conservative fantasy, or nightmare, depending on whom you talk to.
Brexit catalyzed some of the worst tendencies in British politics—its
superficiality, nostalgia, and love of game play—and exhausted the country’s
political class, leaving it ill prepared for the pandemic and the twin economic
shocks of the war in Ukraine and the forty-nine-day experimental premiership of
Liz Truss. Covering British politics during this period has been like trying to
remember, and explain, a very convoluted and ultimately boring dream. If you
really concentrate, you can recall a lot of the details, but that doesn’t lead
you closer to any meaning.
Last year,
I started interviewing Conservatives to try to make sense of these years. “One
always starts with disclaimers now—I didn’t start this car crash,” Julian
Glover, a former speechwriter for David Cameron, the longest-serving Prime
Minister of the period, told me. I spoke to M.P.s and former Cabinet ministers;
political advisers who helped to make major decisions; and civil servants,
local-government officials, and frontline workers hundreds of miles from London
who had to deal with the consequences.
Some people
insisted that the past decade and a half of British politics resists satisfying
explanation. The only way to think about it is as a psychodrama enacted, for
the most part, by a small group of middle-aged men who went to élite private
schools, studied at the University of Oxford, and have been climbing and
chucking one another off the ladder of British public life—the cursus honorum,
as Johnson once called it—ever since. The Conservative Party, whose history
goes back some three hundred and fifty years, aids this theory by not having
anything as vulgar as an ideology. “They’re not on a mission to do X, Y, or Z,”
as a former senior adviser explained. “You win and you govern because we are
better at it, right?”
Another way
to think about these years is to consider them in psychological, or
theoretical, terms. In “Heroic Failure,” the Irish journalist Fintan O’Toole
explains Brexit by describing Britain’s fall from imperial nation to “occupied
colony” of the E.U., and the rise of a powerful English nationalism as a
result. Last year, Abby Innes, a scholar at the London School of Economics,
published “Late Soviet Britain: Why Materialist Utopias Fail,” which argues
that, since Thatcher, Britain’s political mainstream has become as devoted to
particular ideas about running the state—a default commitment to competition,
markets, and forms of privatization—as Brezhnev’s U.S.S.R. ever was. “The
resulting regime,” Innes writes, “has proved anything but stable.”
These
observations are surely right, but I worry that they obscure two basic truths
about Britain’s experience since 2010. The first is that the country has
suffered grievously. These have been years of loss and waste. The U.K. has yet
to recover from the financial crisis that began in 2008. According to one
estimate, the average worker is now fourteen thousand pounds worse off per year
than if earnings had continued to rise at pre-crisis rates—it is the worst
period for wage growth since the Napoleonic Wars. “Nobody who’s alive and
working in the British economy today has ever seen anything like this,” Torsten
Bell, the chief executive of the Resolution Foundation, which published the
analysis, told the BBC last year. “This is what failure looks like.”
High levels
of employment and immigration, coupled with the enduring dynamism of London,
mask a national reality of low pay, precarious jobs, and chronic
underinvestment. The trains are late. The traffic is bad. The housing market is
a joke. “The core problem is easy to observe, but it’s tough to live with,”
Mark Carney, the former governor of the Bank of England, told me. “It’s just
not that productive an economy anymore.”
With
stagnant wages, people’s living standards have fallen. In 2008, Brown’s Labour
government commissioned Michael Marmot, a renowned epidemiologist, to come up
with ways to reduce England’s health inequalities. Marmot made suggestions in
six policy areas, including better access to child care, walking and cycling
programs, social-security reforms, and measures to improve people’s sense of
agency at work. In 2010, he presented his ideas to the incoming
Conservative-led coalition, which accepted his findings. “I thought, Wow, this
is great. . . . I was pretty bullish about the whole thing,” Marmot told me.
“The problem was they then didn’t do it.”
Ten years
later, Marmot led a follow-up study, in which he documented stalling life
expectancy, particularly among women in England’s poorest communities—and
widening inequalities. “For men and women everywhere the time spent in poor
health is increasing,” he wrote. “This is shocking.” According to Marmot, the
U.K.’s health performance since 2010, which includes rising infant mortality,
slowing growth in children, and the return of rickets, makes it an outlier
among comparable European nations. “The damage to the nation’s health need not
have happened,” Marmot concluded in 2020. He told me, “It was a political
choice.”
And that is
the second, all too obvious, fact of British life throughout this period: a
single party has been responsible. You cannot say that the country has been
ruled against its will. Since 2010, the Tories have emerged as the winner of
the popular vote and as the largest party in Parliament in three elections. In
December, 2019, Boris Johnson won an eighty-seat majority in the House of
Commons, the Conservatives’ biggest electoral success since the heyday of
Thatcherism.
How is this
possible? The opposition has been underwhelming. For years, Labour drifted and
squabbled under two unconvincing leaders: Ed Miliband and Corbyn, my old
Islington M.P. It is telling that, since Labour elected Keir Starmer, an
unimaginative former prosecutor with a rigidly centrist program, the Party is
competitive again. But the Conservatives have not survived by default. Their
party has excelled at diminishing Britain’s political landscape and shrinking
the sense of what is possible. It has governed and skirmished, never settling
for long. “It’s all about constantly drawing dividing lines,” a former Party
strategist told me. “That’s all you need. It’s not about big ideological
debates or policies or anything.” In many ways, the two momentous decisions of
this period—what came to be known as austerity and Brexit—are now widely
accepted as events that happened, rather than as choices that were made.
Starmer’s Labour Party does not seek to reverse them.
If you live
in an old country, it can be easy to succumb to a narrative of decline. The
state withers. The charlatans take over. You give up on progress, to some
extent, and simply pray that this particular chapter of British nonsense will
come to an end. It will. Rishi Sunak, the fifth, and presumably final,
Conservative Prime Minister of the era, faces an election later this year,
which he will almost certainly lose. But Britain cannot move on from the Tories
without properly facing up to the harm that they have caused.
