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Kamala Harris was the ideal candidate for Donald Trump: a West Coast liberal-lawyer with a rictus smile and an undistinguished record as vice-president and an opaque policy platform. She smiled and laughed a lot during the campaign, she preached progressive orthodoxies, she rallied with Oprah Winfrey, Beyonce and Lady Gaga, as if the support of the moneyed showbiz elite could persuade provincial, working-class America to vote for the Democrats, but you could see the panic in her eyes. The truth is she had nothing to say to the mass of Americans disillusioned by economic hardship, alarmed by immigration and the porous southern border, and alienated by identity liberalism.

In the final days of the campaign, certainly following the publication of a rogue poll in Iowa (by a “respected” independent pollster, no less) that predicted a late surge to Harris, Democrats seemed confident that Trump could be beaten. Harris became more strident. She denounced Trump as a “fascist” and her supporters cheered. The momentum was with her, we were told, although the betting markets to the last remained firmly for Trump. On the morning of 6 November, New York Times commentators were clustering around Harris, increasingly certain that she would be the next president, the first woman to command the White House. But this was wishful thinking.

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In mitigation, as my colleague Megan Gibson wrote in these pages two weeks ago, Harris was always destined to lose. Megan argued that she’d been given too little time to prepare and make her pitch to the American people: the Democratic elite were culpable for supporting Joe Biden in his doomed pursuit of a second term even as with each passing week he became more shambling and incoherent. Trump’s quip during his debate with Biden in June signed his death warrant: “I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence. I don’t think he knows what he said either.”

But I think Harris, whose campaign out-spent Trump’s and raised as much as $1 billion in funds, had more than enough time to reveal her limitations; as vice-president she was the “incumbent”. She’d had four years to demonstrate her capabilities but, for much of the time, was largely anonymous: marginalised, forgotten. It was as if Biden regretted choosing her as his VP. During the campaign, apart from the issue of women’s reproductive rights, about which she spoke with authority and courage, Harris revealed her drastic limitations as a politician and communicator. She even ended up losing the popular vote, unlike Hillary Clinton in 2016.

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In the late 1970s a divided Labour Party and much of the British left (apart from Martin Jacques’ Marxism Today) misunderstood the forces unlocked by the election of Margaret Thatcher as prime minister. Her victory was complacently assumed to be transient, just another Conservative government passing through, and the consensus politics of the post-war order would be restored in due course.

“When I saw Thatcherism,” the cultural theorist Stuart Hall told the New Statesman in 2012, reflecting on the turbulent politics of the 1980s, “I realised that it wasn’t just an economic programme, but that it had profound cultural roots. Thatcher and [Enoch] Powell were both what Hegel called ‘historical individuals’ – their very politics, their contradictions, instance or concretise in one life or career much wider forces that are in play.”

Something similar could be said of Donald Trump, as I wrote in our Saturday Read newsletter last weekend. When he first ran for the presidency as a Republican he was traduced, ridiculed, and written-off: part orange-faced game show host, part preposterous Mafia Big Man. The American novelist Philip Roth called him the “boastful buffoon”. Trump is boastful and he is a buffoon. His long, tedious, erratic victory speech – there was praise for the “super genius” Elon Musk and a bizarre appearance on stage by golfer Bryson DeChambeau – was absurd even by the standards of a Trump rally.

And yet, for all his repulsive excesses and uncouth behaviour, Trump keeps winning. What does he know? What does he understand about the atavistic impulses and insecurities of America and the American people? Why has the Republican Party allowed itself to be captured by Trump and Trumpism? The Maga movement is not a passing phenomenon: like Thatcherism it has hardened into something permanent. It is a counter-hegemonic project. There is no turning back for the Republicans.

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Alongside Trump will be vice-president elect JD Vance, a true ideologue, and the intellectual leader of the so-called pro-worker, anti-liberal American New Right. But Vance, once a Never Trumper, embodies the contradictions of the Maga movement, which seeks to encompass both the Silicon Valley libertarianism of Musk and Peter Thiel and the common good conservatism of the academic Patrick Deenen who, in his recent book Regime Change, wrote: “The institutionalisation of the libertarian ethos — in both the economic and social domains — has globally ravaged the working classes, leaving them simultaneously in a condition of economic precarity and social disintegration.”

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What to make of the condition of modern America? “No one I know of has foreseen an America like the one we live in today,” Philip Roth said shortly before he died. “No one could have imagined that the twenty-first century catastrophe to befall the USA, the most debasing of disasters, would appear not say, in the terrifying guise of an Orwellian Big Brother but in the ominously ridiculous commedia dell’arte [ITALS] figure of the boastful buffoon.”

But perhaps this outcome could have been imagined. After all, as John Gray has written, the word “populism” has no clear meaning but is “used by liberals to refer to political blowback against the social disruption produced by their own policies”. Trump’s return is some blowback.

What is it the English feel they once had and lost? Or never had and long for? What is it about the culture that valorises noble sacrifice, near-misses, and heroic failure? Why, most hauntingly at this time, does the image of a red-shirted Bobby Moore, the blond-haired, gentleman-East-Ender who was never knighted and died of cancer aged 51, holding aloft the Jules Rimet trophy as a World Cup-winning captain in 1966, inspire such nostalgia and longing even among those of us who have no recollection of that Wembley final?

“National football events don’t become part of public history, they become part of collective memory,” wrote my colleague Nicholas Harris following England’s defeat to Spain on 14 July. “It’s testament to its power that I can convince myself of the vividness of Gazza’s tears and Maradona’s hand of God despite not being alive for either.” Nick was not alive for those moments and yet he has lived through them, or with them, as we all have. They shape the narrative of what it means to be an England fan, hoping for the best while being resigned to something less than the best. Fabio Capello, the unloved Italian football coach of the England team from 2008 to 2012, described the 1966 World Cup win as the “returning ghost” of the national game. It haunts us still.

In his short, sombre victory speech outside 10 Downing Street on 5 July, Keir Starmer said he wanted to lead us on “a rediscovery of who we are”. In other words, he wanted to tell a new story about the country. But his words also hinted at something deeper, the suggestion being that Starmer thinks we do not know who we are. Columnists at the Economist and the Financial Times, high on the thin air of their own exalted, self-congratulatory liberalism, may scoff at notions of belonging. What should it matter to them when you are writing for the habitué of the club class lounge and luxury international hotel? But for the people of deep England, in the suburbs, shires and small towns, national identity matters deeply. We understand this instinctively as we come together for those grand national football occasions when, for 90 minutes or more, as Eric Hobsbawm wrote, “The imagined community of millions seems more real as a team of 11 named people”.

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England played poorly for much of the tournament in Germany but still reached their second consecutive Euros final. That’s quite some advance on the 1970s – when I was at school, as I explained to my son – when England failed to qualify for the 1974 and 1978 World Cups and the 1976 European Championship. This time around, Gareth Southgate’s England were not good enough to beat a wonderfully fluent Spain, expertly coached by the little-known Luis de la Fuente, who had previously led the under-21s. Spain is a fragile kingdom, destabilised by secessionist movements, climate change, and a rising hard-right faction. But the national football team has cohesion, uniting Basque, Catalan and Castilian. There is a common football culture and a common style of play flowing through the age groups and all parts of the kingdom. It is attractive to watch and hard to defeat.

I had a glimpse of what was to come in March when I watched a friendly between Spain and Brazil at the Bernabéu stadium in Madrid. A high-energy game finished 3-3 but it was obvious that Spain had a pattern of play – high pressing, constant movement, pace along both flanks through their wingers Lamine Yamal (then aged 16) and Nico Williams – and would be formidable opponents at the Euros. In contrast, England have no signature style. They were resilient, grinding, always hard to beat, and defined by moments of individual brilliance that rescued games when all seemed lost. But they were never “shit” as Gary Lineker, the BBC’s highest-paid presenter and a social media blowhard, called them in one of his laddish podcasts as he joined the chorus of abuse against Gareth Southgate.

Southgate, who resigned on 16 July, and Starmer share some similarities. They are both cautious, pragmatic men from the home counties. Their speech patterns and diction have a certain low-toned flatness. Their lack of radicalism and charisma have been repeatedly noted by their detractors. They both prefer long-term plans and are not easily knocked off course by events or mob rage. Starmer believes in mission-led government and Southgate was a champion of the FA’s player pathway system, under which players progress from the under-21s to the senior squad. Both men are patriots but also progressives. When I consider their style and approach I think of a remark by Eileen Blair, George Orwell’s first wife, made in a letter to a friend. George is writing a little book, she said of what became The Lion and the Unicorn, “about how to be a socialist while Tory”. Left conservatism – a winning politics for these times.

Lisa Nandy, the Culture Secretary, said after the defeat to Spain that the new Labour government would be “far more Gareth Southgate, and far less Michael Gove” in seeking to heal division. In 2018, during the World Cup in Russia, Alex Niven, an astute anatomist of Englishness, coined the term “Southgatism” “to describe the peculiar national mood his team seemed to both reflect and recreate” during that unusually hot summer. Southgatism, Niven says now, has “aged and mellowed. But it retains much of its utopian potential to gesture at a sort of ‘dream Englishness’… to use the football team as a cue for imagining different, more hopeful and liberated ways of national being.” The Southgate era is at an end, but Southgatism will endure.

At the New Statesman election night party, as we waited for the exit poll at 10pm, Andrew Marr announced in his opening remarks that the 2024 general election would be “remembered for a hundred years”. What will not be forgotten, any time soon, for sure, is what happened to the Conservative Party, which now has only 121 seats in parliament, its worst defeat in its history, and after having won a landslide at the 2019 election on the promise of a new cross-class, pro-Brexit realignment of British politics. It never came close to happening. Levelling-up – forget it. Reduced immigration and tight border controls – forget it. Buccaneering Global Britian – forget it. A cascade of free trade deals, as David Davis used to boast – forget it. By the end of the campaign, Rishi Sunak was reduced to promising unfunded tax cuts and warning voters not to “surrender” to Labour. No one was listening to him. His desolate, arid form of conservatism is out of time, and he was out of luck. More than defeated, he was humiliated. He called a surprise summer election, standing in torrential rain outside 10 Downing Street, and then orchestrated a dismal six-week campaign, characterised by gaffes, undermined by cynicism. At least he departed with grace, his final speech as prime minister being suitably contrite.

As well as the Conservatives, the SNP must show more humility. The party was routed in Scotland, losing 39 seats; it was fortunate to hold on to several others, and seven of its nine seats are now the most marginal in Scotland. During the campaign First Minister John Swinney, as unconvincing now as he was when leader of the party first time around in 2000, repeated the tired formulation that a majority of seats for the SNP at the election would in effect be a mandate for a second independence referendum. The voters thought otherwise. The SNP presents as a party-state: it believes its interests and those of the Scottish people are coterminous. That was always a delusion, and the independence movement has fragmented across three parties and is on a road to nowhere. The intellectual energy and democratic flourishing – the writer Gerry Hassan spoke back then of “an independence of the mind” - of the 2014 IndyRef campaign that so fascinated the New Statesman has curdled into something much darker and resentful. One-party rule is bad for democracy and the SNP has become tired and complacent. The taint of corruption lingers. It was striking that Nicola Sturgeon, a pundit on ITV’s election night programme, referred to the SNP as “they”, as if she too wishes to disown what the party and movement have become. The unity that made the SNP such a formidable election-winning machine under Sturgeon and before her Alex Salmond is no more. Labour’s next challenge will be to win control of the Scottish Parliament in 2026.

During the campaign I chaired a hustings in the constituency of Hertford and Stortford where I live on the Essex-Hertfordshire borderlands. For decades it was an ultra-safe Conservative seat. The local MP, Julia Marson – known locally, I found out at the hustings, as “Julie Margate” presumably because she lives in Kent – was a stooge of Boris Johnson. Friends and family of mine who had written to her over the years about issues of local concern never received the courtesy of a reply. It was no surprise then when she declined to appear at our hustings. The other candidates were engaged and well informed, representing Labour, the Liberal Democrats, the Greens and Reform. We discussed the environment, housing, transport, the polluted Stort and Lea rivers, and took sharp questions from the audience. When told Marson would not attend, I wrote to her to ask if she would reconsider. She did not reply. Of course she did not reply. In the event, she lost to Labour’s 24-year-old Josh Dean, who overturned a Conservative majority of over 17,000 – another brick in the Tory wall removed as the whole house came tumbling down. I smiled when that result came through.

It was not all good news for Labour on election night. I was sorry to see Heather Iqbal lose in Dewsbury & Batley to an independent candidate, Iqbal Mohamed, who believes “our democracy has been hijacked by a corrupt, racist, brutal, apartheid and genocide-supporting elite”. Will that be his message as people ask about bin collection and mental health services at the weekly constituency surgery? Heather, who used to work with Rachel Reeves, is one of the nicest and smartest people I have met in politics, but her campaign was destabilised by sectarianism and the forces of opposition unlocked by the Israel-Gaza war. Several female Labour candidates endured brutal campaigns as independents and George Galloway’s Workers Party mobilised against them. Jess Phillips, the MP for Yardley in Birmingham, in her diary on page xx, describes the abuse and harassment she experienced. These are not progressive new times. Ethno-religious conflict seethes in the old post-industrial heartlands. The country is restive.

And yet, Britain looks more stable than it did before the election was called. Labour has a strong, working majority of 172 in the Commons and a mandate for far-reaching social democratic change in the country. The SNP has been defeated and the unity of the kingdom will not be threatened again by a secessionist referendum for a long while. This was an extraordinary general election, in so many ways. The British people heard Rishi Sunak’s stridently delivered warnings about Labour and ignored them. Now he’s gone. Plus, Liz Truss lost her seat. Rees-Mogg lost his seat. Julie Margate lost her seat. All changed, changed utterly.

I was in my hotel room in Taiwan on the evening of 22 May and thinking about extending my stay when my mobile started to ring: Andrew Marr, the Sunday Times, George Eaton … Rishi Sunak had called a surprise general election for 4 July and I was heading home.

I arrived in Taipei City ahead of the inauguration of Lai Ching-te, or William Lai, who was succeeding Tsai Ing-wen as the eighth president of Taiwan, another smooth transition of power in the self-governing democracy that is uniquely threated by President Xi Jinping’s superpower of 1.4 million people. Only 11 minor states (plus the Holy See) have formal diplomatic relations with Taiwan and their heads of states and presidents were introduced at the inauguration on 20 May as if they were great, returning world leaders. The king of Eswatini (formerly Swaziland) brought an entourage of nearly 100 with him, and not all of them were his wives.

