Some neuroscientists describe it as Life Review. It’s the term they give to those slow-motion instants – after your car hits the black ice but before its impact with the oncoming juggernaut – in which TikTok clips of your whole past are played in front of your eyes. Some argue that the phenomenon is the result of a massive overdose of the flight or fight response, which triggers the brain’s darkest memories and defining emotions all at once. Others, fancifully, that it is evidence of the spirit packing its bags for the life hereafter.
You’d have to say that the sickening squeal of brakes that attends the impending car crash of the Conservative party lends weight to the first of those theories.
There have been times in the past few weeks, watching Rishi Sunak, with his panicky grin and his hands flailing for the steering wheel, when just for a second or two the ghosts of his party’s last 14 years have seemed to play across his features, and we all have been forced to endure that unspooling catastrophe once again, in a rush: the Truss budget and Partygate and Barnard Castle and proroguing parliament and Theresa May croaking her way to her P45 and Jacob Rees-Mogg lounging and No Deal is Better than a Bad Deal and Eat out to Help Out and, God help us, Get Brexit Done.
People who have lived to tell the tale of near-death experiences sometimes argue that in the very last instant before impact, the whirling mind settles finally on a comforting memory, a mother’s cool hand on the forehead, a picnic in a childhood meadow. As diehard Conservatives and the rest of us close in on next Thursday, that place of childlike innocence might be dated to where it all began: David Cameron on a conference stage in 2009 smoothly articulating his ideas for “compassionate Conservatism”, making the case for a Big Society.
Watching that speech again now is an extremely bleak lesson in political befores and afters. (Though there is, you’d have to say, a certain deja vu to his opening remarks: “We all know how bad things are: massive debt, social breakdown, political disenchantment…”)
Cameron was, at that moment, perhaps at the high point of his “you were the future once” personal branding, untested, all the unlined Etonian insouciance intact. His emotional connection with his audience rested on the polls, the possibility that here might finally be a figure to lead his toxic party from that fabled Mordor, the political wilderness – and how the pundits thrilled to his centrist shirt-sleeves, to his Ted-talking capacity to wander a stage and speak without notes!
Much like the current incumbent, Cameron was never a politician who could convince you of the personal struggle of that quest; still he did his best to argue that “none of this will be easy. I will be tested. I’m ready for that – and so I believe, are the British people. So yes, there is a steep climb ahead. But I tell you this. The view from the summit will be worth it.”
And so here we are, 15 years on, worn out after that advertised long march, on top of a dispiriting mountain of broken promises and indebtedness, with an undeniable collective feeling: was there ever a tour guide prospectus more deserving of a zero-star TripAdvisor pile-on than that one?
Hindsight allows you to fact check Cameron’s pledges in detail, which this past week I’ve been taking a certain grim pleasure in. “I can look you in the eye and tell you that in a Conservative Britain,” he began, straightfaced, into the camera, “if you put in the effort to bring in a wage, you will be better off!” (In fact, wage growth in Britain was lower in the ensuing decade than in any decade since the battle of Waterloo). “If you save money your whole life,” he went on, “you’ll be rewarded!” (Britons, by independent analysis, are on average £10,200 worse off than in 2010).
“If you’re frightened,” he claimed, “we’ll protect you!” (nearly 2 million people are currently on waiting lists for mental health services). “And if you risk your life to fight for your country, we will honour you!” (The unimaginably chaotic airlift from Kabul was overseen by a Tory foreign secretary who refused to cancel his summer holiday and a prime minister who allegedly prioritised headlines about repatriating dogs.)
One of the telling features of rewatching those long-ago pledges is the contrast with the tone of this campaign. No one is promising anything much in the way of visionary hope this time around – in the years since Brexit visions of sunlit uplands have themselves, I guess, been given an irretrievably bad name.
Back then, however, even in the wake of the banking crash, Cameron felt able to summon a cadence that fell somewhere between Climb Every Mountain and Martin Luther King. Towards the end of his speech his audience could hardly contain their rapture.
“I see a country where more children grow up with security and love because family life comes first!” he exclaimed. (The Joseph Rowntree foundation reported last year that 3.8m people in the UK, including 1 million children, now live “in destitution”, a figure that has increased two and a half times since 2017.) “I see a country where communities govern themselves — organising local services, independent of Whitehall, a great handing back of power to people!” (Between 2010 and 2020, overall funding for local authorities was cut by 40%. Thirteen councils have filed section 114 bankruptcy notices since 2018; half of all councils warn of bankruptcy within five years.)