The
Conservative Party manifesto for the 2010 election was a plain blue hardback
book titled “Invitation to Join the British Government.” After the Party’s
longest spell out of power in more than a century, its pitch to voters was “the
Big Society,” a call for civic volunteering and private enterprise after the
statism of Labour. “There was a feeling that it must be possible to be positive
about a better future in a way that wasn’t socialist,” Glover, the former
speechwriter, said. “And that wasn’t an ignoble thing to try.”
Beginning
in 2005, Cameron and George Osborne, the shadow Chancellor, had modernized the
Tories. The duo represented a new generation of Conservatives: deft and urbane,
easy in their privilege. Osborne was the heir to a baronetcy; Cameron’s family
descended from a mistress of William IV. Cameron embraced centrist causes,
including the environment and prison reform. There was talk of a
“post-bureaucratic age.” But the main aim was simpler. “Above all, it was
trying to win,” Osborne told me recently.
In the
spring of 2009, Cameron told a gathering of Party members in Gloucestershire,
“The age of irresponsibility is giving way to the age of austerity.” The speech
was part of a successful campaign to associate Labour’s public spending with
the global financial crash, to which Britain had been badly exposed. “The word
‘austerity’ was deliberately introduced into the lexicon by myself and David
Cameron,” Osborne said. “Austerity” evoked the country’s sober rebuilding after
the Second World War. “The word didn’t have the connotations then that it does
now,” Osborne recalled. “It was, you know, a bit like prudence.”
In 2010,
the Conservatives fell short of a majority in the House of Commons and formed,
with the Liberal Democrats, Britain’s first coalition government in almost
seventy years. The state was running a deficit of a hundred and fifty-seven
billion pounds—about one and a half times the budget of the National Health
Service. Any incoming administration would have had to find ways to balance the
books, but, under Cameron and Osborne’s leadership, austerity was a moral as
well as an economic mission. “We allowed it to become the defining thing,” the
former senior adviser reflected.
“Austerity”
is now a contested term. Plenty of Conservatives question whether it really
happened. So it is worth being clear: between 2010 and 2019, British public
spending fell from about forty-one per cent of G.D.P. to thirty-five per cent.
The Office of Budget Responsibility, the equivalent of the American
Congressional Budget Office, describes what came to be known as Plan A as “one
of the biggest deficit reduction programmes seen in any advanced economy since
World War II.” Governments across Europe pursued fiscal consolidation, but the
British version was distinct for its emphasis on shrinking the state rather
than raising taxes.
Like the
choice of the word itself, austerity was politically calculated. Huge areas of
public spending—on the N.H.S. and education—were nominally maintained. Pensions
and international aid became more generous, to show that British compassion was
not dead. But protecting some parts of the state meant sacrificing the rest:
the courts, the prisons, police budgets, wildlife departments, rural buses,
care for the elderly, youth programs, road maintenance, public health, the
diplomatic corps.
Plan A
spooked economists because of the risk to economic growth. But, in 2013, the
British economy grew by 1.8 per cent. The government claimed victory. Around
that time, Osborne declared that the nation could win “the global race” and
become the richest major economy in the world by 2030. “We were in complete
command of the political landscape,” he recalled. “The U.K. is the country that
is seen to have got its act together after the crash. London has become the
kind of global capital. So it has worked—there’s a bit of a dénouement
coming—but it had worked.” At the general election in 2015, the Conservatives
won a majority in the House of Commons, with proposals to make a further
thirty-seven billion pounds’ worth of cuts.
“It was
devastatingly politically effective,” Osborne told me, of austerity. It’s just
that the effects were so horrendous. Between 2010 and 2018, funding for police
forces in England fell by up to a quarter. Officers stopped investigating
burglaries. Only four per cent now end in prosecution. In 2021, the median time
between a rape offense and the completion of a trial reached more than two and
a half years. Last fall, hundreds of school buildings had to be closed for
emergency repairs, because the country’s school-construction budget had been
cut by forty-six per cent between 2009 and 2022.
In October,
I talked with Tony Durcan, a retired local-government employee who was
responsible for libraries and other cultural programs in the city of Newcastle
during the twenty-tens. Durcan told me that he’d had “a good war,” all things
considered. There were moments, he said, when the sheer extremity of the crisis
was exciting. Between 2010 and 2020, central-government funding for local
authorities fell by forty per cent. At one point, it looked as if sixteen of
Newcastle’s eighteen libraries would close. The city’s parks budget was cut by
ninety-one per cent. The situation forced some creative reforms: Newcastle City
Library now hosts the Citizens Advice bureau, where residents can apply for
benefits and seek other forms of financial guidance. (The library is featured
in “I, Daniel Blake,” Ken Loach’s anti-austerity film of 2016.) But other parts
of the city government fell apart. “Youth services and a lot of
community-support services, they just disappeared completely,” Durcan said.
Child poverty rose sharply. (About forty per cent of children in Newcastle
currently live below the poverty line.) But after a while Durcan and his
colleagues stopped talking about the cuts, even though their budgets continued
to fall. “There was a view—was it helpful? Were you risking losing confidence
in the city?”
Over time,
Durcan came to question the official reasoning for the savings. “You can make a
mistake, even when you’re acting for the best,” he explained. “I don’t think
that’s what happened in austerity.” Newcastle was a Labour stronghold, as was
the rest of the northeast. Until 2019, the Tories held only three out of
twenty-nine parliamentary seats in the region. A similar pattern was repeated
across England. Poorer communities, particularly in urban areas, which tended
to vote Labour, suffered disproportionately.
In
Liverpool, where the Conservatives have not won a Parliamentary seat for forty
years, spending, per head, fell more than in any other city in the country.
Public-health spending in Blackpool, one of the poorest local authorities in
England, was cut almost five times more, per person, than in the affluent
county of Surrey, just south of London, whose eleven M.P.s are all Tories.
