What happened in Britain during the extraordinary years of 2018-24 wasn’t the philosophical defeat of ‘Toryism’, or even its betrayal. It was a legal and bureaucratic power struggle that the British Right fought and then lost, decisively.
Here was the essential question of the last six years: is opposition politics allowed in Britain? Almost everything turned on this issue; old Left-Right appeals were the exception not the rule. First came the saga over the referendum result and whether it should be honoured, which meant a constitutional crisis over prerogative powers and an extended showdown with the courts. Corbynism, so close to victory in 2017, was crowded out and fell by the wayside.
Then came a series of unprecedented interventions by the standards and ethics committees into politics. Sue Gray stalked the elected Government in plain sight. An obscure ultra-royalist reading of the constitution was invoked to prevent Boris Johnson from seeking a new mandate from the electorate.
The Parliamentary Right found itself winnowed away by investigations, which led to the former Prime Minister’s expulsion from the House of Commons and his allies being threatened with the same if they criticised these proceedings. A leading member of the Conservative Right, Miriam Cates, was hit with a gag order at the climax of its showdown with Downing Street over illegal migration. Investigations into workplace conduct unhorsed a Deputy Prime Minister and nearly did the same to two Home Secretaries.
Policy became almost irrelevant. The legal inheritance from New Labour made border control impossible. When Raab fell to a workplace investigation, his ‘British Bill of Rights’ that would have replaced the ECHR fell with him. After opposition to Low Traffic Neighbourhoods (LTNs) became Government policy, a Health Minister was asked to refer herself to an ethics advisor for leafleting against “15-minute cities”. In the closing days of the Sunak ministry, a court case killed onshore fossil fuel extraction at a stroke.
Seldom have ideas counted for so little. This was a battle over the levers of Government – not what should happen once they were pulled. Everything was downstream from a willingness or an unwillingness to challenge the various non-partisan bodies for control of the British state.
The coalitions that formed were motley and defied ordinary description. Steve Baker, Sajid Javid and Rishi Sunak were each starchy Thatcherites. Rory Stewart was a Burkean stickler for tradition, Theresa May a committed Anglican. None of it mattered. When the time came, each made the only choice that really counted now: for ‘decentralised’ Britain and against the democratic executive. The same was true of their opponents. Almost nothing united Boris Johnson, Dominic Cummings and Nadine Dorries beyond some defence (ebbing and flowing) of central and democratic authority.
Things were now elemental enough to make the old distinctions blur into irrelevance. The most scrupulous Thatcherite could not have passed a budget without first neutralising the OBR. No YIMBY could have built without defying Natural England and limiting the scope of judicial review. And no kind of Government is possible at all if probity and ethics boards are allowed to cashier the people’s representatives for interrupting people.
We are well beyond theoretical jollies about the remit of the state or the proper role of the markets. Owing to a few key individuals, in 2019 the British Conservative Party essentially solved the problem of centre-Right politics in the 21st Century: that is to say, how to rouse the lower-middle and working classes with a demagogic appeal against the Blob while not spooking the upper-middle classes. The solution, as it turns out, was to simply recast the necessary attack on institutions as modernisation and reform. This is a circle that has yet to be squared in any other Western democracy.
By the end of 2019 the way was open. If Dominic Cummings is to be believed, even after the folly of lockdown the permanent administration essentially surrendered to the Johnson Government, offering to let it carry out the long mooted reform of the Civil Service that would have drastically cut its headcount and ended its institutional independence.
Had this been carried out, it would have opened a new chapter in world history. Britain would have been the first major country to decisively break with the bureaucratic-oligarchic model that rules virtually every state on the planet. At the very least, it certainly would have made the old divides between, oh I don’t know, the Bow Group and Blue Beyond feel less pressing.
Britain is further along in this historical process than any other developed country. Even the most extreme Project 2025 stretch goals would leave a President Trump with far less control over the state than Boris Johnson enjoyed in January 2020. People like Keir Starmer appreciate this. His first speech outside Downing Street had almost nothing to say about living standards, everything to say about probity, ethics and the liberties of the quango. He is prosecuting a conflict that the British Tories began and then refused to wage.