President Lai of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), a medical doctor before he became a politician, has called for de facto “independence” for Taiwan but says now he is committed to the “status quo” – by which he means the strategic and diplomatic ambiguity that has prevailed ever since Chiang Kai-Shek (“the Generalissimo”) and the Chinese Nationalist Party (the Kuomitang, or KMT) lost the civil war on the mainland and relocated to Taiwan in 1949, taking many of the greatest treasures from the Forbidden City with them (they are now part of the permanent collection of the National Palace Museum in Taipei).

The Generalissimo was leader of the Republic of China from 1928 until 1949 and the KMT dreamed of reclaiming the mainland and uniting the Republic of China (ROC) but never returned. Taiwan - Chiang still called it the ROC - evolved from an authoritarian regime under martial law to today’s thriving open society of 23 million people. But the journey to democracy was painful. “We felt so small, so short under martial law,” Lin Hwai-min (universally known as Mr Lin), the celebrated choreographer and founder of the internationally renowned Cloud Gate contemporary dance company, told me over lunch one afternoon. “There was the threat of arbitrary arrest, censorship, the persecution of artists and writers. But then after martial law was lifted [in 1987, by a presidential order] everything changed. You could say the protests of the 1980s created the Taiwan of today.”

The Economist, in a provocative cover story last year, called Taiwan “the most dangerous place on Earth”. But it doesn’t feel like that when you are there, although for the first time, two days after Lai’s inauguration, China simulated a full-scale attack on the island as “strong punishment” for “secessionist acts”. The drills continue alongside ongoing “grey zone” activities: cognitive warfare, cyberattacks, disinformation. “My mother says: ‘One day it [war] might happen, but we can’t give up our lives in the meantime,” said Catherine Hu, a diplomat, capturing the spirit of cheerful resilience among the people of the mountainous island that also endures earthquakes and typhoons.

Would the Americans fight for Taiwan if the People’s Liberation Army invaded to reclaim the island? Can the status quo hold in the region? And is Xi Jinping, who demands peaceful unification, prepared for a war with the West over Taiwan?

The self-governing island democracy dominates global semiconductor production and its companies, notably the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), produce over 60 per cent of the world’s semiconductors and over 90 per cent of the most advanced chips (Apple is TSMC’s biggest customer). TSMC’s chief international rival is Samsung. China, the world’s largest consumer of semiconductors, makes its own chips but its technologies are reportedly at least 10 years behind those of TSMC, which now manufactures the three-nanometre chip, the most advanced.

The semiconductor industry constitutes around 14 per cent of Taiwan’s total GDP and 40 per cent of its exports, according to a recent report by the British-Taiwanese All-Party Parliamentary Group – and it serves as a kind of defensive shield, or “sacred mountain”, protecting the island from hostile takeover. The economic effects of a war in Taiwan and the consequent disruption to global supply chains would be devastating. “We don’t want war, but we have the willingness to fight and the determination to fight,” said Tien Chung-kwang, the deputy foreign minister.

I asked him about the lessons of Hong Kong. “They screwed up,” he said of Beijing. “How can you ever trust China’s promise after what has happened? One country two systems – that’s not going to work for Taiwan.”

While in Taipei I re-read JG Ballard’s Empire of the Sun, from 1984. It is a fictional recasting of the author’s experience as a teenage detainee in the Lunghua internment camp in Shanghai, where he had lived with his parents in the International Settlement. In the novel the young Jim sees a distant glow in the sky after the atom bomb is dropped on Nagasaki and, later, after escaping the camp, he is filled with strange foreboding. The Second World War has ended but here, he senses, “at the mouths of the great rivers of Asia, would be fought the last war to decide the planet’s future”. It’s a profoundly unsettling vision but, as ever, Ballard was ahead of the game. He’d anticipated the world to come.

During the election campaign I have been thinking about Taiwan. Our national political debate seems so provincial, so removed from the huge forces remaking the world around geopolitical risk and threats of war. Meanwhile, as our party leaders squabble like contestants on a game show, Putin flies to Pyongyang to sign a mutually assured defence pact with North Korea and Chinese war ships continue their menacing daily manoeuvres in the Taiwan Strait.

The fiscal constraints under which a new Labour government would operate in the next parliament mean that, before too long, Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves will be compelled to raise taxes. The alternative is a return to austerity, which would be unconscionable for the Labour leadership and punish those whom the party aspires to represent above all others: Britain’s fabled “working people”.

But the charade goes on. The front bench repeats with iron discipline its mantra that Labour will not raise income tax, VAT or National Insurance if it wins on 4 July, as it will resoundingly. On this Reeves means what she says. But when it comes to, say, raising capital gains tax, or re-evaluating council tax charges, or even introducing wealth taxes, she and her colleagues are equivocal. This, then, is what economists are calling Labour’s “conspiracy of silence” over tax and the state of public finances.

One understands the reason for Labour’s lack of candour. Why would Starmer and his team wish to disturb their own serene glide towards power? Labour strategists cannot believe their luck at how dismal the campaign has been for the Conservatives. Rishi Sunak, less than three weeks out from the final vote, and usually so stridently self-confident, has the demoralised look of a man already mourning his own defeat. For the Prime Minister, most certainly since the D-Day commemorations debacle, this has become a protracted campaign of masochism: he goes on because he has no alternative but to go on. Until the electorate ends his misery.

Labour knows it will win but remains excessively cautious, in part because it has been traumatised by repeated election defeats as well as the civil war that consumed the party during the Corbyn years. Starmer may have served under Corbyn until the final, abject defeat but this, he shiftily told Beth Rigby during the Sky leaders’ debate on Tuesday evening, was only because he knew the veteran agitator would lose. Does anyone believe him?

Starmer had other reasons for staying on. First, he understood that as an anti-Corbyn dissenter he could never win the leadership of a party that had been captured by the radical left. Second, back then, he was a committed Remainer. He sensed an opportunity to reverse the vote for Brexit and persuaded John McDonnell, Corbyn’s shadow chancellor and the de facto leader of the left in parliament, to support a second referendum. But now Starmer seldom mentions the European Union other than to reiterate that Brexit is a settled matter.

Labour’s problem then is not so much a conspiracy of silence as a crisis of trust. Who or which institutions do the public believe will change their lives for the better? Labour says it will not raise taxes, but we know it will. Sunak says he will reduce immigration, but we know he cannot, just as David Cameron could not before him, despite pledging to reduce net migration to below 100,000 a year.

Trust, and its absence, was the fork on which Beth Rigby expertly skewered Starmer and Rishi Sunak in her interviews with both men. She wanted them to concede that they said one thing and did another; that promises and pledges existed only to be broken in politics. Why pretend otherwise?

There is a restive mood in the country as there is elsewhere in Europe as the hard right advances in Germany, France and Italy in particular. Labour should be very careful. The party’s support is broad but shallow: turn-out may be low on 4 July and it may even win fewer votes in aggregate than Corbyn’s Labour did at the 2017 election. One of the failings of the first-past-the-post system is that it exaggerates the margin of victory: the winner really does take it all.

But there is a deeper political tide turning beneath this approaching result. Trust and confidence in British politics and our elected politicians is at an all-time low, according to a National Centre for Social Research report published this week. “The public is as doubtful as it has ever been about the trustworthiness and efficacy of the country’s system of government and the people who comprise it,” said John Curtice, the polling expert and author of the report.

Nigel Farage has always had a feeling for the social atmosphere of the country. He is determined to exploit an anti-Tory mood of mass disaffection, especially among leave voters. “I’ve been thinking that Brexit might not be the last [political] earthquake,” he told me in 2017. “There might just be another one. There may be something seismic still to come. And it could be the Conservative Party that’s the most vulnerable to it.” This election shows he was right about that. Now he says: “Something remarkable may happen on election day. We are on the verge of shifting the tectonic plates of politics.”

Labour will benefit from the Conservative collapse in Farage’s metaphorical earthquake. But Starmer’s government will immediately face multiple crises: weakened state capacity and a fragile civil service, real-terms public spending cuts that will come into effect from 2025, a hard right insurgency in Europe, geopolitical disorder from the Red Sea to the Taiwan Strait. This is emphatically not the dawn of a new progressive liberal world order that was celebrated by Tony Blair in 1997.

What Jonathan Powell, chief of staff in the Blair government, called the “post-euphoria, pre-delivery phase” of government is vanishingly brief. Keir Starmer’s Labour will be revealed soon enough by the choices it makes in power.

The hard lesson of these recent years of post-Brexit upheaval is that it’s not enough to say what your intentions are – that’s the easy part of campaigning. Many politicians have good intentions. Some even mean what they say. But what matters in leadership is not what you say – or pledge and promise as Rishi Sunak has brutally discovered - but what you do and how competent you are. “People need to trust a leader’s competence,” writes the economist Paul Collier in his new book, Left Behind. That word again: “trust”. But trust in politics and politicians has never been lower. Labour have had fair warning.

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Editor’s Note:

Nigel Farage is back. Did he ever go away? Apart from Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, Farage is the most consequential politician of the last 50 years, although of course he has never been an MP. He is a renegade nationalist conservative with broad cross-class appeal who is utterly contemptuous of the Conservative Party. A brilliant communicator and public speaker, and relentless agitator, he emerged from the fringes of the hard right to command the centre of the political scene. He understands the power of social media and uses it more effectively than any other British politician. He is an accomplished broadcaster and the star turn on GB News. He created a movement – the so-called people’s army – and two political parties: the Brexit Party and Reform UK, of which he is now leader and chief executive having ousted Ricard Tice. He has possibly learned the art of complete control from Nicola Sturgeon and Peter Murrell, the husband-and-wife team who ran the SNP – until they suddenly didn’t. The marginalisation of Tice was vintage Farage. As Ken Livingstone used to say: “There are no permanent friendships in politics.”

No one did more than Farage to create the conditions for Brexit and then did more to undermine the post-Brexit settlement. Why has he come back? Why would he risk humiliation by losing in Clacton, Essex? Because he relishes the game of politics, delights in the outrage he causes, and means what he says: the Conservatives have betrayed their voters and the country. The United Kingdom’s borders have become more porous not less, and Rishi Sunak can do nothing about it. Annual legal net migration is double what it was in 2016 (330,000) when David Cameron failed to persuade mutinous voters to choose Remain and therefore the status quo. The heart of the matter for many Brexit voters – especially working-class Labour voters who abandoned the party in 2019 – was that the status quo was already intolerable. Many believed they had nothing to lose by voting out and much to gain. “We’ve got to get our country back,” Farage told them. And people heard him – because they felt something had been lost: control. Worse than this they felt disrespected, ignored, and scorned by metropolitan liberals as I discovered when I visited some of the faraway Brexit-supporting towns while writing my book, Who Are We Now? Stories of Modern England.

The predicted realignment of British politics after Boris Johnson’s Conservatives routed Labour in many of its old post-industrial heartlands at the general election in December 2019 never came close to happening. Johnson was a huckster who campaigned energetically but lacked the discipline and temperament to govern well in the national interest and those who followed him – the lamentable Liz Truss, the amiable but politically inept Sunak – have presided over the collapse of the Conservatives Party.

Labour is on course for a remarkable landslide victory. And Farage senses an opportunity to lead the long-threatened revolt of the right while becoming the de facto leader of the opposition to Keir Starmer’s Labour. Under a proportional voting system Ukip would have had more than 80 MPs after winning nearly four million votes (yet only one seat) at the 2015 general election. There will be no breakthrough for Reform in July. Could Farage one day take over the Conservative Party as he has threatened? That seems unlikely. But his return to party leadership only emboldens the nationalist right and hardens its resolve just as other comparable parties and movements are set to make gains at the European Parliament elections on 9 June.

I first interviewed Farage in November 2014, a week after an Editor’s Note I’d written about the failures of Ed Miliband’s leadership – supported by a report from inside Westminster by George Eaton – had gone viral. Our argument was that Miliband did not understand the threat Ukip posed to the left - especially if it adopted so-called Red Ukip positions on the economy as the far-right Sweden Democrats and Marine Le Pen’s National Front had in France - and that, unless he changed course, Miliband would lead Labour to defeat. Farage agreed with our reasoning. “I’m coming for Labour voters,” he told me. He described himself that morning as being “neither left nor right” but an anti-system radical. “We’ve got to get back control of our country,” he said. “When you get back control of your country you get proper democracy. You get proper debate.” Dominic Cummings was listening to him. “Take back control” became the triumphant slogan of the Brexit campaign.

When I interviewed him again, in 2017, he was waiting to see how Brexit would play out. “I’ve thought for a long time that this question about Europe and our relationship with it was one that had the potential to realign British politics,” he told me. “In the last few months, I’ve been thinking that Brexit might not be the last earthquake. There might just be another one. There may be something seismic still to come. And it could be the Conservative Party that’s the most vulnerable to it.”

Liberals, the left and mainstream Conservatives all loathe Nigel Farage. But he understands something important about the restless, fractious mood in the country and he is prescient. This is an era of turbulent and volatile politics, of seismic shocks. The earth is moving, and great fissures are opening beneath us. You could call Farage a kind of political seismologist of our disturbed modernity. Are the Conservatives uniquely vulnerable to the coming political earthquake? This time Labour is set to be the chief beneficiary of their collapse on 4 July. But if Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves fail, Farage will be waiting among the ruins.

Last week I was in Washington DC with David Lammy, the shadow foreign secretary. Britain’s politics are juvenile: consider the recent absurd antics over Natalie Elphicke in the House of Commons. But so is the way we treat our politicians.

Lammy arrived in Washington alone, having taken an early morning connecting flight from Newark (parliamentary pressures meant he missed his planned flight to Dulles Airport). He was met in DC by Ben Judah, his adviser and ideas guru, who had travelled down from New York. Lammy had flown economy class and had no entourage, no diary secretary or personal assistant with him. Nor did he have an assigned driver. His schedule in the Beltway was extraordinarily hectic but he used his time well – to network, to listen and to learn. He travelled around town in various Ubers.

A passionate liberal Remainer during the protracted Brexit wars – he was a prodigious and belligerent tweeter – Lammy is also a self-described communitarian. As Britain’s chief-diplomat-in-waiting, he wants to build bipartisan alliances in the national interest. And as the first black Briton to attend Harvard Law School, Lammy has long-established family, personal and professional relationships in the United States. When he arrives in the capital senior politicians want to meet him, both Democrat and Republican.

Keir Starmer knows this, and it was one reason he wanted Lammy to lead for Labour on foreign affairs. Lammy, co-chair of Starmer’s leadership campaign, was less sure when first approached. “I needed time to think about it. I have young children and there would be a lot of travelling,” he told me. But he was persuaded that it would be the right role for him at the right time: he is an Atlanticist and internationalist but accepts that the so-called liberal order has fragmented in what he calls “a newly dangerous world”.