Durcan and his colleagues noted the discrepancies between Labour- and
Conservative-supporting regions. “And so there was cynicism,” he said, “and
also great disappointment, a sense of injustice.”
Osborne
denies that austerity was ever targeted in this way. “It’s not like we
ministers just sit there and go, We’re not going to cut Kensington Council.
We’re going to cut Liverpool Council. That is a lampoonish way of thinking
about British politics,” he said. But some of his colleagues were more willing
to acknowledge that electoral thinking was at play. One former Cabinet minister
conceded that there were “big strategic moves” to favor older voters, who were
more likely to vote Conservative, in the form of pension increases and
interventions to raise property prices. David Gauke, a Treasury minister from
2010 to 2017, agreed that the parts of the country that had benefitted most
under Labour had seen their budgets cut under the Conservatives. “There was a
rebalancing that went on,” he said. “Did it go too far? Maybe it did.”
What was
less forgivable, in the end, was the cuts’ unthinking nature, their lack of
reason. In the fall of 2013, a staffer named Giles Wilkes, who worked for a
senior Liberal Democrat minister in the coalition, became alarmed by
projections that showed ever-reducing government budgets. “I don’t wish to
paint the picture of the British state as too chaotic and heedless and amateur.
But I was wandering around in 2013 and 2014, saying to people, Does anyone know
what this means for the Home Office or the court system, for local authorities
and the social-care budget?” Wilkes said. “Nobody was curious.” Wilkes is now a
fellow at the Institute for Government, a nonpartisan think tank. “It was very
obvious in real time,” he told me. “There wasn’t a central function going, Hold
on a mo. Have we made sure that we can provide a decent prison estate, a decent
sort of police system?”
And so
stupid things happened. Since 2010, forty-three per cent of the courts in
England and Wales have closed. No one thinks that this was a good idea. For
years, the Conservatives cut prison funding and staffing while encouraging
longer jail times. “You kind of had a mismatch,” Gauke, who later served as the
Justice Secretary, admitted. The number of adults sentenced to more than ten
years in prison more than doubled—until the system caved in, overrun by
violence, self-harm, drug use, and staff shortages. In 2023, the government
activated what it called Operation Safeguard, in which hundreds of jail cells
in police stations were requisitioned to hold convicted offenders, because the
prisons were full. In September, a terrorism suspect escaped from Wandsworth
Prison, in South London, by clinging to the underside of a food-delivery truck.
Eighty of the prison’s two hundred and five officers had not shown up for work
that day.
The
long-term effects of austerity are still playing out. A 2019 paper by Thiemo
Fetzer, an economist at the University of Warwick, asked, “Did Austerity Cause
Brexit?” Fetzer found that, beginning in 2010, the parts of the country most
affected by welfare cuts were more likely to support Nigel Farage’s U.K.
Independence Party, which campaigned against immigration and the E.U. The
withdrawal of the social safety net in communities already negatively hit by
globalization exacerbated the sense of a nation going awry. Public-health
experts, including Marmot, argue that a decade of frozen health-care spending
undermined the country’s response to the pandemic. More broadly, austerity has
contributed to an atmosphere of fatalism, an aversion to thinking about the
future. “It is a mood,” Johnna Montgomerie, a professor at the University of
British Columbia who studies debt and inequality, has written. “A depression, a
chronic case of financial melancholia.”
Since
leaving politics, in 2017, Osborne has enjoyed a lucrative career, serving
simultaneously as an adviser at BlackRock, the asset-management firm, and as
the editor of the Evening Standard newspaper; more recently, he has been a
partner at an investment bank and a podcaster. He insists that the cuts,
ultimately, enabled the U.K.’s public finances to withstand the pandemic and
the energy crisis that followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. “There’s no
counterfactual,” he told me. Osborne likes to accuse his critics of living in a
parallel reality, in which the financial crisis and Britain’s deficit never
existed: “It’s, like, Apart from the assassination, Mrs. Lincoln, did you enjoy
the play?”
But that
does not mean the Tories made good choices. British social-security payments
are at their lowest levels, relative to wages, in half a century. Under a
steady downward ratchet, started by Osborne and continued by his successors,
household payments have been capped and income thresholds effectively lowered.
In 2017, a “two child” limit was placed on benefits for poor families. In
November, 2018, Philip Alston, the U.N.’s special rapporteur on extreme
poverty, toured the U.K. When we spoke, he recalled a strong sense of denial,
or ignorance, among British politicians about the consequences of their
decisions. “There was a disconnect between the world and what senior ministers
wanted to believe,” he said.
The fall in
Britain’s living standards isn’t easy for anyone to talk about, least of all
Conservatives. The Resolution Foundation, which studies the lives of people
with low and middle incomes, is chaired by David Willetts, a former minister in
Cameron’s government. Willetts is a tall, genial man, who worked for Margaret
Thatcher’s policy unit in the eighties. His nickname in the Party was Two
Brains. “What I say to Tories now is, Look, we are behind for various reasons,”
Willetts said, carefully. “You can argue about it. But our household incomes
are clearly lower than France or Germany or the Netherlands.” Part of the
problem, Willetts explained, was that Britain’s richest twenty per cent had
largely been spared the effects of the past fourteen years—and that made it
genuinely difficult for them to comprehend the damage. “We are all O.K.,” he
said. “The burden of adjustment has almost entirely been borne by the less
affluent half of the British population.”
In late
November, I took a train to Worcester, a cathedral city south of Birmingham, on
the River Severn. It was a raw, washed-out morning. Floodwater shone in the
meadows. The city is famous as the home of Lea & Perrins Worcestershire
sauce—a dark, sweet yet sour, almost indescribably English condiment, first
sold by a pair of chemists in 1837—which has been doused on two centuries’
worth of shepherd’s pie and other stodgy lunches. Worcester used to be a den of
political corruption: in 1906, men willing to sell their votes to the Tories
could collect payment in the rest rooms of the Duke of York, a pub in the
middle of town. More recently, it has been a bellwether. In the nineties,
Conservative strategists described “Worcester Woman,” a median female voter—politically
aware, married, with two children. (Since 1979, the city’s M.P.s have belonged
to the party in power.) I was on my way to Citizens Advice Worcester—part of a
charitable network that offers free counselling on debt relief and legal
matters—behind a restored Victorian hotel.