And so to say now, as many do, that the Conservative Party should in the wake of its defeat muse on the philosophical case for the centre-Right is to forget all that has happened – perhaps wilfully. It ignores how politics has regressed, or perhaps progressed, into a bare conflict between institutions. It means everyone can go back to ignoring that a Prime Minister with an 80-seat majority was ousted from office for eating cake. It means that everyone can go back to ignoring that the particular formation around Johnson and Cummings got within an ace of actually dissolving the Blob and transforming politics forever. Those who would sooner forget about these events are taking Keir Starmer at his word: that the ordinary democratic process has resumed and that the last few years were only a freak aberration, never to be repeated.
More than anything else, it allows the Tories to ignore the fact that they have, since 2019, known perfectly well how to win a popular mandate from the British people, which can then be used to carry out a reformation of the state. Everyone knows what would drive a person to vote against something like Starmerism – this showy, hand-wringing over the reason why only invites us to think they don’t like the answer.
How will a centre-Right Government elected in 2028 pass a budget in the teeth of OBR opposition? These are the salient questions, and their ultimate answers are more profound and more revolutionary than any paean to ‘institutions’, or even to free markets. Politics as commonly understood ended in 2019, and those who would now lead the opposition should not forget it.
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Gove is the master snake oil salesman. A political back stabber and at the very beating heart of every wound inflicted on our great nation by the Con-servatives over the last 14 years.
I gave up on the Spectator years ago when it embraced greenism and covidism.
I’m sure it will be a blow to their hopes but I won’t be back …
I have just about stuck with them for Liddle, Murray, Shriver etc. However I think the baggage Gove brings is too much. I’m out.
Never bothered with the Spectator. Never read it. Gave up on Fake News lamestreaming back in 2005 or before. Used to read the Ecommunist and WSJ – globalist rags, couldn’t stand vomiting so much, so had to stop. I doubt the Govidians running the Spectator are any better. All of them are a waste of space.
Goves’s a slimey git, RIP the spectator!
Powell was right.
Gove is a despicable covidian.
The Conservative party has never recovered from Heath.
But Heath was not the cause of the Conservative Party’s problems – he was a symptom. The cause is that our civilisation is decadent, our dominant class (the state bourgeoisie) is degenerate, and our ruling group (Rushi Soonoff, 2TK, etc, etc, etc) is gripped by a death with – hence the insane addiction to the Great Replacement. Only if we get rid of our current rulers in some kind of national revolution can we prevent the social collapse that they will impose on us.
Well, perhaps what you say is correct but for me the traitor Heath will always remain the traitor. A cold fish who thought that by joining with a continent that was entirely unlike us we should somehow be able to repair what was wrong in our own country.
A thousand deaths are not enough for the traitor Heath.
England joined “with the continent which was entirely unlikely to it” for the most recent time in in 1903 and the ultimate outcome was a wholesale destruction of the traditional order of that continent, millions of dead people and handing over all of Europe eastward of the so-called Oder-Neiße line as birthday present to the great beneficiary of mankind known as Josef Stalin which lead to about 45 years of Bolshevist/ Communist rule there.
You’re more than welcome to stick with minding your own business in future while Europe eventually reconstructs itself instead of playing some idiotic “We are are victim of ourselves!” card. Such as (a set of more recent examples) first pressing for quick eastward expansion of the EEC and then complaining about it having happened or (I still remember that one) first forcing Germany into the European currency Irrsinnsprojekt as condition for allowing its so-called reunification and then complaining about the Euro being a German, that is “Nazi” project for German domination of Europe.
I gave up subscribing to The Spectator about 5 years ago.
Now the treacherous snake Gove is Editor, I won’t even consider re-subscribing.
I used to give the £5 per month to The Spectator. I stopped when I heard Fraser Nelson talking all Covidian. I don’t remember what it was he said, but I do remember thinking “I no longer want to support this magazine, so I dont want to give them any more money”. It gave me pleasure to cancel that standing order.
On a not entirely unrelated point, I need some timber today to replace a couple of floorboards. I shall take quiet satisfaction from driving past Wickes to the slightly more expensive DIY shop further down the road.
Good. I have exactly the same principles, which my wife just absolutely cannot understand, (which in itself is an indictment of where we have got to).
Amazon is a prime example – just NO, NO and furthermore, NO.