On the morning of 8 May, Lammy gave a short speech at the Hudson Institute. He shared a platform with Jim Risch, a hard-line Republican senator and Beltway fixer. Lammy described himself as a “good Christian boy” and a “conservative” Labour politician, and described JD Vance, the fast-rising Republican “New Right” senator, as a friend. But none of this was cynical or said merely to please. Lammy embraces ambiguity and paradox. In a recent Foreign Affairs essay he wrote that “progressive realism” would inform his approach to world affairs. The phrase has resonated in Washington. “I like the realism,” Senator Risch quipped, “but not the progressive part.” The concept of progressive realism is inchoate. Is it a form of liberal universalism? Or an aspiration to have a foreign policy based on the social and economic rights of the British people?

Speaking at the Hudson Institute, Lammy said: “I’m a man made of the Atlantic. My parents were from the Caribbean, their siblings spread out from New York to London. And I share something deep with millions of Americans. Because if I have the privilege to be foreign secretary, I will be the first to be able to trace his lineage back through the Atlantic slave trade.”

The next afternoon, at a private meeting, he was heralded as a role model and inspiration by Hakeem Jeffries, the highest-ranking Democrat in the House of Representatives and former whip of the Congressional Black Caucus.

Lammy’s personal story is inspiring. He has what Paul Gilroy calls a kind of “double consciousness”: he knows who he is and where he is from and what he represents. And he aspires to pursue liberal enlightened goals in a world that does not follow liberal enlightened rules. “The world is what it is,” he said to me as we travelled in an Uber to the White House. And then he repeated the statement, with added emphasis: “The world is what it is.” Is this what he means by “realism”?

While in Washington I caught up with my old friend (and former NS colleague) Mehdi Hasan. Hasan is renowned in the US for his forensic TV interviews: half left-wing shock jock and half peak Paxman-style grand interrogator. He likes to deliver fast-paced, fact-heavy monologues, scabrous and sarcastic, straight to camera. He left MSNBC in January (was he fired?) because, he says, he wants to speak freely about what he insists on calling the “genocide in Gaza”. He has since successfully launched his own media company, Zeteo, via Substack, and is back on air attracting controversy and serious attention in equal measure (see our recent interview with him).

No one should appear on The Mehdi Hasan Show if unprepared – even less so if he considers you to be a political opponent or antagonist. Mark Regev, the formidably articulate former Israeli ambassador to London, appeared on his MSNBC show last November. Their encounter is on YouTube, and it’s fascinating to watch as Regev, whom Mehdi has called a “smooth operator”, is led inexorably into a trap. He ends up, uncharacteristically, shouting in frustration at his interlocutor.

I was reminded of a breakfast meeting we’d had with Regev many years earlier in the City of London. Mehdi and I had struggled to find the venue and arrived very late. Regev was waiting for us. He was courteous but clearly annoyed. Later I was told he’d enjoyed the conversation, however, and was impressed by how well-informed Mehdi was on Israel-Palestine matters. He can’t say he didn’t have fair warning, then.

On Wednesday afternoon, at prime minister’s questions, Sir Keir Starmer finally delivered a robust defence of Angela Rayner. He denounced her tormentors for “smearing a working-class woman”, as if her social class offered protection against legitimate public scrutiny of an elected politician’s private conduct.

Rayner is facing investigations by Greater Manchester police over whether she broke electoral law by supplying incorrect information to the electoral register when she lived between two houses with her then husband in the 2010s.

She and Starmer have what is described as a pragmatic working relationship. They are not confidantes and do not trust each other, but are bound inextricably as the elected leader and deputy leader of the Labour Party.
Starmer came late to Labour politics but Rayner’s powerbase is the trade union movement through which she rose as a young care worker. And she knows how to do politics: to use relationships to her advantage, to build cross-class coalitions and alliances (she is close to trade union leaders and wealthy party donors), to leak and brief as and when it is in her interest.
In spring 2021, for instance, she outmanoeuvred Starmer and dispatched her aides to brief on her behalf after he tried to demote her during a botched shadow cabinet reshuffle from which Rayner emerged strengthened and garlanded with new job titles. The “more titles he feeds her, the hungrier I fear she is likely to become”, Boris Johnson quipped in the Commons, likening Rayner to a lioness. “She knows in any pride of lions, it is the male who tends to occupy the position of titular, of nominal authority, but the most dangerous beast, the prize hunter of the pack, is in fact the lioness.”
But Labour’s flame-haired lioness is unusually subdued. In normal times, she would have been stridently leading the attack against Mark Menzies, the latest Conservative MP to be mired in sleaze allegations. These are not normal times for Rayner. She is adept at telling stories about herself but now she has lost control of the narrative and feels persecuted and abused. Beyond the brash exterior is a vulnerable and anxious woman. She is an insomniac — she endures the long, sleepless hours by listening to audiobooks about serial killers — and trusts very few people beyond her tight inner circle; she has panic buttons installed in her house and was convinced during the Corbyn years that she was being spied upon.

The feeling among some of her friends is that Starmer would not be too bothered if she were toppled by the saga of her former living arrangements and tax affairs; Rayner has said that she would resign if found to have committed a criminal offence. But if she resigned, a deputy leadership contest would follow, and that’s something Starmer does not want so close to a general election.

Like Boris Johnson, whom in some ways she resembles, Rayner is a source of endless fascination and speculation. There is no one quite like her at Westminster. She is gossiped about, condescended, traduced but never ignored. Like Johnson, she has undoubted star quality. She is both self-glamorising and self-mythologising.

Rayner is a politician for all factions of the party. New Labour veterans herald her as a model of working-class aspiration; she publicly praised Tony Blair in 2019. The old right like her communitarianism and classic Labourism. The hard left — she was a prominent member of Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet but never a true believer — like her anti-Tory militancy and rabble-rousing; she once described Conservatives as “scum”. The soft left like her pragmatic deal-making and social-democratic approach to workers’ rights and the state. She is the leading advocate of Labour’s putative New Deal for Working People and, therefore, revered and protected by trade union power brokers.

It was notable that, when defending her in the Commons, Starmer referred performatively to Rayner’s social class. There are other conspicuously working-class members of the shadow cabinet whose childhoods were, in different ways, just as complex and difficult as Rayner’s, such as Wes Streeting, the shadow health secretary, and Bridget Phillipson, the shadow education secretary. But they both rode an education escalator all the way to Oxbridge.
Rayner never stepped on the escalator. Her impoverished mother could not read or write and suffered from bipolar disorder. Rayner dropped out of school and was a mother herself aged 16 (and a grandmother at 37). She wears these early struggles like a badge of honour. They define who she is and the communities for whom she professes to speak. They are part of her working-class “authenticity” so cherished by Labour, which nowadays is largely a party of graduates, urban progressives, public sector workers and minority groups.

Angela Rayner is caricatured as brash, brassy and unlettered. But those who have worked closely with her say she’s highly intelligent (though not an intellectual) and deadly serious about reforming the country. She is used to being underestimated and to defying expectations: as a teenage single mother making her way in the northern trade union movement; as an inexperienced MP thrust into Corbyn’s depleted shadow cabinet after mass resignations; as the elected deputy leader whom Starmer wanted to demote.

As Labour’s “most dangerous beast”, Rayner is feeling hunted. She knows the Tories are out to get her and the minor revelations about her former living arrangements keep dribbling out. There are some in the parliamentary Labour Party who believe Rayner has acquired too much power and overreached but, though she is wounded, she retains the pragmatic support of the leadership. For now.

The author’s blurb on Salman Rushdie’s new book, Knife, styled as “Meditations After an Attempted Murder”, describes him as one of the “world’s most acclaimed, award-winning contemporary authors”. True enough. He is also perhaps the most hunted and most resilient: misunderstood, misinterpreted, misread or not read at all. The man who attacked him on stage at the amphitheater in Chautauqua in upstate New York in August 2022 said he’d read a “few pages” of his work. And he delivered his verdict with a knife.

Rushdie, now 76, has lived under a sentence of death since the fatwa was ordered against him in 1989, in the long, troubled aftermath of the publication of The Satanic Verses. (The street protests against the book and its author began in Bradford, England.) Even today Rushdie remains reviled by some as an anti-Islamic heretic but by others, rightly, as a heroic champion of free speech and the open society. Now he is blind in one eye following the near-murderous attack on him, but no one has taken his voice away: he is still speaking and writing well.

I first spoke to Rushdie in spring 1992. I’d recently joined The Bookseller, a venerable trade journal founded in the Victorian age, my first job in London after leaving university. In one of my early weeks there the editor, Louis Baum, said: “I’d like you to do an interview this morning?”

Who with?

“Salman Rushdie.”

Salman Rushdie!?

“Yes, he will call at an agreed time, and I will put you through.”

Baum was well connected in literary London, I discovered as I got to know him, and his partner, Liz Calder, had edited Rushdie.

This was only three years after the fatwa and Rushdie was in deep hiding - or, as Cynthia Ozick once put it, “wrapped in hiddenness”. He was still published and gossiped about but seldom seen. (We know now that he was living in a mansion on Bishop’s Avenue in north London, a billionaires’ road popular with oligarchs and Gulf Arabs.)

I was thrilled to speak to Rushdie whose story and its radiating consequences I’d followed with rapt fascination ever since he went into hiding with a bounty on his head. I met him in person a year or so later when I sat on the same table as him at the Booker Prize dinner; the anonymous man in a tuxedo next to me turned out to be Rushdie’s police protection officer and, as we chatted, he quietly opened his jacket to reveal the handgun he carried.

Rushdie had a reputation back then for extreme arrogance, but I found him courteous and amusing. He was a raconteur but not a tyrannical monologist; I think he spoke a lot about Star Trek that evening, for some reason.

In her piece published today about Rushdie, Nicola Sturgeon, the former First Minister of Scotland and an excellent New Statesman book reviewer, calls Knife “therapy, a healing process for Rushdie’s mind”. After all this time, he remains bitter about those writers, politicians and intellectuals who were reluctant to support him publicly after the fatwa. Or who were even openly contemptuous. He cites John Berger, Germaine Greer, President Jimmy Carter and Roald Dahl as well as various British Tory grandees. He does not mention John le Carre or VS Naipaul, who were both notably dismissive (he was later reconciled with le Carre). When I once mentioned Rushdie to Naipaul, he said: “Why are you asking me about the man who writes like the blind Irishman!” He presumably meant James Joyce.

Sturgeon says that we “we should all reflect on, with some shame” the failure to defend Rushdie and an artist’s right to free expression in an age of creeping censorship and illiberal liberalism (the italics are mine). “In the midst of our modern-day debates about the rights and limits of free speech, we should pay attention to his words,” she writes. I hope they are listening in Scotland as the country is embroiled in a row over the SNP’s authoritarian hate crimes law.

The walls and doors of the white-washed, flat-roofed, three-room apartment we have entered in the “juvenile generation” neighbourhood of Kibbutz Kfar Aza are full of bullet holes. The floor is cratered where a thermobaric grenade exploded. This was Sivani Elkabets’ house where she and her partner, Naor Hassidim, lived and were murdered on the morning of 7 October. On one of the walls, you can read a transcript of the final messages Sivani sent via WhatsApp to her mother, who lived elsewhere in the kibbutz. “what is it, mom?/ What’s going on here?/ Mother … Mom, mother/ Let me know every five minutes that you’re okay.”

It’s a warm morning and small, brightly coloured birds flit between the olive trees. Across nearby fields, perhaps a mile away, is the Gaza border and, intermittently, you hear the boom of artillery being fired into the Strip. One struggles to comprehend the consequences of the war – the horrific loss of life and the absolute destruction – and of what happened here in October as you are guided in bright sunshine around the kibbutz by Zohar Shpek , a former police lawyer. He is dressed in a black T-shirt and army-green trousers, his head shaven. He can speak English but prefers to communicate through a translator, as if seeking greater precision. A semi-automatic rifle is slung across his shoulder. He says 69 people were murdered and 12 others were taken hostage after Hamas militants surged into the kibbutz and the killing spree began. They were followed by waves of civilians who looted and rampaged as a blood-dimmed tide broke across the kibbutz; as many as 3,000 people are believed to have poured out of Gaza and into Israel. “We broke our contract with the people of Israel on that day,” said Major David Baruch, an IDF reservist, whom we’d met earlier at the location of the Re’im music festival, now a memorial site to the Israeli dead.

Zohar is one of the few residents to have returned to Kfar Aza. Before the attack 950 people lived here, “nearly all of them left-wing activists” as he describes them. He estimates that perhaps as many as 65,000 citizens have since been relocated from southern Israel. A similar number have been evacuated from towns in the north of the country which is under attack from rockets and anti-tank missiles fired by Hezbollah. Israel’s next war may soon be against the formidable and battle-hardened Iran-backed Shiite militant group inside Lebanon.

We are introduced to a man whose brother, a member of the “first response team” which led the counterattack against Hamas at the kibbutz, was murdered on 7 October. He and his wife and two young children had survived by sheltering for 22 hours in a safe room. He mentions his mother, who also lived at Kfar Azar. She too survived. “My mother is so left-wing that when she looks to her left there is nowhere to go,” he says with a sad smile. His mother worked with Road to Recovery, an organisation whose volunteers would meet sick children and their families at the Erez Crossing in northern Gaza and drive them to hospitals in East Jerusalem for treatment. She longs for peace with the Palestinians. “We built relationships with Palestinians – sending aid and provisions into Gaza,” Zohar says. How does he feel now about what is happening to Gazans? “I don’t care about them. I care only about people this side of the border. My vision didn’t change from twenty years ago. I’m a peacenik. But I can no longer go to help an Arab child. I can only help my child. We are fighting for our lives.” His stare is cold and hard and unyielding. Later, opening his arms wide as if in despair, he says: “This was Eden!”

What is left of the left in Israel? Not much. The Labour Party, once hegemonic, the party of Golda Meir, Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, the party of the old Ashkenazi elite, is a shell of what it once was and has only four seats in the Knesset. Over coffee one morning at a café in Tel Aviv its leader, Merav Michaeli, a former journalist and columnist at Haaretz, said: “There are fifty shades of right in Israel and Labor. It’s all about who is more right-wing and who wants to kill more Arabs.” She said that Labor, despite its diminished status, was “the only representative of genuine Zionism”. What did she mean? “I mean equality of opportunity for all, with all our neighbours, no matter your sex, race, religion, even in the bloodiest circumstances. And we support a social democratic economy.” The Bibi era, as she called it, referring to Benjamin Netanyahu, who first became prime minister in 1996, had brought only division and conflict to Israel. Likud was now hegemonic: it controls organised labour, the unions, the institutions, she said. And all Israelis are in deep mourning. “Here in Tel Aviv we cannot say to each other: ‘How are you?’ Nothing is personally okay for anyone. It [the attack] has taken away the feeling of being safe.”