Shakira was
playing on the radio in the reception and a sign read “If You Are Frightened of
Your Partner, Call Us.” Geraint Thomas, a Welsh lawyer who runs the center, was
in his office, worrying about a heating bill. A few years ago, it was some four
thousand pounds a year, but after recent price hikes it was now about fourteen
thousand. In 2017, the charity had started running services in Herefordshire as
well. Now funding was tight, and various covid emergency funds were coming to
an end. “Next year, we have got a bit of a hole,” Thomas said. The clock on his
wall had stopped.
Since 2019,
the number of people seeking help at the center had risen by thirty per cent.
Two years of high inflation and rising interest rates meant that the
caseworkers were now seeing homeowners and people working two jobs, along with
the unemployed and families on benefits. “It’s like a black hole, dragging more
and more people in,” Colin Stuart, who manages volunteers, said. Anne Limbert,
who oversees the advice team, explained that, until a few years ago, it was
usually possible to make a recovery plan for clients. “It used to be that we
could help people, you know, and make a difference,” she said. “Now it’s just
kind of depressing.” Increasingly, Limbert was sending clients to food banks.
The
caseworkers said that they had mostly tuned out politics. Gwen Fraser, a
volunteer manager in Herefordshire, which has some of England’s most deprived
rural communities, had met a visiting M.P. a few months earlier. “I thought,
You’re not in the real world, mate,” she said. Not long ago, a
seventy-seven-year-old man, behind on his mortgage, had told Fraser that he was
suicidal. The proportion of people coming to the center with a long-term health
condition had risen by twenty per cent since 2019. (N.H.S. prescriptions for
antidepressants in England almost doubled between 2011 and 2023.) Fraser had
recently settled on a phrase that she found useful in her paperwork:
“Overwhelming distress.”
Worcester
Woman voted for Brexit. In 2016, the city chose to leave the European Union by
a margin of fifty-four per cent to forty-six per cent. The perception of the
Brexit vote as a cry of anguish from deindustrialized northern towns or from
faded seaside resorts isn’t wrong—it just leaves out the rest of England. Two
weeks after the referendum, Danny Dorling, a geography professor at the
University of Oxford, published an article in the British Medical Journal
showing that Leave voters weren’t defined neatly either by geography or by
income. Fifty-nine per cent identified as middle class, and most lived in the
South. “People wouldn’t believe me for years,” Dorling told me. “This was
Hampshire voted to leave.”
Dorling’s
politics are on the left. He opposed Brexit and often describes Britain as a
failing state. During the summer of 2018, Dorling gave dozens of public talks
across the country reflecting on the referendum. He noticed that places that
had voted Remain invariably had better rail connections than those that voted
Leave. A lot of Brexit supporters were older and economically secure but had a
keen sense of the country going downhill. “Something was falling apart,”
Dorling said. “They had got a house in their twenties. They’d had full
employment. Their children were in their forties and they might be renting. . .
. It was an almost entirely unselfish vote by the old for their
grandchildren—let’s try it, or let’s at least show we’re angry.”
How you
interpret the Brexit vote informs, to a great extent, how you make sense of the
past fourteen years of British politics. It is not just a watershed—a before
and after. It is also a prism that clarifies or scrambles the picture entirely.
One perspective sees the whole saga as a woeful mistake. In this view, Cameron
decided to settle, once and for all, an internal Tory argument about Britain’s
place in an integrating E.U., a question that had haunted the Party since the
last days of Thatcher. In the process, he turned what was an abstruse obsession
on the right wing of British politics into a much simpler, terrifyingly binary
choice for the population on how they felt their life was going.
In the
accident theory of Brexit, leaving the E.U. has turned out to be a puncture
rather than a catastrophe: a falloff in trade; a return of forgotten
bureaucracy with our near neighbors; an exodus of financial jobs from London; a
misalignment in the world. “There is a sort of problem for the British state,
including Labour as well as all these Tory governments since 2016, which is
that they are having to live a lie,” as Osborne, who voted Remain, said. “It’s
a bit like tractor-production figures in the Soviet Union. You have to sort of
pretend that this thing is working, and everyone in the system knows it isn’t.”
The other
view sees Brexit as an unfinished revolution. Regardless of its origins, the
vote in 2016 was a repudiation of how Britain had been governed for a
generation or more. In the B.M.J. article, Dorling observed that younger
voters—who chose overwhelmingly to remain in the E.U.—were angry with their
elders. “They will feel newly betrayed . . . but their real betrayal has been a
long time in the making,” he wrote. For a highly centralized country that is
smaller than Wyoming, the U.K. is lopsided beyond belief. It contains regional
inequalities greater than those between the east and the west of Germany, or
the north and the south of Italy—inequalities that have been allowed by
successive governments to grow to shameful extremes. On average, people in Nottingham
earn about a quarter of what people make in Kensington and Chelsea, in West
London, which is some two hours away by train.
During the
Brexit campaign, the E.U. came to represent not just a supranational monolith
across the English Channel but profound distances within the U.K. itself. And
the politicians who defended the E.U. looked and sounded, for the most part, as
if they spent more time in Tuscany each summer than they had spent on Teesside
in their lives. “The kind of globalism, the internationalism, the liberal élite
view, was seized on by people who thought that they’d been spoken down to for
decades,” John Hayes, a Tory M.P. and a Brexiteer, told me. “And the more they
wheeled out the establishment figures, the more it was, Yeah, that’s them.
Those are the ones who don’t get it. They don’t understand us.”
Almost
eight years after the vote, what stays with me is how unimagined Brexit was.