Never subscribed, but if someone like James Delingpole became editor I might consider it!
Neil Oliver and John Redwood might also be good, but its a very narrow field, so many disappointed when it mattered, if not over Brexit then over the Covid scam, and/or the Climate lie.
I wonder whether Gove will give his good pal James Delingpole a broader remit.
’Down the Rabbit Hole with Delingpole’ would make for an interesting column.
Splendid suggestion trouble is it won’t happen sadly.
I am a subscriber to the Spectator.
I think it’s a good magazine. Sure, I don’t agree with everything that I read but that’s OK. We blame the left for living in their echo chamber so we should be careful not to live in ours.
I must admit the appointment of Gove surprises me: this is a guy who was in favour of vaccine passports and mandates. Plus, as many others have noticed, there is something slimy about the guy. But we’ll see.
Ultimately, if I don’t like the magazine, well, it only takes a few clicks to unsubscribe. I wish I could do the same with our Labour government!
Editors are indeed important. But even more so are the owners. Why the author does not mention the owners of the Spectator over the last fifty years, the last one being (since September) Sir Paul Marshall, who also owns GBNews and UnHerd. Strange.
The Media appear unable to understand that STEM subjects, up to A’ levels, and even a Natural Science, mid-1970’s, degree, is apolitical. There might be tweeks, like Newton’s and Einstein’s views on Space and Time, but both sets of experts agreed on the boundaries. Until further evidence arrives, they are the tools of the trade, for further investigations., and wealth creation.
A balanced discussion about the Climate Emergency is impossible while there’s a BBC ban on ‘Climate Deniers’. And it happens in many other disciplines too. Yet, discussions about what is woman are acceptable, as long as there is no conclusion!
When you know about what happens during solar storms and understand Maxwell’s Equations enough to think it worth investigating, and wonder why it isn’t discussed in the Media, it’s easy to see why we are in the state we are in.
And while Arts and Humanities graduates dominate every sector, it will continue. The reason there are so few STEM graduates with good presentation skills is that they rarely have the opportunity to maintain their sanity, integrity and income, if they ventured into the Media / Political Bubble.
I also subscribe and rather agree with MajorMajor. There seems to be an increasing tendency to write off newspapers and magazines unless you agree with pretty much every opinion expressed in them. I think that’s unfortunate. I’ve never met a person I agreed with about everything, nor do I expect I ever will; and I am even less likely to find a publication I entirely agree with.
I think that the Spectator’s heart has been in the right place under Fraser Nelson on many, though not of course, all issues. It is a well written and stimulating publication. I will wait to see what Gove does with it.
I’ve been a Spectator subscriber for a couple of years. Whilst I didn’t always agree with every opinion on there, and some of Fraser Nelson’s recent comments made me wonder what he’d been drinking, it was always a worthwhile read.
However, Gove is a red line for me. Subscription has been cancelled and I won’t go back whilst he’s there.
When they appointed Gove as Editor I stopped my subscription to the Spectator.
One has to have standards…
I gave up reading the Spectator when Nelson and his crew refused to call out the scamdemic for what it was – a complete fraud. Where were they when we needed them? Absolutely f… nowhere.
I have had several letters published by The Spectator over the years but (IMHO) my best one – which mentioned that the damage from Covid “vaccines” dwarfed the Thalidomide toll – was ignored. Similarly, credit to Fraser Nelson for keeping faith with Toby Young when the Twitter mob descended on him, but I don’t recall him writing anything in The Spectator which criticised the vaccines.
My Spectator addiction began in Creighton’s time. Then, as now, it has excellent contributors. But context is all. Then, as for many years after, to oppose our membership of the EEC was to be put beyond the pale. The Spectator had to bang its drum because almost every other paper endlessly banged the other drum.
Fifty years on, my only break from Spectator reading was in Chancellor’s time as editor. It had just given up under what Nelson described as a lazy editor.
It eventually came back, not as an echo chamber but as an intellectual stimulant. If you met most of the contributors in the pub, you would probably stay for a silly afternoon.
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The current edition of The Spectator contains a review of Boris Johnson’s memoir by… Michael Gove – hardly an unbiased observer. I was thinking of resubscribing, but my loathing of Gove rules it out,