Her words were sombre. I left Israel convinced more than ever that there is no pathway to a two-state solution. People have been hardened by suffering. The mutual hatred and distrust are too deep. One senior Israeli official said that the Gaza war would end only when Hamas were militarily destroyed. And after that? “We need a deal instigated by Arab states, supported by the Americans and that Israel can live with”. What of a Palestinian state? There would be no Palestinian state, he said, because Israel had no partner for peace.

Rachel Reeves went to Washington last May to proselytise about what she believes is her big, transformative idea for the next Labour government: “securonomics”. The neologism was her own coinage and encapsulates her considered response to what she calls “our age of insecurity” in which hostile great powers compete to control the technologies of the future.

“The era of hyper-globalisation as we know it is dead,” she told a breakfast gathering at the Peterson Institute in Dupont Circle. Her message was received, overall, with polite indifference and afterwards her interlocutor, the economist Adam Posen, asked if she was preaching a form of “zero sum economics”. Reeves smiled and pushed on, praising the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which uses subsidies and tax breaks to incentivise investment in green technology, American manufacturing and domestic energy production.

Since the Washington trip, Reeves has been ensnared in the debacle over Labour’s U-turn on its incoherent pledge to spend £28 billion a year on green growth. Most weeks she is caught up in the grind of trying to explain how a Labour government would invest in public services without raising taxes. She repeats her mantra of fiscal restraint with robotic discipline.

But she has bolder ambitions and on Tuesday she is giving the annual Mais lecture, hosted by the City of London University, and will use it to deepen the theme of securonomics.

Securonomics, she will say, will not signal a return to 1970s-style big state Labourism. “It advances, by contrast, not the big state, but the strategic state. Not the top-down, Whitehall-knows-best industrial policy approaches of the past, propping up industries that cannot compete and seeking to direct from above.”

“This is a big moment for us,” Reeves, who has been “working flat out” on the Labour manifesto, said when we spoke on Friday afternoon. “The central importance of the speech will be to emphasise resilience, security and active government – and the need for reform.”

Reeves, who refused to serve in Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet, loathed Corbynism – especially its strident pieties and voodoo economics. But she is equally sceptical of progressive boosterism and believes market-driven globalisation has created too many losers, a decaying public realm in Britain and overstretched public services.

Unlike Tony Blair, who once told me he believes the “arc of history bends towards justice and enlightenment”, Reeves does not think progress is inevitable. She’s not an anti-liberal, but her political instincts are increasingly post-liberal and, therefore, more in tune with these dark times.

The purpose of an active state, she believes, is to provide security from the havoc wrought by global free markets as well as creating the conditions for economic growth. There can be no liberty – what Thomas Hobbes called “commodious living” - without security and order. On this, she is aligned with Keir Starmer.

The Labour leader’s colleagues often say that while he is ruthless in pursuit of victory and therefore as pragmatic and flexible as he needs to be, he has “no politics”. He has instincts rather than a grand strategy or ideological conviction, which may be a good thing: he can travel light, and flex and bend as the logic of the situation dictates. He entered parliament late and is not associated with any of Labour’s core factions: the hard left, the soft left, the old right, or the Blairites.

But Reeves is a creature of the Labour Party. She is deeply interested in its traditions and history. Even as a young economist at the Bank of England, having turned down an offer while at Oxford to join Goldman Sachs, she was identified by Gordon Brown as a possible future Labour chancellor and nurtured accordingly.

Starmer’s unthreatening demeanour and moderation should be enough to make him prime minister as the Tories self-immolate. But many Labour voters demand more than incremental change and technocratic social democracy. They want bold ideas. They want radicalism. This, perhaps surprisingly given her public image and innate caution, is where Reeves believes she can help: she is Labour’s chancellor-in-waiting but also its chief ideologue.

That maybe so but does securonomics really amount to anything more than an exercise in wishful thinking: Bidenism but without the money and the mighty dollar? More than this, as Adam Posen suggested in Washington, is it really another word for protectionism?

“Look, I have no problem with our great financial service companies selling to China,” Reeves told me. “But never again should we be reliant on China, a country that does not share our values, to build our nuclear power stations and never again should we open our 5G infrastructure to Chinese investment. Securonomics is not protectionism. But it is hard-headed realism. As for Bidenomics, I know we can’t put in billions, trillions in investment like the Americans can. So we will have to find different ways of getting investment in the economy by working in partnership with business.”

Rachel Reeves knows a long period of Conservative rule is ending and that the political sea-change is now for Labour. She is troubled by what she calls “British decline” and wants to position herself in the vanguard – alongside US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen - of a new economic consensus.

At the end of the 1970s, as the post-war order crumbled, the Thatcherites had a radical solution to the political and economic crisis in which Britain was mired. Can Reeves, with her talk of securonomics and new orthodoxies, and Labour effect a similar transformation today during a comparable period of crisis? Or will the cycle of decline continue? We shall find out soon enough.

There was nothing in the autumn statement that Rachel Reeves and her shadow Treasury team did not expect. The headline moves by Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, were tax cuts for voters and businesses while stating that the share of public spending in GDP will fall slightly to 42.9 per cent by 2027-28.

He failed to mention, of course, that the tax burden was at its highest level since the Second World War and we are grappling with the largest reduction in living standards since records began in the 1950s, according to the Office for Budget Responsibility. Nor that the UK has the highest debt-interest costs of any big economy.

Hunt has an emollient style, but is ruthless. He wants Labour, the self-styled party of the NHS, to answer a simple question: would it be prepared to reverse the tax cuts or recalibrate its public spending commitments? If not the former, then how will it fund the Labour state in straitened times?
Reeves understands the traps the Tories are setting, which was why, in May, she pulled back on the proposed £28 billion-a-year plan for capital spending on green growth, saying it would not be implemented at least until later in the next parliamentary term. “No plan can be built that is not a rock of economic and fiscal responsibility,” she said in June.

Reports yesterday that Keir Starmer wants to scale back the plan even further — or abandon it altogether — were dismissed by aides close to both the Labour leader and his shadow chancellor. “There is nothing between Keir and Rachel on this issue,” I was told. “We are fully committed to our plan and the speculation is nonsense.”
Is it really? Starmer and Reeves are nothing if not pragmatic and, I suspect, commitment to the £28 billion a year green pledge will remain open-ended rather than have a fixed date of delivery: Reeves has said that a Labour government would not borrow to fund day-to-day spending and would also reduce the national debt as a share of the economy. She believes in the potential of the energy transition to create jobs and revitalise regions, but will not make promises she cannot fulfil.

Her next move? Ahead of the general election, I expect she will rule out raising income tax, VAT and national insurance in the next parliament.

That would be a defensive move consistent with the leadership’s caution. What about something radical such as wealth taxes — on land, property and other static assets, as many on the left would wish? When I asked Reeves about wealth taxes, she ruled them out.

But Labour remains anxious — and the question of tax is at the heart of the matter. The leadership is haunted by past defeats: not just the abject collapse of the Corbynites in 2019 but more pertinently Neil Kinnock’s 1992 loss to John Major. That election has been studied obsessively by Morgan McSweeney, Sir Keir Starmer’s chief strategist, who also urges colleagues to read Edward Fieldhouse’s recent book Electoral Shocks: The Volatile Voter in a Turbulent World.
The fundamental message Labour has taken from the 1992 defeat is: don’t raise taxes. John Smith, then shadow chancellor, proposed to do just that by pledging during the first week of the campaign to increase the top rate of income tax from 40 per cent to 50 per cent, as well as national insurance for higher earners. “Higher taxes and higher prices” — that was “Labour’s double whammy”, as the Conservatives framed it in a ubiquitous campaign poster featuring a pair of boxing gloves. The punches landed. Major returned to Downing Street with a 21-seat majority.

In May, when I travelled to New York and Washington with Reeves, we spoke about why Labour would not make the same mistake. She was in the US to introduce herself to Janet Yellen, the first female US treasury secretary, and other financial leaders. But she had another purpose: to show that she belonged in this company and had a serious economic plan for Britain.

Early one morning, at the Peterson Institute in Dupont Circle, Washington, she gave a speech in which she declared the end of liberal globalisation “as we know it” and outlined her vision for what she called “securonomics”. We had entered a new era of geopolitical competition and active government, she said. Labour believed in an interventionist state and the new modern supply-side economics (which the Harvard economist Dani Rodrik calls “productivism”) and was more in tune with the spirit of the age than were the Sunak Conservatives.

The day before, as we talked on the train to Washington, Reeves cried a little when she mentioned a girl called Natalie who had been the first pupil from her state school to go to Oxford. As a teenage chess champion, Reeves had competed against public schoolboys who blithely discussed the Oxbridge colleges they were going to. She was intimidated by their sense of entitlement. They came from a world she did not know nor understand. Her parents were not graduates and Oxbridge, for Reeves, seemed out of reach. Until Natalie showed her, through discipline and hard work, it was not.

What does this tell us about the kind of chancellor Reeves will be? First, she is deadly serious when she says she wants to create an economy that empowers “working people”. She is scornful of the carelessness of Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng and of their reckless tax-cutting mini-budget. She despises incompetence and profligacy. But she also accuses Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell, his shadow chancellor, of making unfunded spending commitments during their 2019 campaign.
Second, she dislikes unearned privilege: she is entirely relaxed about imposing VAT on private schools as well as abolishing wealthy “non-dom” status for foreign nationals.

But she knows “closing tax loopholes”, as she calls them, will not be enough to rebuild the diminished public realm. She knows too that the Tories are no longer trusted on the economy but that Labour must win people’s trust. “If people don’t trust us, we will not make it,” said one adviser who has the word “trust” written on a Post-it note on their computer.

In the months ahead, Reeves’s message will be more of the same: fiscal discipline, a strategic state powering the nation’s productive capacity, and public-service reform. And she will keep asking voters the same question: do you feel better off than you did 13 years ago?

None of this will excite the left, which has been inflamed by the Gaza conflict and yearns to govern a country that does not exist, but it should be enough to win an election against an exhausted and fractious Conservative Party.

One afternoon during the Labour leadership contest of 2015, I visited Liz Kendall at her Westminster office. Her candidature was being cruelly caricatured as “the Blair Witch Project” and it was obvious even early in the campaign that she would lose, although some of the party’s smartest strategists were on her team.

Her campaign was being managed by Morgan McSweeney, now Labour’s campaign director, and I was greeted at her office that day by Pat McFadden, now national campaign co-ordinator. Also working for Kendall was Matthew Doyle, now Keir Starmer’s director of communications, and she had the support of emerging MPs such as Wes Streeting and Peter Kyle, now both prominent in the shadow cabinet.

In the end, Kendall was humiliated in a contest won resoundingly by Jeremy Corbyn: she finished with just 4.5 per cent of the vote (for a while afterwards her personal Twitter handle was “4 per cent Liz”. Despite their political differences, Kendall formed a close personal bond with Corbyn as they toured the country, and after her defeat she retreated quietly from the frontline and did not become embroiled in the civil war that consumed the party until its epic defeat at the 2019 general election.

Corbyn and the radical left may have emerged from the 2015 contest victorious but in retrospect the ultimate winners turned out to be Liz Kendall and her closest allies, who today have iron control over Labour’s general election planning and strategy. Call them Blairites, centrists or whatever but they have vanquished the left, unified the party and are remaking it as a formidable and disciplined election-winning machine.

In September Kendall completed her comeback by being promoted to the shadow cabinet as the new shadow work and pensions secretary. “Liz is the ultimate symbol of our return to the centre ground,” one of her senior colleagues told me.

Labour strategists spent much of last week observing, with horror and fascination, events at the Conservative Party’s conference in Manchester. Despite Rishi Sunak’s positioning as the self-styled candidate of change against a failed consensus – a hard sell when your party has been in power for 13 years – many Conservative MPs are acting as if they have already lost. Different factions from the reactionary populist right to the Trussite libertarians are competing to shape the post-election identity of a fractured party.

“The Conservatives’ desperation makes them very dangerous,” one shadow cabinet minister told me. “Not least because they are flirting with a new kind of post-truth conspiracist politics.”

Labour is bracing itself for relentless personal attacks on Starmer in the months ahead over his record as Director of Public Prosecutions, his previous support for Corbyn and what the Tories consider to be his “flip flopping” on key policies. But Labour is prepared and emboldened to occupy the moderate centre ground, forcing the Tories even further to the right.

Labour would agree with the Tories’ Reginald Maudling who once quipped that England is “a Conservative country that sometimes votes Labour”. That is why the Starmer leadership, once he had taken full control of the party, has been largely about creating reassurance. Ed Miliband was never trusted by the electorate and Corbyn even less so.

Starmer is a hesitant radical. Before Labour can be radical, he knows it must first be trusted on defining national issues on which it has been traditionally mistrusted: the economy, security, defence, law and order, immigration.

But an overwhelming desire to reassure can also lead to excessive caution, to Labour being forced into what the shadow cabinet member describes as its current “defensive posture”. Labour wins well when its leader has an instinctive feel for what George Orwell called the social atmosphere of the country and can articulate a sense of national purpose or mission. “We were looking towards the future,” Clement Attlee once said of Labour’s 1945 landslide victory. “The Tories were looking towards the past.”

Speaking to the party conference in 1995, less than two years before he became prime minister, Tony Blair was also looking to the future. “I want us to be a young country again with a common purpose, ideals we cherish and live up to, not resting on past glories, fighting old battles,” he declared.

Blair is a progressive; he believes the arc of history bends towards progress and enlightenment. I think he is wrong but that is irrelevant. Inspired by the Clinton Democrats, he knew the kind of country he wanted to lead back then: liberal, meritocratic, unburdened by the past and open to the world. A country that would embrace the new market-driven globalisation and serve as a transatlantic bridge between the EU and the United States. A “young country” no less, led by a new party: New Labour.

What kind of country does Starmer want to lead? He still hasn’t told us. “Keir is not a Blairite,” one of his closest allies said last week. “He’s a centre-left pragmatic, problem-solving type. But he is ruthless about winning.”

No one doubts that Keir Starmer wants to win. Comprehensive victory for Labour in the Rutherglen & Hamilton West by-election last Thursday confirmed that he leads a government-in-waiting. But he needs to do more, starting today at the party’s conference in Liverpool. He needs to find a different register, to quicken the pace, to inspire as well as reassure. Above all else, as well as occupying the centre ground, he needs to convey a sense of hope and common purpose and pull Labour out of its defensive posture.