Overnight, and against the will of its leaders, the country abandoned its
economic model—as the Anglo-Saxon gateway to the world’s largest trading
bloc—and replaced it with nothing at all. “I can’t think of another occasion
when a party has so radically changed direction while in office,” Willetts
said. Thatcher was an architect of the E.U.’s single market, which in time
became a heresy.
You can
marvel at the recklessness of Brexiteers such as Farage, or of Johnson, who
spearheaded the Vote Leave campaign. (“He is not a Brexiteer,” Osborne said. “I
really would go to my grave saying, deep down, Boris Johnson did not want to
leave the E.U.”) But the real dereliction ran deeper. Sensible Britain failed.
The Civil Service did not plan for Brexit. Ivan Rogers was the U.K.’s permanent
representative to the E.U. from 2013 to 2017. He started warning about the
likelihood of Brexit about five years before the vote. “It was difficult to get
the attention of the system,” he said. Beyond a briefing paper, demanded by the
House of Lords, there was only some “confidential thinking,” in the words of
Jeremy Heywood, the former head of the Civil Service. (Heywood died in 2018.)
“The mandarins have a lot to answer for on this,” Rogers said. “We were very
badly prepared in 2016.”
“I didn’t
think it was very wise,” Carney, the former governor of the Bank of England,
said, of the official refusal to consider the referendum going wrong. “We did a
ton of planning.” After the vote, the Bank stabilized the markets while British
politics imploded. Cameron resigned and was replaced by Theresa May, a former
Home Secretary with limited experience of the economy or of international
affairs. In the second half of 2016, May worked with a small group of advisers
to formulate a Brexit strategy that ultimately satisfied nobody. “It was
incredibly poor statecraft,” a former Cabinet colleague said. “Absolute shit.
Abominable.” The abiding image of the Brexit talks was a photo of Michel
Barnier, the E.U.’s chief negotiator, with his colleagues and their neat piles
of paper on one side of a table, while their British counterparts, led by David
Davis, a bluff former special-forces reservist, sat on the other side with a
single notebook among them.
One Friday
lunchtime, a couple of months ago, I met Dominic Cummings at a pub not far from
his house in London. A light snow was in the air. Cummings, who is fifty-two,
worked on education policy in the coalition government before becoming the
campaign director of Vote Leave. (He coined its notorious slogan, “Take Back
Control.”) Cummings is a Savonarola figure in British politics, an ascetic and
a technocrat, who wants to save the state by burning it down. He refers to Elon
Musk by his first name and writes Substack essays with titles such as “On
Complexity, ‘fog and moonlight,’ prediction, and politics VII: why social
science is so bad at prediction & what is to be done.”
Cummings
reveres the Apollo space program and takes a dim view of almost all Britain’s
elected officials. “Where they are not malicious they are moronic,” he told me
once. He talks rapidly, with a slight Northern rasp. (He is from Durham, near
Newcastle.) Next to our table in the pub, a woodstove emitted a sudden,
enveloping cloud of smoke, which dissipated while we talked. Cummings appeared
to be wearing two hats, against the cold. He apologized if it seemed as if he
were staring at me. He had recently undergone retinal surgery.
Cummings,
unsurprisingly, saw Brexit in revolutionary terms—as a chance to break with the
country’s ruling orthodoxy. “The Vote Leave campaign was not of the Tory
Party,” he said. “It was not a conservative—big ‘C’ or little ‘c’—effort. But
none of them wanted to confront the reasons why we did it in the first place. .
. . For us, this was an attempt to wrench us off the Cameron, establishment,
Blairite line.” Cummings believes that Britain must rediscover its ability to
build things—roads, railways, houses, research institutes, products that people
want to buy—in order to prosper again. He argues that it is America’s ecosystem
of universities, entrepreneurs, and government procurement departments that
have helped maintain its economic and technological edge, not just lower taxes
or a freer form of capitalism. “When you start talking about this to Tories,
they go, Oh, Dominic, you sound like a terrible central planner,” Cummings
said. “And you go, That’s America. This is not weird left-wing shit.”
No one
would accuse Cummings of having a popular platform. His jam is A.I. and
Nietzsche. But, after the Brexit vote, he kept waiting for May’s government to
act on what was, to him, its obvious implications: to restrict immigration,
reform the state, and explore dramatic economic policies, in order to diverge
from the E.U. and to boost the country’s productivity. “I kept thinking, month
after month, God, like, it’s weird the way they are just thrashing around and
not facing it,” Cummings said. In his view, the election of Trump, that
November, provided a perfect excuse for Remainers not to take the Brexit vote
seriously. “They just lumped it all in with, Oh, it’s a global tide of
populism. It’s mad, irrational, evil. It’s partly funded by Putin,” he said.
“They didn’t have to reëvaluate and go, Maybe the establishment in general has
been, like, fucking up for twenty-plus years. ”
In July,
2019, May resigned as Prime Minister and was replaced by Johnson, who hired
Cummings as a senior adviser. Cummings thought that Johnson would probably
screw it up. At the same time, he saw an opportunity to advance what he
considered the true Vote Leave agenda. “In some sense,” he said, “the risk was
worth taking.”
That fall
was the most kinetic, breathtaking period of Britain’s fourteen years of Tory
rule. With Cummings at his side, along with Lee Cain, another former Vote Leave
official, who became his director of communications, Johnson broke the deadlock
that had existed since the referendum. He asked the Queen to prorogue, or
suspend, Parliament. He expelled twenty-one Conservative M.P.s—including eight
former Cabinet ministers and Nicholas Soames, the grandson of Winston
Churchill—for attempting to stop the country from leaving the E.U. with no deal
at all.
On a
Tuesday in late September, the Supreme Court ruled that Johnson’s suspension of
Parliament had been unlawful. “The effect upon the fundamentals of our
democracy was extreme,” the Justices found. I stood outside the court in the
rain, and it felt as though the thousand-year-old timbers of the state were
moving beneath our feet. Someone in the crowd was wearing a prison jumpsuit and
an enlarged Johnson head. A woman was dressed as a suffragist. Anna Soubry, a
former Tory M.P. who quit the party to fight for a second referendum, shook her
head in wonder. “Astonishing,” she said. But Johnson prevailed. Before the year
was out, he had cobbled together a new, hard-line Brexit deal and thumped
Corbyn at a general election on another three-word Cummings-approved slogan:
“Get Brexit Done.”
Johnson
was, briefly, unassailable. In the election that December, the Conservatives
won seats in places such as Bishop Auckland, in Cummings’s home county of
Durham, which they had not held for more than a hundred years. The Party
gathered a new, loose coalition of pro-Brexit voters—many of whom were from
formerly Labour-voting English towns—to go with its traditionally older,
fiscally conservative base. Johnson’s celebrity (the hair, the mess, the faux
Churchillian vibes, the ridiculous Latin) was the glue that held it all
together. He sensed the public mood. (With Johnson, that was not the same as
doing something about it.) He disavowed austerity—promising more money for the
N.H.S., new hospitals, and more police—and described a mighty program to redress
the country’s economic imbalances, which he called Levelling Up.
Johnson’s
premiership collapsed under the pressure of the pandemic and of his own
proclivities. According to Cummings, the alignment between the goals of Vote
Leave and Johnson’s ambitions as Prime Minister decoupled in January, 2020,
just a few weeks after the election. Cummings wanted to overhaul the civil
service and Britain’s planning laws. Johnson, for his part, wanted a rest. “He
was, like, What the fuck are you talking about? Why would I want to do that?”
Cummings recalled. (Johnson did not reply to a request for comment.) “It’s
basically cake-ism, right?,” Cummings said, referring to Johnson’s political
lodestar: having his cake and eating it, too. “I want to do all the things you
want to do, and I want everyone to love me,” Cummings recalled. “I was, like,
Yeah, that’s not happening.”
Britain’s
first cases of the coronavirus were announced on January 31, 2020, the day the
country left the European Union. In March, Johnson ordered the first national
lockdown, caught covid, and later spent three nights in the I.C.U. For months,
the country staggered from one set of restrictions to the next—a reflection of
Johnson’s inconstant attitude toward the virus. In texts, Cummings used a
shopping-cart emoji to indicate the Prime Minister veering from one half-formed
idea to the next. Levelling Up became a pork-barrel exercise: of seven hundred
and twenty-five million pounds earmarked in June, 2021, about eighty per cent
was for Conservative constituencies.
Johnson’s
Downing Street was operatically dysfunctional. A rift opened between Cummings
and his team and a faction centered on Carrie Symonds, Johnson’s then fiancée,
a former Conservative Party communications director. In November, 2020,
Cummings accused the Prime Minister of betraying the Vote Leave program and
resigned. “I said, Listen, we had a deal. And if you end up breaking our deal
there is going to be hell to pay,” Cummings recalled. Cain left as well. A
little more than a year later, the Daily Mirror, a left-wing tabloid, broke the
news that Johnson and his staff had organized parties while the rest of the
country was under lockdown—beginning with the party for Cain’s departure, the
previous November. Johnson resigned six months later.
The
pandemic bore out truths about the British state. There were bright spots: the
vaccines and their rollout by the N.H.S.; the intervention of the Treasury,
under Rishi Sunak, the Chancellor, whose furlough plan protected millions of
jobs. More generally, though, the virus revealed tired public services, a
population in poor health, and a government that was less competent than it
thought it was. “It’s very convenient for everyone to blame Boris,” Cummings
said. “But the truth is, in January, February, of 2020, it was the civil
service saying‚ We’re the best-prepared country in the world. We’re brilliant
at pandemics. The reality is, everything was crumbling.”
In October,
2023, Cummings testified at the U.K.’s covid inquiry, an investigation of the
government’s handling of the pandemic led by a retired judge. His written
evidence was a hundred and fifteen pages long and began with an epigraph from
“War and Peace”: “Nothing was ready for the war which everybody expected.”
The
hearings took place in an office building around the corner from Paddington
Station. I sat next to a row of bereaved family members, who were holding
photographs of their loved ones. Cummings wore a white linen shirt, which came
untucked, a tweed jacket with elbow patches, and black boots. He is such a
contentious figure—an agent of these disordered times—that people often don’t
really listen to what he says. A great deal of the media coverage of Cummings’s
testimony focussed on his texting style. In messages during the pandemic, he
referred to ministers as “useless fuckpigs,” “morons,” and “cunts.” The
inquiry’s lawyer asked Cummings if he thought his language had been too strong.
“I would say, if anything, it understated the position,” he replied.
In written
testimony, Cummings implored the covid inquiry to address a wider crisis in
Britain’s political class. “Our political parties and the civil service are
extremely closed institutions with little place for people who can think and
build,” he wrote. Cummings believes that the war in Iraq, the financial crisis,
the pandemic, and the invasion of Ukraine all, in their ways, exposed serious
shortcomings in the British state that have yet to be addressed.
Brexit,
too. When we met, Cummings observed that the country has still failed to
confront the full implications of the vote, either domestically or abroad: “You
can just treat it as, like, a weird thing, like a witch trial in a medieval
village. Now the witch has been burnt, and now the community is getting back to
normal. Or you can think of it as part of big structural changes in Western
politics, society, and the economy. And if the establishment thinks that you
can treat it like a sort of episode of witchcraft mania, then they’re just
going to walk straight into recurring shocks.”
Iwas at
Heathrow Airport, refreshing the BBC’s Web site on my phone, when the screen
changed to a black-and-white commemorative portrait of the Queen. On February
6, 1952, when Elizabeth’s father, George VI, died, the Prime Minister was
Winston Churchill. “We cannot at this moment do more than record a spontaneous
expression of our grief,” he told the House of Commons that afternoon. Seventy
years later, in September, 2022, Britain was seized again by deference,
tenderness, and other, more inchoate, emotions. You could not escape the
ritual. Hats, horses, artillery in London’s parks. In her later years, the
Queen’s aura of permanence had been enhanced by the recklessness at work in
other parts of Britain’s public life. Her survival helped to contain a sense of
crisis.