Of the many defeats Labour has suffered in recent years, the loss of Scotland is the most traumatic. The Labour Party was founded by Keir Hardie, a Lanarkshire trade unionist after whom the present leader is named, and Scotland was for so long its heartland and stronghold.

How Labour hegemony came to be supplanted by the SNP north of the border is a parable of entitlement and misrule and of what happens when a party pursues its own sectarian interests at the expense of those of the voters.

Yet even when Gordon Brown was defeated in 2010, creating the conditions for a long period of Conservative rule, Labour still won 41 of the 59 Scottish Westminster seats. At the 2015 general election, eight months after the independence referendum in which Labour had formed a unionist alliance with the Conservatives, the party, under the hapless leadership of Ed Miliband, won only one seat. The referendum had fired nationalist ambitions and hardened support for the SNP.
Labour’s catastrophic collapse in Scotland gave the Conservatives an unexpected majority. David Cameron was compelled to honour the pledge he had made to hold a referendum about British membership of the European Union. We know what happened next. We had entered an era of extraordinarily turbulent politics.

As the Brexit wars raged at Westminster, the SNP consolidated its hold on power as well as its influence over civil society in Scotland. Under the indomitable command of Nicola Sturgeon, a serial election winner before she abruptly quit as first minister in February, and her husband Peter Murrell, who resigned a month later after 22 years as the SNP’s chief executive, because of obfuscation about membership figures, Scotland became a one-party state. Or perhaps more accurately a “party state”: brooking no opposition, the SNP believed that its interests and those of the Scottish people were coterminous. They were not, but that was how the SNP presented it, fanatically supported by an army of often anonymous online belligerents, the so-called cybernats.

Labour lost Scotland because it deserved to. It neither understood the deeper forces powering the rise of Scottish nationalism — the decline of the trade unions, the weakening of cross-border working-class solidarity, a botched devolution settlement, mistrust of institutions and contempt for the Westminster jamboree, the fragility of the post-imperial multinational British state — nor knew what to do about them.

After the creation of the Scottish parliament in 1999, Labour continued to send its brightest talents to London and complacently assumed that most left-leaning Scottish voters would never abandon the party. Until one day they did, in their hundreds of thousands.

But is something big happening again in Scotland? Voters are “coming home” to Labour, as an adviser to Sir Keir Starmer claimed to me last week. We’ll discover how true this is at the Rutherglen & Hamilton West (SNP majority: 5,230) by-election on October 5.

Labour has never won a seat from the SNP at a by-election, and this one is no ordinary seat. It was in Hamilton, in 1967, when the SNP was a peripheral party of romantics, anti-Catholic cranks and “tartan Tories”, that Winnie Ewing won a sensational by-election victory over Labour. Alex Salmond, the former first minister, calls Hamilton “the birthplace of the modern SNP”.

The Starmer aide told me: “The by-election in Scotland is seminal for us. We’re sending every shadow cabinet member there at least twice. Our aim is to build a big coalition in Scotland again. We want this by-election to be a pivotal moment in Scottish politics like in 1967.”
For Salmond, the SNP was always “more than a party”, as he once said to me. “It is also a cause and a movement. That is the source of our great strength.”

That strength of unity has gone. Ravaged by scandal and a police investigation into its finances (Sturgeon and Murrell have been arrested and released), the SNP is factionalised and losing support. It has fragmented across several parties, including the ultra-liberal Greens, who back the SNP at Holyrood, and Salmond’s Alba, a party of independence fundamentalists founded in 2021.
Salmond and Sturgeon, once allies, despise each other. Humza Yousaf, the first minister, backed by the Sturgeonites, struggles to command respect and authority. His poll ratings are dire. Kate Forbes, traduced in the leadership campaign because of her Christianity and social conservatism, remains a leader-in-waiting.

Labour is benefiting from SNP chaos and the consequences of Sturgeon’s failure to deliver the long-promised second independence referendum. From the beginning of Starmer’s leadership, Scotland was a priority for him and his campaigns director, Morgan McSweeney, whose wife, Imogen Walker, is the Labour parliamentary candidate in Hamilton & Clyde Valley.
The plan was this. First, Richard Leonard, the Corbynite leader of Scottish Labour, had to be replaced, as he eventually was by Anas Sarwar, a former MP who is close to Starmer. Next, Labour had to rebuild an effective campaigning operation and replace the Tories as the main opposition to the SNP, as it has, in the polls at least. Then, at a general election, it had to win seats from the SNP before ultimately reclaiming power at Holyrood.

Labour believes it is the only truly national British party, one capable of winning in the towns and cities of England, as well as in Wales and Scotland. That was in large part why the loss of Scotland was so painful. It was also a warning of what lay ahead for the demoralised party in its “red wall” heartlands in England.

This week we have launched our new live blog dedicated to the defining multifaceted crisis of our times. The coronavirus pandemic – and the world’s response to it – has been described by the political philosopher John Gray, in a widely read essay in the Spring Special issue of the magazine, as a “turning point in history”.

The crisis has certainly intensified trends and forces that were already changing the world: the fragmentation of globalisation; the hardening of national borders; the need for more resilient supply chains, and so on. No one knows what its ultimate consequences will be for how we live, work and interact.

As part of our response to the crisis, we have accelerated the digital expansion of the New Statesman, and have continued to invest in our international coverage – most recently appointing our new US editor, Emily Tamkin, who is based in Washington, DC. Under the leadership of Jeremy Cliffe, our international editor, we have just launched a weekly newsletter on international affairs, World Review. A new podcast of the same name will follow. We have also appointed a new group head of data journalism, David Ottwell, who is leading our commitment to more data-led online reporting.

The New Statesman’s Covid-19 live blog, launched today, will be constantly updated and will showcase posts from our staff and guest writers as well as collating our reporting, data and analysis as it happens. It will summarise and link to the most essential and relevant pieces from other websites in our network, which provide specialist analysis on everything from medicine to the media, as well as newswires and other sources.

Alongside our political expertise, we have access to GlobalData’s team of analysts and terabytes of data on industries such as pharmaceuticals, energy and technology means we can offer regular news updates from experts around the world.

The blog will also collect some of our best writing on the pandemic – urgent political, scientific, medical, geopolitical and economic essays and commentary, and exclusive analysis of its effects on politics and government, the global economy, society and culture.

All the New Statesman team are now working from home in this changed world, and we are communicating remotely via conference calls and teleconferencing facilities such as Zoom. It’s a strange, challenging period. But necessity is the mother of invention, and new ways of working and communicating can lead to bold innovation and progress.

The mission of the New Statesman remains the same: to analyse and explain the defining issues driving change in the world today. We hope our new blog will prove to be an invaluable resource for our readers.

Early on the morning of Saturday 21 March, I visited Saffron Walden to buy some bread from a small artisan bakery and some flowers for Mother’s Day from the local market. The queue from the bakery stretched far up the hill, ending just opposite St Mary’s Church (though, this being Saffron Walden, perhaps the most elegant and refined town in Essex, people were politely keeping their distance from one another). The market on this cold but radiant spring morning was bustling with shoppers, especially around the flower stall in the ancient square. It could have been any typical Saturday morning, except that some of the cafés were closed, and those that were open were serving only takeaways.

Scenes such as this in Saffron Walden were being replayed across the country last weekend – especially in parks and recreational spaces – as people ventured out, as if they could not quite believe what they were being told about the pace and severity of the unfolding health crisis. We were still in the period of the phoney war: the news from Italy and Spain was increasingly bleak but our prime minister had been telling us only a few days before that we should have this thing beaten in 12 weeks. We were witnessing the consequences of the government’s own confusion and mixed messaging in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

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Boris Johnson is, by instinct, a libertarian. As a journalist and commentator, his shtick was all about frivolity, mocking the nanny state, rejecting political correctness and making fun of excessive bureaucratic control. He is a fluent and witty writer but I have never read a column by him that has impressed me with its moral seriousness, or made me change my mind, or re-evaluate what I thought about something fundamental. His utterances as a journalist are invariably thin-spun and trivial.

We are told he is good at delegating and he listens to those who advise him in Downing Street, as he did at City Hall when he was mayor of London. These are good traits. But leaders also need to be able to lead: to command authority, implement a coherent strategy, instil confidence, and reassure a nation for whom normal life has been suspended.

We are also told that Johnson is an intellectual snob. That may be so, but equally he is not an intellectual – by which I mean, he is clever but essentially unserious. He has a 19th century-style, high public school, classical education that has ill prepared him for the defining technological, scientific and economic challenges of the 21st century. Johnson now seems out of time and ponderous, a relic of an ancient regime, whereas his young and impressive chancellor, Rishi Sunak, seems like a new man: an intellectually nimble and open-minded technocrat and meritocrat, unencumbered by Johnson’s class baggage and past associations.

What is striking too is just how inarticulate the Prime Minister is when he is not working from a prepared script: he writes so much better than he speaks.

As the Times, which endorsed Johnson for the Conservative leadership, stated in a leader on 23 March: “The truth is that his performance so far has been chequered. Since the start he has appeared behind the curve. Considerable time that could have been spent preparing for the crisis appears to have been squandered.” It concluded: “The country needs to know that Mr Johnson has a coherent strategy. Otherwise the prime minister who dreamt of being Churchill may find himself cast as Neville Chamberlain.”

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For much of this fast-moving, multifaceted crisis, Johnson, flanked at press conferences by his scientific and medical advisers, has struggled to speak for and to the nation. He could not find an appropriate tone or method of persuasion. His natural idiom is one of optimism. But his blustering, declamatory style, refined as a student at the Oxford Union, and habit of emphasising certain words in a sentence as he strives for flamboyant effect, was not working. He tried to be grave (“I must level with the British people”) and he tried to be optimistic (“We can turn the tide in 12 weeks and I’m absolutely confident we can send coronavirus packing in this country”). In the end, on the evening of 23 March, Johnson delivered a scripted televised address to the nation. It was a powerful, necessary and effective moment: but had it come too late?

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Johnson’s hero, Winston Churchill, experienced the First World War and the Great Depression. His response to the General Strike of 1926 was, of course, disastrous, as he sent in the army. (Clifford Sharp, the first editor of the New Statesman, denounced the then chancellor’s performance in an article headlined, “Should we hang Mr Churchill or not?”.) He raged against appeasement. Yet when his moment finally arrived, after the retreat from Dunkirk and the fall of France in 1940, Churchill knew what to do. He found a tone of voice, moral purpose and grandeur of expression commensurate to the gravity of the situation. He emphatically spoke to and for the nation; my mother remembers gathering as a child with her parents around the wireless to listen to his beautifully constructed addresses.

By contrast, Johnson spent eight years at City Hall and has written over-many quickfire, jejune columns for the Daily Telegraph. He is a raconteur and a gag-maker. He is a natural humorist, as his father Stanley says. Is he anything more than this?

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For the Tories, Boris Johnson has proved to be a serial winner; he is relentless in his ambition and will to succeed. And now here he is, our prime minister, no less (a position he coveted for much of his career), during the defining global crisis of the postwar period. If he continues to equivocate – and before the televised address many of his ministers believed he was – the need for a national government may become inevitable.

I have now been editor of the New Statesman for a decade: how did that happen? I started just as Barack Obama became president of the United States and thought I was just passing through, on my way to the next challenge. I didn’t apply to be editor and wasn’t much interested in being so when I was first asked to meet the businessman and philanthropist Mike Danson (who would soon buy full control of the New Statesman from the Labour MP Geoffrey Robinson) back in 2008. I had only recently been appointed editor of Granta magazine, which is owned by Sigrid Rausing, a culture-loving billionaire, and our offices were located in a splendid white-walled Holland Park town house. Granta is only published, in book format, four times a year and, having left the faster pace of newspapers, this seemed to be a role I could combine with doing some writing and flâneuring around town. What was there not to like about it?

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From the outside the New Statesman – which was rapidly losing circulation and struggling to adapt to the challenges as well as the opportunities of the digital age – looked to be a magazine in serious trouble. Did it even have a future? And being editor of the Statesman always seemed to me to be a bit like being manager of Newcastle United: the potential was boundless and you could be beguiled by it but the reality was invariably one of conflict, struggle and decline. And it usually ended with the sack.

Plus, there was the “golden period” of the magazine, from the mid-1930s to the mid-1970s, which, it was always being said, could never be recaptured. “Every editor starts with a belief that he (it’s always been a he so far) can restore the magazine’s glory days,” wrote Peter Wilby, who was editor from 1998 to 2005. “I was fired in the end. Not all the others suffered the same fate, but most left office with a sense of disillusion and disappointment and, in some cases, mental turmoil.” Disappointment, mental turmoil, the sack… oh dear.

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And yet, it seemed to me, there were some things that could be done to improve the New Statesman in an era of declining newspaper circulation and revenues. Wilby had aspired to create “a left-wing Spectator”. But that wasn’t my aspiration, not least because the Spectator is a magazine of opinion that does not publish essays or more ambitious long reads. And as a reader of American magazines such as the Atlantic, reinvented as a print-digital hybrid, it seemed obvious to me what was needed: take the New Statesman upmarket; make it more politically sceptical and unpredictable; free it from the clutches of the Labour Party; publish longer and better-written pieces; burnish its literary pages; create a dynamic website; and discover and nurture a new generation of political writers.

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An editor, like a sports coach, must of course have a method, a plan and a style of play, as it were, but he or she also needs luck. In my early weeks in the job I received an email from a young fellow called Leo Robson who had just graduated from Warwick University. He expressed an interest in writing book reviews and I read some of the pieces he sent in, which had been published in the Boar, the student newspaper. “When we encounter a natural style we are always surprised and delighted,” wrote Blaise Pascal. Robson, who was a Man Booker prize judge in 2018, seemed to have his own attractively natural style.

One bitterly cold morning we had coffee in Victoria, sitting outside at a table. After a couple of hours of animated conversation my mind was made up: he would become our lead fiction reviewer. A week later, I received an email from a friend of Robson’s, another recent Warwick graduate called George Eaton. He wanted to write about politics and so I called him in. After one conversation, I hired him as a graduate trainee. Eaton and Robson were the first of a group of writers who would define our expansion in print and online: Laurie Penny, Mehdi Hasan, Jonathan Derbyshire, Rafael Behr, Helen Lewis, Stephen Bush, John Bew, Shiraz Maher. And the next generation is now emerging: Sophie McBain, Anna Leszkiewicz, Anoosh Chakelian, Patrick Maguire… Watching their progress has been one of the pleasures of my job.