The Queen
died on Liz Truss’s second full day in office. When the country’s brand-new
Prime Minister and her husband, Hugh O’Leary, arrived at Westminster Abbey for
the state funeral, Australian television identified them as “maybe minor
royals.” Four days later, Truss launched the Growth Plan 2022, a
Thatcher-inspired, forty-five-billion-pound package of tax cuts intended to
reignite the British economy. The bond markets didn’t like it. The pound fell
to a record low against the dollar. The International Monetary Fund asked Truss
to “re-evaluate.” Her approval rating dropped by almost thirty points in a
week. Ashen, Truss fired her Chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, then left office
herself, on October 25th, serving seventy-one days fewer than Britain’s
previous shortest-serving Prime Minister, George Canning, who died suddenly of
pneumonia in 1827.
It made
sense to pretend that Truss and her Growth Plan had been a rogue mission,
inflicted on an unsuspecting nation. Truss was depicted as mad, or
ideologically unreliable, or both. She had been a Liberal Democrat at Oxford
who once opposed the monarchy. She was strangely besotted with mental
arithmetic. But the truth is that Truss was neither an outlier nor a secret
radical, but a representative spirit of the Conservative Party and its years in
power. She was one of the first M.P.s of her intake to be promoted to the
Cabinet, brought on by Cameron, before serving both May and Johnson in a hectic
and haphazard series of important jobs: running departments for the
environment, justice, international trade, and a large part of the Treasury.
In all
these positions, Truss was the same: spiky, dynamic, considered skillful on TV.
In 2012, she and Kwarteng contributed to “Britannia Unchained,” an ode to tax
cutting and deregulation that described the British as “among the worst idlers
in the world.” I asked one of Truss’s contemporaries, the former Cabinet
minister, if anyone took the ideas seriously at the time. It was hard to catch
the attention of the Party’s base under the coalition, he complained. “The
easiest way was to show a bit of leg,” he said. “It used to be hanging.” Truss
campaigned for Remain before becoming a Brexiteer. As Foreign Secretary, she
posed on top of a tank—pure Thatcher cosplay—and dominated the government’s
Flickr account, with pictures of herself jogging across the Brooklyn Bridge and
standing, ruminatively, in Red Square, in Moscow.
“It’s
silliness,” Rory Stewart told me. Stewart became a Conservative M.P. on the
same day as Truss, in 2010, after working for the British government in Iraq,
running an N.G.O. in Afghanistan, and teaching at Harvard. He was ejected from
the Party during the Johnson purge of 2019. Last year, he published “How Not to
Be a Politician,” a compulsive, depressing memoir of his career during this
period. “It’s clever, silly people. It’s a lack of seriousness,” he said, of
Truss and many of his peers.
In 2015,
Stewart was sent to work under Truss at Britain’s department for the
environment. Truss challenged him to come up with a strategy for England’s
national parks in three days. “She said, Come on, Rory, how difficult can this
be?” he recalled. Truss started firing off suggestions. “Get young people into
nature. Blah blah blah blah.” (The plan was announced on time; Truss declined
to speak to me.) “I felt with Liz Truss slight affection but above all profound
pity,” Stewart said. “Because she’s approaching these big conversations as
though she’s sort of performing as an underprepared undergraduate at a
seminar.”
On a
cloudless summer’s morning, in the dog days of Theresa May’s government, I
travelled to Scunthorpe, in North Lincolnshire. In the sixties, Scunthorpe was
a growing steel town with four blast furnaces named after English queens. In
2016, the population voted overwhelmingly for Brexit; three years later, the
steelworks was at risk of closure, in part because of trade uncertainties
caused by the vote. British Steel, which ran the plant, had been sold to
private-equity investors for a pound. Four thousand jobs were on the line.
In the
afternoon, I sat down with Simon Green, the deputy chief executive of the local
council. Green was in his early fifties, angular and forthright. He grew up in
Grimsby, a fishing town on the coast, and spent his career in local
government—in Boston and New York, as well as in Nottingham and
Sheffield—before taking the job in North Lincolnshire, in 2017. Green was sick
of reporters, like me, coming up to Scunthorpe from London for the day, to gawk
at its predicament and wonder why people could have believed that Brexit would
improve their situation. “No disrespect, but we do get a level of poverty
porn,” he said. “A lot of doom and gloom.”
Green
assured me that the Brexit-related anxiety around the steelworks was a blip.
“We’re actually on a bit of a comeback roll,” he said. He was excited about the
region’s potential for green technology and the construction of HS2, a new
Y-shaped high-speed railway that was going to transform connections between
London and cities in the northeast and the northwest. “Rail track, ballast,
concrete, cement—you name anything to do with trains, infrastructure, it’s an
engineering, Midlands, Northern thing,” he said. Green ascribed the Brexit vote
in Scunthorpe to “values and culture” rather than to economics—a sense of
dislocation and of feeling disdained by politicians in London.
Recently, I
wondered how Green was getting on. In 2019, Scunthorpe was part of the “Red
Wall” of Labour constituencies that flipped for the Tories. British Steel had
changed hands once more. Now Chinese investors were planning to install new
furnaces, which required fewer workers and were fed with scrap metal. For the
first time since 1890, the plant would no longer produce virgin steel from ore.
I met Green a couple of weeks before Christmas. He had left his job a few days
before. He seemed relieved to be done. Seven local authorities in England have
gone bust since 2020, including the one serving Birmingham, Britain’s
second-largest city. In North Lincolnshire, the council now spends about
three-quarters of its budget on services for vulnerable children and
adults—roughly double the proportion of a decade ago. “We’re still here,” Green
said, ruefully. The saga of the steelworks continued. “It’s endless,” he went
on. “Is it closing? Isn’t it closing?” Britain has had eleven different
economic programs in the past thirteen years.
We were in
a teaching room at the University Campus North Lincolnshire, which opened a few
years ago in the former local-authority offices. The old council chamber, built
in the shape of a blast furnace, was now a lecture hall. The average student
age was twenty-nine. Green was proud of the project. It reminded him of
mechanics’ institutes in the nineteenth century. “People are using their own
judgment to better themselves,” he said. “If you want a job in this area, you
can get a job. We need more quality opportunity.” Green had had a clear
strategy for Scunthorpe and the nearby Humber estuary, built around green
technology and education. “I asked a question to my colleagues and politicians
as well,” he said. “What sort of town do you want this to be in ten, fifteen,
twenty years?”
Britain has
no equivalent strategy for itself. In September, Sunak weakened several of the
country’s key climate-change targets. A few weeks later, he cancelled what was
left of HS2, the new rail network. Only the stem of the Y will now be built,
from London to Birmingham, at a cost of some four hundred and seventy million
pounds per mile, with little or no benefit to the North. “I can get quite
excited, agitated by that,” Green said. “It makes us look a laughingstock.”
Green was studiously apolitical when we talked. I had no sense of which way he
voted. But he despaired of the shallowness and contingency now at the heart of
British politics, and the lack of narrative coherence—or shared purpose—about
what these years of struggle had been intended to achieve. I asked if he ever
worried that the country was in a permanent state of decline. “I think, at the
moment, we are at the crossroads,” he replied.
When will
it end? Sunak says that he will call a general election in the second half of
the year. The gossip in Westminster says that probably that means mid-November:
a British encore, to follow the main event in the U.S. But it could come as
soon as May. The Prime Minister began preparing the ground last fall, after his
first year in office, by presenting himself as a change candidate—a big claim,
considering the circumstances.
In October,
I went to Manchester to watch Sunak address the Conservative Party’s annual
conference. He was introduced onstage by his wife, Akshata Murty, the daughter
of N. R. Narayana Murthy, a founder of Infosys, the Indian I.T. conglomerate.
(According to the London Sunday Times, Sunak and Murty have an estimated net
worth of about five hundred million pounds.) Murty wore an orange pants suit,
and she addressed Britain’s most successful political organization as if it
were a local gardening society. “Please know that Rishi is working hard,” she
said. “He shares your values and he knows how much you care about the future of
the U.K.”
Sunak has a
quietly imploring tone. British politics was in a bad way, he explained. People
were fed up. “It isn’t anger,” Sunak said. “It’s an exhaustion with politics,
in particular politicians saying things and then nothing ever changing.” Sunak
dated the rot back thirty years without explaining why, but, presumably, to
indicate the fall of Thatcher. (Thatcher was everywhere in Manchester; she is
the modern Party’s only ghost.) Having positioned himself as the country’s
next, truly transformative, leader, Sunak offered his party a weirdly pallid
program: the dismantling of HS2, plus two long-range, complex policies, to
abolish smoking and to reform the A-levels—England’s standard end-of-school
exams. “We will be bold. We will be radical,” Sunak promised. “We will face
resistance and we will meet it.”
Increasingly,
Sunak has been pulled between the Party’s diverging instincts: to retreat to
the dry, liberal competence of the Cameron-Osborne regime or to head off in a
more explicitly protectionist, anti-immigrant, anti-woke direction. In
Manchester, the energy was unmistakably on the Party’s right. Suella Braverman,
then the Home Secretary, magnetized delegates with a speech warning of a
“hurricane” of mass migration. Truss staged a growth rally, and Nigel Farage
cruised the conference hall, posing for selfies. (There is talk of Farage
standing as a Conservative M.P.) Back in London, I had lunch with David Frost,
an influential Conservative peer. “Rishi, I feel for him, in a way,” Frost
said. “He’s just trying to keep the show on the road and not upset all these
different wings of the Party. But the consequence of that is you end up with a
sort of agenda which is not politically meaningful at all.”
On January
14th, a poll of fourteen thousand people, which Frost facilitated, suggested
that the Party is on course for a huge defeat later this year. The question is
what kind of haunted political realm it will leave behind. Under Starmer,
Labour has been tactical in the extreme, exorcising Corbyn’s left-wing policies
(Corbyn has been blocked from standing for the Party at the election), while
making vague noises about everything else. It has nothing new to say about
Brexit and equivocates about its own tax and spending plans, if it wins power.
The Party recently scaled back a plan to invest twenty-eight billion pounds a
year in green projects. There is no rescue on the way for Britain’s welfare
state.
Osborne
noted all this with satisfaction. “The underlying economic arguments have
basically been accepted,” he said, of austerity. “It’s rather like the Thatcher
period. Everyone complained that Thatcher did deindustrialization, and yet no
one wants to unpick it.” By contrast, Cummings sees the two cautious, hedging
leaders in charge of Britain’s main political parties—and the relief among some
centrists that the candidates are not so different from each other—in rather
darker terms. “They are deluded when they think it’s great that Sunak and
Starmer are in. It’s just like they’re arguing over trivia,” he said. “The
politics of it are insane.”
I am afraid
that I agree. It is unnerving to be heading into an election year in Britain
with the political conversation so small, next to questions that can feel
immeasurable. I put this to Hayes, the Tory M.P., when I went to see him in the
House of Commons. “You’re arguing we have very vanilla-flavor politics, in a
richly colored world. There’s something in that,” he said. Then he surprised
me. “I think the key thing for the Conservatives now is to be more
conservative,” he said. We were sitting in a bay window, overlooking the
Thames. A waiter poured tea. Hayes seemed to relish the coming election. It was
as if, after almost fourteen years of tortuous experiment, real conservatism
might finally be at hand. “Outside metropolitan Britain and the university
towns, it’s all up for grabs,” Hayes assured me. “Toryism must have its day
again.” ♦
Sam Knight
is a staff writer at The New Yorker, based in London. His first book, “The
Premonitions Bureau: A True Account of Death Foretold,” was published in May,
2022.
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