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The philosopher John Gray was the first writer I contacted when I became editor. I was delighted when he agreed to become our lead book reviewer, and over the past decade John’s review-essays and longer pieces exploring the history of ideas and the crisis of liberalism have contributed hugely to the redefinition of our political and cultural coverage, as we attempt not only to understand but to analyse and explain the forces driving this period of extraordinary upheaval and technological disruption.

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Editing the New Statesman has made me less rather than more partisan: my politics are sceptical and the shocks of recent times – the collapse of the centre-left across Europe, the rise of the new national populist movements, Brexit, Trump – should make us all much warier of prediction. Pragmatism and moderation are desirable, especially in this age of extremes. In the words of the American commentator David Brooks, “Being a moderate does not mean picking something mushy in the middle but picking out the strong politics at either end, because politics is essentially about balance, getting the balance right.” For the economist Paul Collier, there are no permanent solutions. “You’ve got to learn from context and work out what’s best in the context.”

Getting the balance right, learning from context: this is what we have been trying to do at the New Statesman. It seems to be working. Thank you for your support and happy Christmas to all our readers.

My mother’s eldest sister has lived in the same modest house in Potter Street, on the edges of Harlow, in Essex, for more than 50 years. Auntie Connie, as I call her, will celebrate her 90th birthday in May and is very much the family matriarch. She is lucid and moral and has a deep sense of history as well as an instinct for fair play. A lifelong Labour voter, she is also respectful of her local MP, Robert Halfon, an advocate of “white van conservatism”. (There are no Labour MPs left in Essex and every district in the county voted for Brexit.) She has lived in Harlow since 1953, having been attracted there in the early days of the new town by the opportunities it offered to those escaping the bomb-ruined streets of east London.

The original village of Harlow (renamed Old Harlow) is mentioned in the Domesday Book. This and other long-established settlements – Potter Street, Parndon, Netteswell, Tye Green, Latton, Churchgate Street – were subsumed by the chief architect-planner Frederick Gibberd into his urban master-plan after the town was created by the Attlee government’s 1946 New Towns Act. Over the ensuing decades, these settlements were built on and around, developed, expanded but not erased or demolished. Even today, Potter Street, though in need of much regeneration, retains something of the character of a village.

I know Potter Street well because we lived there in a rented maisonette and then in a council house for the first six years of my life, before my parents bought their first property on a quiet cul-de-sac elsewhere in the town. My first school was a short walk from Connie’s house. The local doctors’ surgery was located at Osler House in Prentice Place shopping precinct – we could see its imposing front door from the window of our maisonette – and it was there that we would visit our austere family doctor; back then there were still family doctors, which meant continuity of care was possible.

In Gibberd’s original master-plan each discrete settlement or neighbourhood in the town had its own self-supporting infrastructure: a shopping precinct, community facilities, a pub (invariably named after a butterfly or moth), a GP surgery, a sub-post office, and so on. But like much of the town these neighbourhood communities suffered from neglect and underfunding. Prentice Place is no exception: once vibrant, today it is desolate and run-down. And in late February the West Essex Clinical Commissioning Group announced that Osler House is to close, leaving as many as 3,000 people scrambling to find a doctor.

Residents were especially outraged that there was no advance consultation or warning before they were sent letters dated 21 February informing them that Osler House would close on 30 April. It was a fait accompli. No questions asked, please. Nor was Robert Halfon or the district council consulted before the decision was taken. The GP surgery is run and operated by a private company, The Practice Group.

Osler House patients were advised to register at surgeries at Bush Fair or Church Langley: but both areas are inaccessible to Connie and many other elderly residents like her; to reach the Church Langley Medical Practice my aunt would have to take four separate buses – at the age of 90!

I discovered what had happened in an email titled “Go on, Connie!”. I opened it and clicked on the accompanying link to a video that featured my aunt being interviewed outside Osler House. In the video – which went viral – she expresses outrage at the decision. You can see she is close to tears so deep is her frustration.

When we spoke, she was as angry as I’d ever heard her. “It is an absolute disgrace,” she said. “And the whole thing has been so underhand. Why was a private company running our local GP surgery and allowed to close it down? Why was there no consultation? We are still hoping to reverse the decision – but we are fighting giants.”

Connie has always believed passionately in Harlow and in the ideal of the egalitarian state; from the beginning, she believed in the bright promise of the new town, in what it represented, how and why it was created, its mission. She stayed on when nearly everyone else in our extended family left the town, some of us alarmed by decline.

Robert Halfon has called the closure of Osler House “a terrible and short-sighted decision”. He is correct. It is also symbolic of a deeper countrywide malaise. For in every town and city people are experiencing what Connie and the residents of Potter Street have experienced: the arbitrary closure, with scant consultation and concern for the consequences, of essential community services – doctors’ surgeries, child centres, libraries, post offices. The public realm is decaying. Central government funding for local authorities has been reduced in real terms by 49 per cent since 2010, according to the National Audit Office (by 2020, the figure is estimated to be 77 per cent). Even where I live in the leafy shires, the roads are breaking up and potholed; the schools are over-subscribed; one of the nearby hospitals was until recently in “special measures”; the doctors’ surgeries are over-stretched; Sure Start child centres are closing. This is the reality of Crumbling Britain in the age of austerity – and in the coming weeks we will publish a series of articles about what is going on and how it is affecting people’s lives.

What invariably kills Tory governments, in the end, is private affluence and public squalor. Today too few Conservatives are sufficiently conservative: they seldom speak of the value of community, of the shared institutions that bind us together and give purpose, dignity and meaning to our lives. And so, Britain crumbles.

Jason Cowley’s essay on Harlow and the Brexit Murder is published in the latest edition of Granta magazine

John le Carré’s latest novel returns the reader to the years of the Cold War and to the betrayals and duplicity of the secret world. We are reintroduced, in A Legacy of Spies (reviewed on page 42 by William Boyd), to some of his most enduring characters, including the spy­master George Smiley, pictured above played by Alec Guinness, and Peter Guillam. The book is a prequel as well as a coda to the 1963 novel The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, the international success of which liberated David Cornwell (le Carré was a pseudonym used to protect his diplomatic cover) fully to pursue the writing life.

In the penultimate chapter of A Legacy, Guillam visits his former colleague Smiley, who is now elderly and living in Freiburg. They reflect on the old days, on what they got right and wrong, as well as the inevitable moral compromises of the spying game. At one point, Guillam asks whether it had been worth the struggle and sacrifice. He wonders what it was all for. Was it for England? Smiley ponders and then replies:

There was a time, of course there was. But whose England [le Carré’s italics]? Which England? England all alone, a citizen of nowhere? I’m a European, Peter. If I had a mission – if I was ever aware of one beyond our business with the enemy, it was to Europe. If I was heartless, I was heartless for Europe. If I had an unattainable ideal, it was of leading Europe out of her darkness towards a new age of reason. I have it still.

Smiley – whose allusion to Theresa May’s 2016 Conservative party conference speech will be noted by the alert reader – is not alone in yearning for a new age of reason. But these are unreasonable times, as the Brexit debacle demonstrates. Darkness is falling wherever one looks: the US, the Korean Peninsula, Vladimir Putin’s Russia, the former eastern bloc states of Poland and Hungary, Myanmar, the Middle East.

In Britain, we are suffering from a catastrophic loss of confidence in our national leaders. How else to account for the fact that Jacob Rees-Mogg, a pantomime toff with unpleasant hard-right convictions, is the choice of Conservative Party members to be their next leader, and thus our prime minister? Worse still, the United Kingdom seems to have no coherent foreign policy. The Conservative Party is introspective, split between Remainers and Brexiteers. The Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson, is received with ill-concealed derision in most foreign capitals. Foreign Office mandarins consider him to be lazy and unserious. The most significant speech on international affairs this year was given not by Mr Johnson but by Theresa May in Philadelphia in January, when she renounced Blairite (or neoconservative) interventionism and attempted to outline a new “realist” foreign policy.

But since her humiliation in the general election, Mrs May is much reduced. Her distinctive brand of communitarian conservatism (which was never properly articulated in the election campaign) has been replaced by a pragmatic survival strategy. And the Prime Minister has been captured by the Brexiteers, who wish to keep her in office until she can no longer deliver what they want.

Meanwhile, what is strikingly absent from the Brexit debate is any larger sense of Britain’s role in the world. Brexit is a retreat from responsibility. The rhetoric about a liberated, buccaneering “global Britain” is so much cant, the delusions of empire nostalgists or Randian free market ideologues.

Yet what has Labour got to say? As we listened to Keir Starmer on The Andrew Marr Show on 3 September tortuously attempt to explain his party’s revised position on Brexit, we were struck by the intellectual impoverishment. In truth, Labour has next to nothing to say about Britain’s role in the world. It has had nothing substantive to say about the nuclear stand-off in the Pacific, which threatens the balance of power in south-east Asia. While Mr Starmer goes on about the single market and extended “transition” periods, the UK is losing influence.

Inside the European Union and as the so-called Atlantic bridge to the US, the UK could shape the destiny of Europe. Outside the EU and considered increasingly marginal by world leaders, Brexit Britain, in its less than splendid isolation, will be in no position to lead Europe towards George Smiley’s longed-for “new age of reason”.

There is much conflict in the Conservative Party, especially over Brexit, but senior Tories are agreed on one thing: the Labour opposition offers no threat to them.

One former cabinet minister said to me that the Brexit debate amounted essentially to an argument within the “conservative family”. By “family” he meant the Tory party, the right wing press and the business community. As far as he was concerned, Labour was irrelevant and had nothing to contribute to the defining political and economic issue of our times.

How has it come to this? Many Labour MPs blame their present malaise and disastrous poll ratings on Jeremy Corbyn. But the left is losing throughout Europe and Corbyn is a symptom rather than the cause of Labour’s decline.

Corbyn won two leadership contests in little more than a year and is clearly the leader the members and activists want and the biggest trade union, Unite, continues to support.

His anti-austerity message remains popular with a couple of hundred thousand people who self-identify as socialists. They have the whip hand in the party, and yet can give the impression of wanting to turn Labour into an anti-capitalist protest movement rather than the next government of the United Kingdom.

Labour is superficially united but in reality it is fragmenting. It has collapsed in Scotland, where the Conservatives, under the resourceful leadership of Ruth Davidson, are resurgent. Where it is not losing to the Tories in England and Wales, Labour is being squeezed by the populist nationalism of Ukip and the unashamed pro-Europeanism of the Liberal Democrats.

Labour’s position on Brexit isn’t helping. The party campaigned to remain in the EU only to be ignored by at least a third of its voters who wanted out. Worse than this, Labour can agree no coherent position on immigration. Corbyn supports freedom of movement and open borders within Europe, which makes the party vulnerable to attack from Ukip.

Corbyn’s aides are determined to relaunch their man as a “left-wing populist”. They want him to make more interventions and more media appearances – to operate as a kind of socialist Nigel Farage.

This isn’t Corbyn’s style. He is at his happiest among true believers, addressing rallies of the faithful or tending to constituency matters. He isn’t fired up by the day-to-day business of the Westminster jamboree, which is why Labour seems so often off the pace or merely silent.

After the failed attempt last summer to oust Corbyn as leader, many Labour MPs are now simply waiting for him to fail on his own terms, in his own way. They feel there is nothing more that they can do. You could call it a death wish.

This week the Fabian Society, a Labour affiliated think tank, got some attention for saying the party “was too weak to win but too strong die”. But this was simply stating the obvious.

Meanwhile, the Unite leader Len McCluskey told the Mirror that Corbyn and his shadow chancellor John McDonnell would be prepared to resign if the party’s poll ratings had not improved by 2019 – recognition that all is not well even among hardcore Corbynites.

McCluskey, who is caught up in a leadership contest of his own as he campaigns to serve another term as Unite leader, is one of the few individuals within the Labour movement whose power Corbyn fears.

For now, Jeremy Corbyn seems unassailable. He has the backing he needs to continue as leader, and so the good ship Labour sails on into the doldrums from which there may be no return.

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On 20 January Donald Trump will be inaugurated as the 45th President of the United States. The leader of the free world will be a reality TV star and property tycoon who has never before held political office or served in the military.

Trump, 70, is an erratic, thin-skinned narcissist and braggart. As President-elect, he has lived down to expectations with his wild tweets and macho posturing.

Trump delights in goading China, which is threatening America’s role as the world’s superpower. He has sided with Russia’s autocratic president Vladimir Putin against Barack Obama. He has casually dismissed claims by the CIA and FBI that Russian state hackers meddled in the US election.He has expressed support for Julian Assange, the reviled WickiLeaks founder who Paul Ryan, the Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives, this week called “a sycophant for Russia”.

The influential American commentator David Brooks has a smart phrase for Trump: he calls him the “Snapchat President”. Brooks says Trump’s statements should “probably be treated less like policy declarations and more like Snapchat. They exist to win attention at the moment, but then they disappear.”

Perhaps. But it’s too easy to dismiss Trump, as many did during the Republican primaries and presidential campaign, as a buffoon and big mouth who does not mean what he says.

Sure, he is an attention-seeker but all the evidence suggests that he means exactly what he says and this is why he is such a clear and present danger to the stability of the liberal world order.

We have never seen an American president seemingly as reckless as Donald J. Trump before, and even the Washington elites have no idea what he will say or do next. Cursed are we to live in interesting times.

On September 24, Jeremy Corbyn is expected to be re-elected leader of the Labour Party, which means he will have won two leadership contests in just over a year. While not unassailable, he will feel vindicated for resisting the demand from most of his MPs to resign.

That his most senior detractors in the party have fallen silent will further embolden him. The former Labour leaders who earlier in the summer denounced Corbyn now have nothing to say. There have been no major interventions in recent weeks from Tony Blair, Neil Kinnock, Gordon Brown or Ed Miliband. No fiery speeches made or compelling articles written outlining the depths of the Labour crisis and what needs to be done.

In private they denounce Corbyn – they speak of the ‘tragedy’ of it all – but publicly they are quiet. They show no fight, merely a kind of meek acceptance of the inevitable. It’s almost as if they are in denial – or have given up.

What’s going on? Why isn’t there more fight? ‘It’s because there’s a general feeling of hopelessness,’ Labour grandee Roy Hattersley told me. ‘This is far worse than the early 1980s. I had hope then. Now I don’t have any.’

There’s a saying by the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci that is a favourite of the Left: ‘Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.’ It refers to the long struggles on the Left to challenge and rectify concentrations of wealth and power as well as to disrupt established hierarchies.

The history of the Labour Party has been characterised by struggle and fight, the fight to enfranchise the populace and build the institutions – the NHS, the welfare state, the good state schools – that could transform working people’s lives for the better and create equal opportunities for all.

Nowadays, apart from the Corbynites, there’s no optimism of the will among most of the party’s MPs. Instead, there is only pessimism of the intellect (they have no idea how to renew and become a unified election-winning force again) and pessimism of the will (even the desire to fight is draining away).And the EU referendum, in which a third of Labour supporters voted for Brexit, has demoralised them further. The forces of globalisation, immigration, stagnant wages, rampant inequality, precarious rather than stable jobs, digital disruption – all have contributed to the crisis on the Left in the UK and the rest of Europe, where moderate social democracy is in retreat.

Labour’s traditional voters – those who voted for Brexit – feel let down and left behind. They feel alienated from metropolitan liberals and the London Left, and are turning to Ukip, the SNP and Theresa May’s Tories.

Labour MPs know what is wrong because their constituents tell them so. As a consequence, their mood is as bleak as I’ve known it. The party’s support has collapsed in Scotland, and most of the 106 gains that Labour will need to win a majority after the constituency boundary changes are in England, where the party is weak.

The rebellion against Corbyn that, in the aftermath of the Brexit vote, began with mass resignations from the Shadow Cabinet and an overwhelming vote of no confidence by MPs in the leader, is ending in a mood of sullen resignation in the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP). Corbyn’s supporters are, by contrast, jubilant, and they should be.

The challenge to Corbyn this summer has been feeble. The onus was on the PLP to come up with something different, ideas and a broad analysis of what has gone wrong and what should be done. This has not come close to happening.

The leadership contest has been an ideas-free zone and a procession for Corbyn, who has toured the country doing what he does best – bolstering the true believers at events that often have the feel of religious revivalist rallies.

The challenger to Corbyn, the Welsh MP Owen Smith who is from the ‘soft Left’, has offered little beyond self-belief and a certain dogged persistence. He has shown more courage than many of his colleagues in taking on the challenge when others cowered or equivocated, but he has made too many gaffes.

Smith’s policy proposals are largely the same as Corbyn’s. He delivers the same statist, anti-austerity rhetoric. His message amounts to no more than this: ‘Like Jeremy, I am of the Left and for the Left, but I’m more competent than he is.’ Be enthused by that, if you will.

That Smith emerged as the sole challenger proves Corbyn is winning more than the leadership contest. He and his shrewd Shadow Chancellor, John McDonnell, who is now the real power in the remade party, have successfully dragged Labour to the radical Left. With the backing of the Unite union, they are now determined to complete the job by taking control of the crucial policy-making National Executive Committee and begin selecting more MPs in their own image – which obviously means deselecting others.

But this isn’t a Trotskyite takeover. Corbyn has been democratically empowered by the membership. No one was coerced into voting for him. Clearly, Labour members want him and his socialist populism, even if, judging from the polls, the electorate resoundingly does not.

The brightest talents on the Labour benches – Yvette Cooper, Chuka Umunna, Dan Jarvis, Keir Starmer – are becalmed. Perhaps they simply don’t know how to respond or fight in the way Denis Healey and Roy Hattersley did to save their party during the Bennite wars of the early 1980s. Perhaps it was all too easy for them on the way up, when the Left was marginal and Blair was winning landslide majorities. Perhaps they are constrained by members and activists.

Several moderate MPs I know have spoken of giving up on politics altogether. Others, such as Andy Burnham, a leadership frontrunner only last summer, want to pursue careers away from Westminster – he’s the favourite to become the next mayor of Manchester.

So here’s the essential question for Labour, the answer to which will define its prospects over the next decade and beyond: is it content to be a mass membership movement of anti-capitalist radicals, or does it aspire to be a party of government capable of appealing to moderate voters who do not live in cities?

In Theresa May, Labour is up against a Prime Minister much more formidable than David Cameron, the gilded Old Etonian Notting Hill liberal. Her meritocratic Cabinet has more state- educated Ministers than any previous Conservative government, and more than all Labour governments since Clement Attlee’s in 1945. With Ruth Davidson now the most popular politician in Scotland, the Tories are beginning to look and sound like the rest of the country.

Mrs May has made a direct appeal, too, to those voters who are ‘working hard, but just managing’. That message resonates.She does not want to govern for the few, but the many.

If she can deliver on these promises, her reform conservatism could condemn Labour to electoral oblivion. Is this what the heirs of Labour’s greatest prime minister, Clement Attlee, want for their party?

Sadiq Kahn, the mayor of London, has become the latest senior Labour figure to declare that Jeremy Corbyn has to be stopped if the party is not to be routed at the next general election. Pragmatic and street-smart, Khan is increasingly emerging as a possible de facto leader of the moderate wing of Labour. “I am afraid we simply cannot afford to go on like this,” he wrote.

But the sad truth is that Labour will keep going on like this. This is the party’s worst crisis since it won only 52 seats in the 1931 general election after Ramsay MacDonald had broken away to form the National government. After losing the 2015 election under the feeble leadership of Ed Miliband, the party has been captured by the far Left and ceased to be in any recognisable sense a government in waiting. And the gulf that has opened between its Left and its mainstream may never be bridged.

Corbyn is likely to be re-elected as leader at a special conference on September 24, cheered on by hundreds of thousands of activists who aspire to turn Labour into a mass-membership social movement irrespective of its election-winning potential. For these people, many of them young idealists, there is no turning back to the triangulations and equivocations of recent years. They believe policy should be made by the popular will of the many, not by the elected few. They are ashamed of and despise Tony Blair, and they will never allow Labour’s most electorally successful leader and those who supported him to forget the catastrophe of the Iraq war. They believe that moderate social democracy has failed. They wish to make no accommodation with the capitalist order; comical as it may sound in 2016, they wish to overturn it and create a new economic paradigm.

With Corbyn re-elected, the Left will continue with its transformation of Labour, taking control of its policy-making committees and constituency parties as well as agitating to have “moderate” MPs deselected. In return, the MPs say they will form what may in effect become a party within a party, meeting and organising together as they seek to prevent Corbyn from turning Labour into little more than a rainbow coalition of disaffection and protest.

If you speak to Labour MPs, they are despairing but not completely resigned. There have been discussions about a split and the creation of a new pro-EU, pro-business centre-Left progressive party. This is wishful thinking. Who, for a start, would lead it? There is no one of the stature of Roy Jenkins, Shirley Williams or Denis Healey. There are gifted MPs – Dan Jarvis, Keir Starmer, Rachel Reeves, Chuka Umunna – but they do not yet have a record of hardened achievement. Nor do they wish to quit and start again in a new party.

Joe Haines, the former journalist and aide to Harold Wilson, has a different plan. Describing Labour as being “unelectable but not indestructible”, he advocates MPs forming a breakaway parliamentary faction – perhaps as the Peelites did after the repeal of the Corn Laws in the 1840s. On the strength of numbers alone, this new faction could declare itself the official opposition, in effect splitting the PLP from the leader.

Yet Labour has already split. “It’s like one of those chasms you see in the Arctic,” said Peter Kyle, the MP for Hove and Portslade, of his party in the New Statesman last week. “It starts very small at the top, a dusting of snow covers it; but underneath is this enormous gap, and when somebody steps on it you fall through.”

What sustains Labour MPs even in their darkest periods, when elected office seems like a chimera, is a sense that their values are superior. At the launch of her ill-fated leadership campaign in July, Angela Eagle was asked how she would beat Theresa May. Her reply was as pithy as it was revealing: “Because she’s Tory.” There was nothing more sophisticated to be said. Her complacency was damning but characteristic of much Left-wing thinking. Too many Labour people think that the Tories are essentially nefarious and so cannot understand what is so attractive to so many about conservatism.

For his part, John McDonnell, the neo-Marxist shadow chancellor, recently claimed to come from the mainstream of the Labour tradition, citing Clement Attlee as an influence. McDonnell is more intelligent and better read than Corbyn, but in this instance he was being deliberately obtuse. Attlee loved his country and its institutions. He was formed by Haileybury College, the poetry of Kipling, and his experiences as a soldier in the Great War. He became a socialist after working among the poor of the East End at Toynbee Hall. And he believed in strong defence and collective security: Attlee’s Labour was the party of Britain’s nuclear bomb and Nato. These aren’t the politics of Corbynism, which is pacifist, isolationist and anti-patriotic.

In his forthcoming Attlee biography, Citizen Clem, the brilliant young historian John Bew urges Labour to recapture something of the ethos of the Attlee period – of what he calls Attlee’s “unobtrusive progressive patriotism”. It may be too late. “I started writing the book four years ago in the hope/expectation that a revival of Attleeism was Labour’s last great hope,” Bew told me. “Now I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s almost a post-mortem.”

This is not yet the end of days for Labour, but the party is in a critical condition. Its problems go far deeper than Corbyn’s leadership; he is a symptom rather than the cause of the malaise. More broadly, social democratic parties are being rejected across Europe, their purpose weakened by globalisation and immigration, and overwhelmed by the populism of the radical Left and Right.

The Brexit vote was a further warning to Labour of just how disillusioned its traditional supporters are. And it could be that the politician best placed to appeal to them is Mrs May. For her steely resolve, cool mind, professed concern for social justice, and her understanding that a strong state is the precondition of order and security seem more in keeping with the spirit of this anxious age than the Labour leader’s peacenik utopianism.

Jason Cowley is editor of the New Statesman

As Labour members prepared late last summer to elect Jeremy Corbyn as leader, Gordon Brown warned in a speech that: “Making what we want — the desirable — possible means making the desirable popular and electable.”

Sadiq Khan, who has succeeded Boris Johnson as London Mayor, is both popular and electable, and now has the largest personal mandate of any elected politician in the United Kingdom (more than 1.3 million people voted for him).

Khan is the son of a Pakistani immigrant who worked as a bus driver, as he never tires of saying. He is also an observant Muslim and, in a period of rising xenophobia, a potent symbol of the openness, tolerance and diversity of our capital city.

The triumph of this upwardly mobile mayor, who grew up as one of eight children in a council house, should inspire people from all different ethnicities and backgrounds to believe that, with talent and determination, they too can be elected to the highest offices in the land. The great doors of power are not closed to them after all.

But, on the whole, it was a pretty noxious mayoral election campaign, especially when, in the final weeks, Zac Goldsmith smeared his Labour opponent as a fellow traveller of Islamists. The subtext was obvious: this Muslim called Khan, a former human-rights lawyer who has spoken at public events alongside extremists, cannot be trusted.

Goldsmith traduced Khan but he also underestimated and misunderstood him. Khan is less an extremist than an extreme pragmatist. Above all, he knows how to win, which means at times he can seem like a man for all seasons, courting both the Left and the Right, in the manner of Harold Wilson of old.

I remember Khan telling me when we met for coffee last year that he would comfortably beat Tessa Jowell, the admired Blairite candidate who was then the favourite to become the Labour mayoral nominee. “You’ve got to understand who’s voting in this contest,” he said.

Later, as Labour careered to the Left after the general election defeat, Corbyn would be useful to Khan, who sensed the mood among the party membership. Once Khan won the nomination, however, he astutely distanced himself from the Labour leader, pledging he would be the “most pro-business mayor ever”.

Similarly, Khan never doubted he would beat Goldsmith, even as his opponent, hitherto a charming, liberal Tory environmentalist, was coerced into becoming a mud-slinging belligerent.

Labour people are naturally cheered by Khan’s victory. Some see it as vindication of Corbyn’s leadership and radicalism. They should be so lucky. In bitter truth, last week’s election results in England, Scotland and Wales merely reiterated the depth of the party’s malaise. Labour is the first Opposition party since 1985 to lose seats in local elections.

We already knew from the general election that, in spite of becoming a playground for a deracinated international plutocracy, London is a Labour city. But London is not England, and England is not Britain.

Consider what happened in Scotland, where Labour was once the natural party of government and is now not even the official opposition at Holyrood. That title belongs to the resurgent Tories, led by Ruth Davidson, whose charisma and blue-collar conservatism as well as Labour’s mediocrity have inspired an improbable revival of the party of Margaret Thatcher in Scotland.

It’s a myth that the Scottish people are more Left wing than the English. They disliked Thatcherism certainly, but few of them yearn for Corbynite socialism. What powers the SNP’s popularity is nationalism, a botched devolution settlement that allows the nationalists to claim all successes as their own while attributing failures to Westminster, and the slow death of Scottish Labour.

The former SNP leader Alex Salmond is a centre-Right nationalist, a former oil economist and an instinctive tax-cutter. His cocky, competent successor as leader a nd First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, is a pro-business centrist with a social conscience and a long-standing aversion to nuclear weapons being located on the River Clyde.

Misreading her own country, Kezia Dugdale, leader of Scottish Labour, opted to challenge the SNP hegemony by moving sharply to the Left. She proposed raising income tax even for low and average earners (never sensible) and equivocated over her party’s commitment to the Union. Labour was crushed and the Tories under Davidson are now claiming to be the last, true believers in, and defenders of, the Union in Scotland.

Where does all this leave Jeremy Corbyn? One source close to the small cohort of Left-wingers who are in control of the party told me that the Islingtonian dislikes the burden and intrusions of leadership and is open to the possibility of John McDonnell, his long-time ally and shadow chancellor, succeeding him in the right circumstances. But first, the Left wants to take full control of the party’s policy-making mechanisms and enact a final revenge on Tony Blair and his few remaining disciples, whom they despise.

If what Sadiq Khan describes as his “big tent” politics represents the best of London Labour, Corbyn and his closest allies — sectarian, ideologically inflexible, suspect on patriotism, drearily pious — represent the worst. In an article yesterday Khan warned Labour that “we will never be trusted to govern unless we reach out and engage with all voters — regardless of their background, where they live or where they work”.

The new Mayor might as well have been talking to his wife because Corbyn has no desire to listen or reach out as instructed. He’s less a “big tent” pragmatist than a closed-minded ideologue, a serial rebel who somehow, late in life, became the accidental leader of the opposition. He knows he doesn’t have the support of most of his MPs, who are frankly embarrassed by his incompetence and cranky obsessions.

But he has the support of the members and activists, which means he is immoveable. Meanwhile, the Tories are free to feud, U-turn at will and contradict each other over Europe, knowing full well that Labour’s zombie opposition cannot hurt them.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal after the Commons had voted in support of air strikes against Isis in Syria, George Osborne described how the “controversy over US and British engagement in the Iraq War, compounded by the trauma of the Great Recession, caused my political generation, in both countries, to look inward”. In early September, when I spent a day with the Chancellor in the north of England, he spoke at length about how this new inwardness – in effect, a new isolationism – had affected British prestige and influence. Dismissing the suggestion that he was a neoconservative, the Chancellor – who at least has a coherent world-view, unlike the Prime Minister – described himself as a liberal interventionist: “My generation has got to win an argument, because of what happened in 2003, again, that Britain is a force for good in the world and we shouldn’t be embarrassed to say so. And we shouldn’t be embarrassed to assert our values . . . of openness, tolerance, freedom, democracy, which I think are universal values.”

We discussed the failures of the Iraq War and its long, disastrous aftermath. Osborne said that he had learned from and been changed by the experience. “I think we ­always know the price of military action,” he told me. “What’s more difficult to judge sometimes is the price of the absence of war, to borrow a David Hare phrase.”

If Osborne is both a foreign policy realist (doing trade deals with China while turning a blind eye to its human rights abuses and authoritarian excesses) and an idealist (asserting British values and morality), Jeremy Corbyn is a utopian. He never speaks about the national interest and, because his politics were forged in the fires of the upheavals of the late 1960s and the anti-Vietnam War protests, his instinct is to denounce “Western imperialism”. As he told Stop the War’s Christmas fundraising dinner, “I’m not interested in bombs. I want a world of peace.”

No one sane wants a world of war but sometimes nation states must fight for peace. It’s not something that arrives gift-wrapped. To approach every conflict with fixed, preconceived positions is to reduce the complexity of statecraft to a student slogan as well as to show little feeling for what Max Weber described as “the tragic sense of life, the awareness of unresolvable discord, contradictions and conflict which are inherent in the nature of things and which human reason is powerless to solve”.

Because Corbyn is an isolationist (he is deeply Eurosceptic, opposed to Nato and the UK’s independent nuclear deterrent, which he considers “immoral”), foreign policy was always destined to split the Labour Party under his leadership.

Yet Corbyn is correct to assert and defend his positions – he won an astounding mandate in September and knows he has the support of most of the members and activists. But he must do more than speak to the converted. What the Labour leader needs most pressingly is to understand better the country of which he aspires to become prime minister. Perhaps he doesn’t want to – after all, he has spent his entire career surrounded by people just like him – but he needs to make the effort all the same if he is ever to be taken seriously by world leaders.

Some on the left may wish it otherwise but Britain remains a great power and, indeed, a force for good when world order seems to be crumbling. As a P5 nation – a permanent member of the UN Security Council – and a prominent member of Nato, Britain cannot simply ignore its responsibilities. Staying on the sidelines and hoping for a “political solution” to a catastrophe such as the Syrian War without being prepared actively to achieve it is not an option – not when Europe is destabilised by the worst refugee crisis since the end of the Second World War and the virus of violent jihadism is mutating.

Here’s a suggestion. Corbyn and his peacenik advisers would do well over the Christmas holiday to study John Bew’s new book, Realpolitik: a History. A New Statesman contributing writer and academic in the war studies department at King’s College London, Bew is among the brightest of the new generation of British historians.

In Realpolitik he quotes the “realist” Hans Morgenthau’s observation that no nation can “escape into a realm where action is guided by moral principles rather than by considerations of power”. But a realist foreign policy pursued without regard to morality has severe limitations. And one driven by the will to power and self-interest alone can be ruinous, as the experience of Germany in the 20th century demonstrated.

Yet idealism can be fraught with danger, too – just ask Tony Blair, who argued for “a more subtle blend of mutual self-interest and moral purpose in defending the values we cherish”. The result: the Iraq War.

In the age of Isis, we must accept that there is, as Barack Obama put it in a 2007 interview with David Brooks of the New York Times (drawing on his reading of the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr), “serious evil in the world, and hardship and pain” and that “we should be humble and modest in our belief that we can eliminate those things”. But humility in and of itself is not enough. Political leaders should be humble and modest, yes, but also pragmatic and prepared to intervene if the logic of the situation demands it. Power must be balanced by power.

Nor should foreign policy problems be approached with a pre-prepared script (Corbyn and Ed Miliband) or, as Bew writes, “with unshakeable faith in one’s methods” (Blair and Cameron). The Syrian War – with its hundreds of thousands dead and millions of refugees, and still without a sense of an end after more than four years – has taught us this, if nothing else. We can’t simply turn away from what’s happening and wish it wasn’t so. A condition of hermit security isn’t possible in such an inter­connected world.

On Monday evening in a committee room at the House of Commons, Harriet Harman, Labour’s acting leader, chaired a fractious meeting of the parliamentary party. Labour has responded just as George Osborne would have wished to the Budget by descending into rancour over the proposed reforms to welfare and tax credit reductions. The divisions in the party that have been simmering since last autumn, when there was a botched attempt to oust Ed Miliband as leader, are now exposed for all to see.

The Tories wish to restyle themselves as the “workers’ party” – which means, by implication, that they want Labour, in spite of its name and heritage, to be perceived as the party of the workless and of the benefit-dependent. Those with good sense can see all too well the trap being set for them. “If we oppose everything, people will not hear those things we are opposing and why,” Harman told her colleagues, at least 80 of whom are expected to defy her instruction to abstain on a vote on the Tories’ Welfare Bill when it comes before Parliament on July 21.

It’s easy to mock Harriet Harman as the unsmiling personification of Labour machine politics. Yet for all her tribalism, she at least seems to understand the scale of Labour’s election defeat and this has informed her nuanced response to the Budget – she has also instructed colleagues to support George Osborne’s plans to limit tax credits to families with a maximum of two children.

For some Labour MPs, Osborne’s welfare reforms are nothing more than an attack on the poor; worse still, the future child tax credit limit has about it an unfortunate taint of eugenics: the state seeking to control the fecundity of women.

“I suspect the reason Harriet is being uncharacteristically strident in her views on welfare is that she has seen some of the preliminary research into why we lost,” I was told by a supporter of Liz Kendall, one of the four leadership contenders. “I suspect she’s seen the data in the marginal seats which shows we weren’t trusted on the economy or on welfare.”

There’s no doubt Labour is in a frightful mess. “We’re up against Premier League players and we’re several divisions below them,” one despairing senior MP told me.

For many, having lost an election they expected to win, the summer recess cannot come soon enough – and yet they are mired in a protracted leadership contest that has enthused few beyond the supporters of the Left-winger Jeremy Corbyn. The contenders’ hustings have all the joy of a waterboarding convention.

Ed Miliband is culpable for much of the mess, not least for resigning as abruptly he did rather than staying on to ease the party through a period of painful transition as Michael Howard did for the Conservatives after losing the 2005 election. In Miliband’s position I would have resigned as well. But sometimes leadership, in the best interests of the party, is also about doing what you least want to do, no matter the consequences for your psychological well being. By continuing as leader, Howard prepared the way for David Cameron and George Osborne to win control of the Conservative Party, just as he wished.

Had Miliband stayed on until the party’s annual conference in September, Chuka Umunna, such a gifted communicator, might still be a contender for the leadership and, given more time to reflect and build networks, Dan Jarvis, the highly-regarded former soldier, might well have jumped in as well.

In his resignation speech, Ed Miliband said that Labour had lost the election but not the argument. There are many in the party who believe as he does: believe that the electorate yearns for a return to some form of big state socialism and would vote accordingly if only Labour could find a charismatic leader, someone like Alex Tsipras, Syriza’s Mediterranean Marxist, he of the open-necked shirts and dissident chic.

As things stand, Labour has Jeremy Corbyn. The bearded radical is principled but his world-view has ossified: he doesn’t seem to have had an original thought since at least 1981 (he favours a “planned economy” and unilateral nuclear disarmament, for instance).

When Labour was desperately weak in the 1980s it was still strong in Scotland, where today it looks to have been decisively defeated. Yet I do not share the view that Labour’s crisis is existential. It can win again. There’s talent enough on the front and backbenches. The English do not crave one-party rule. They do not love the Tory party but they do seek pragmatic, non-ideological guidance as well as sound public finances. (In the grip of nationalist fervour, Scotland has become a different country altogether.)

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George Osborne told me recently that he spent his early years in Parliament watching and learning from Tony Blair: watching how he seized and then held the centre ground of British politics, forcing the Tories to the Right. Osborne is doing something similar to Labour, by forcing the party to the Left. Whoever ends up leading Labour in September ought to watch and learn from how Osborne and Cameron have modernised their party just as they learned from Blair and Brown before them.

The Chancellor and his party might seem indomitable but one should beware of overconfidence in politics, as even Nicola Sturgeon will one day discover. Labour’s time will come again, but not until it understands and adapts to how England is changing, demographically and economically – by 2018, for instance, there will be more self-employed than public service workers. Gordon Brown’s “client state” is being dismantled, and little will be left of it by 2020.

Disraeli once spoke of how the “leadership of hopeless opposition is a gloomy affair, and there is little distinction when your course is not associated with the possibility of future power”. At present, Labour seems content to wrap itself in the comfort blanket of hopeless opposition. Does it have the will to change course and move on to what Jim Murphy, the outgoing leader of Scottish Labour, calls “the hardest ground” by seeking to win over Conservative voters? And if not now, when?

Ed Miliband’s defeat and resignation are a personal humiliation and a family tragedy.

He challenged his elder brother David for the leadership of the Labour Party in 2010, effectively destroying their relationship, because he was convinced it was his destiny to become prime minister and to lead Britain in a bright new direction.

In his dignified resignation speech, Miliband said he’d lost the election but ‘not the argument’.

This was the statement of a deluded man. He lost the election and the argument. If Labour doesn’t understand this, and adapt accordingly, it is in deeper trouble than even I believed.

Driven by a kind of messianic self-belief, Miliband was Labour’s most unashamedly Left-wing leader since Michael Foot, whose 1983 election defeat condemned the party to a long, painful period in the wilderness as Margaret Thatcher accelerated her transformation of Britain.

On the occasions when we met, he told me again and again that the financial crisis and the consequent Great Recession had created what he called a moment of great opportunity for the Left.

Perhaps they did in Scotland, but certainly not in the seats in the Midlands, Home Counties and southern England that Labour must win if it is ever to return to power.

‘Under Miliband, we had nothing to say to the faraway towns of England,’ one senior Labour figure told me.

By which he meant, Miliband’s cerebral socialism might have been popular among metropolitan liberals but it emphatically did not resonate with the skilled working and lower middle classes in small towns in places such as Essex, Bedfordshire, Kent, Hertfordshire …

As I wrote last November, in a column that precipitated a leadership crisis (there were, for a time, reports of attempted coups and secret letters circulating), Ed Miliband has a quasi-Marxist worldview.

His great obsession is political economy. He believes that if you change the economic base of a nation, you change the soul of its people. Rent controls, energy price freezes and heavy redistributive taxation were the means by which he believed the State would set about taming the ‘predatory’ forces of capitalism and building the ‘good society’.

As soon as he became leader, Miliband was eager to distance himself from the Blair years, even the successes, and this merely angered many of his MPs.

His focus on economic matters was exceptionally narrow. He had a theoretical understanding of business and poverty but no practical experience of either.

Unlike Blair, who understood the value of middle-class aspiration, Miliband seldom spoke about education (even though state academies were the creation of New Labour) or Britain’s place in the world. He never discussed public service reform or wealth creation.

Far too late, he made a desperate attempt to reframe Labour as the party of fiscal rectitude by including a so-called ‘budget responsibility lock’ (which guaranteed that every policy in Labour’s manifesto was fully funded without requiring any additional borrowing) — a matter of months after forgetting to mention the deficit in his party conference speech.

‘Ed spent his whole leadership in the bunker,’ I was told this week by one despairing former confidante. ‘Don’t forget, he spent all those years in the bunker alongside Gordon Brown and Ed Balls. That shaped him. He had a siege mentality, and he thrived on it.’

Meanwhile, Miliband failed to glimpse, even out of the corner of his eye, what was unfolding in Scotland, where Labour used to weigh the votes in constituencies that, in some cases, had all the characteristics of rotten boroughs.

The party sent its brightest talents to London and introduced a botched devolution settlement. George Robertson, the former Labour defence secretary, boasted that devolution would ‘kill Scottish nationalism stone dead’.

Instead, it empowered the SNP and fired its ambitions, allowing Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon to claim all Scotland’s successes as their own, while its failures could be blamed on Westminster.

The Labour collapse in Scotland has been dramatic in its totality and rapidity, but in truth it was a long time in the making.

A few prescient politicians such as Douglas Alexander, the former shadow foreign secretary who lost his Paisley seat to a 20-year-old student, understood how nationalism and identity politics were profoundly changing his homeland.

But Alexander, who led David Miliband’s doomed leadership campaign, was another senior colleague not fully trusted by Ed Miliband.

To the last, Miliband remained complacent about the rise of the SNP and ended up even more unpopular in Scotland than David Cameron. Not once during the election campaign did he feel confident enough to take his message directly to the Scottish people, on the streets or at public meetings.

His visits there were few, and always tightly choreographed. It was almost as if he were some kind of fugitive, being hurried in and out of a hostile land.

Labour MPs often complained to me about Miliband’s small team of closest advisers and the effect they were having on him. Having won the leadership because of the overwhelming support of the unions, he never really trusted many of his MPs.

In the early years of his leadership he felt isolated, and was especially suspicious of Ed Balls, with whom he worked as an aide under Gordon Brown at the Treasury and whose respect he never fully won.

Miliband surrounded himself with a small group of like-minded, scholarly, middle-aged men: most notable were Stewart Wood, a former Oxford academic, and Marc Stears, also an academic and an old friend of Miliband’s from Oxford University who wrote many of his speeches.

It created a peculiar kind of group-think. Their meetings had the atmosphere of lofty seminars; but then no one around Miliband had run or set up a business.

Throughout his leadership and encouraged by his loyal aides, Miliband liked to style himself as an ‘insurgent’, challenging a nefarious establishment: big business, the multinational banks, the Press barons, the energy companies.

Some of his positioning was bold and, indeed, courageous — especially when he defied David Cameron and refused to support British strikes against the Assad regime in Syria in 2013.

But it never seemed to dawn on him that he, too, was an emblematically establishment figure. He just happened to be a member of a different establishment from the Prime Minister. That of the liberal metropolitan elite.

In my view, a more nimble leader than Miliband, one with broader life experience, would have seized the opportunity presented by the collapse of support for the Lib Dems and the rise of Ukip, which divided the Right and caused deep unrest among the Tories.

A more nimble leader would have looked beyond Labour’s core vote and attempted to appeal not just to a faction but to most of the people, most of the time.

The British are, on the whole, fair-minded and generous spirited. They are rightly sceptical of ideology and grand schemes to remake society. And, despite the blindness of the polls, it’s clear that they made up their mind about Ed Miliband almost as soon as he became Labour leader.

As it turned out, nothing that he did or said during the protracted election campaign — no boast about his toughness nor late-night tryst with Russell Brand — would change the people’s fundamental view that he was simply not up to the job of being prime minister.

Now Labour has to clear a path through the rubble.