Among Cameron’s big ideas, you will remember, was the notion that, in the wake of the bank crash, we had to find other ways to measure our prosperity than GDP. His “wellbeing index” was to take account of such things as birdsong in hedgerows. “I see a country where it’s not just about the quantity of money, but the quality of life – where we lead the world in saving our planet!”. (In 2009, a quarter of English rivers were judged as being of good ecological standard; by 2022 not one river was in a healthy state).
His suave messianic vision did not end there. “I see a country,” he said, raising his eyes to the gods, “where you’re not so afraid to walk home alone, where you’re safe in the knowledge that right and wrong is restored to law and order.” (In the first eight years of austerity, funding for police forces in England fell more than 20%; in 2023, 90% of reported crimes went unsolved).
Cameron saved his clincher for the end. Far from downplaying his own privileges he argued that a Conservative government would raise standards for all children: “I see a country where the poorest children go to the best schools not the worst, where birth is never a barrier!” (The Institute for Fiscal Studies reported this year that spending on each schoolchild’s education in England has suffered an unprecedented freeze since 2010; a third of pupils on free school meals were persistently absent from school last year).
One of the few members of that government who has not written a memoir of those years is George Osborne, the primary architect and enforcer of austerity, the policy, which, counterintuitively, was sold as the path to Cameron’s compassionate society. In a recent interview with the New Yorker, Osborne admitted that the new, more inclusive rhetoric was “above all [about] trying to win.”
Still for a while, the notion that the Conservative party had changed, that we might, despite all evidence to the contrary, be all in it together, vaguely persisted.
I’d put a date to the moment when that mask slipped, when the tone of the conversation hardened. I remember it well because I was in the Olympic stadium reporting on Danny Boyle’s extraordinary opening ceremony to the 2012 Games. In some ways the event was the great dramatisation of Cameron’s vision of a creative and dynamic nation pulling together: the skydiving Queen, the reconstructed achievements of the industrial revolution and the Windrush generation, the triumphant choreography of the NHS. The pageant was a suitable opener for the Games themselves, which reflected a city and a country at ease with itself, Team GB in practice, a triumph of volunteering and the pursuit of excellence. For the event I’d downloaded Twitter for the first time and when a tweet came up on my phone, I wrote it down on my notepad.
“The most leftie opening ceremony I have ever seen – more than Beijing, the capital of a communist state! Welfare tribute next?”
The surprise of that tweet was that it came from one of the new intake of Tory MPs, 31-year-old Aidan Burley. He had won Cannock Chase from Labour in 2010 with a record swing of more than 14%. His tweet was followed a minute later by another: “Thank God the athletes have arrived! Now we can move on from leftie multicultural crap. Bring back red arrows, Shakespeare and the Stones!”
To begin with, Burley was reprimanded; Cameron called his remark idiotic. The party whip was withdrawn and Burley subsequently stepped down. But from that moment, it seemed, you began to hear versions of that sentiment more and more often. It was, among other things, exactly the kind of message that Twitter was made for.
Coincidentally, a couple of weeks before those Olympics, I’d spent some time writing about Nigel Farage, who was then on a neverending tour of town halls, whipping up support for Ukip. Farage had the cynic’s gift of making Burley’s kind of division seem something worth fighting for. I don’t think that the term culture war was in circulation at that point, but here was the blueprint for it, borrowed from the vitriol of the tabloids. Farage enthused his disgruntled Tory audience with fear-mongering about immigrants and travellers’ sites and wind farms, and ridiculed Cameron’s “leftie” posturing.
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In the decade that followed, we learned an awful lot about the people in those town halls, about their curdled nostalgia, about their unease with British cities, about their full English bitterness over the country’s – and their own – perceived decline in sovereignty. They had their vocal counterparts in the parliamentary Tory party, in undead Thatcherites like Bill Cash and John Redwood, in the permanent spluttering outrage of the European Research Group, personified by Mark Francois, and of course in the pages of the Daily Mail.
The simplest, saddest narrative of the last 14 years is how, in the absence of any substance in Cameron’s rhetorical pledges, those voices from the margins came to dominate first the Conservative party, and then large parts of the national conversation. The party reverted to toxic type: in Theresa May’s “hostile environment” for foreign-born citizens, in Boris Johnson’s “war on woke”, in the shameful Rwanda nonsense.
There are many tragic morality tales in this history. In Andrew Hindmoor’s recent book, Haywire, he suggests that the genesis of the Brexit referendum was a deal that Cameron made to protect one of the genuine progressive acts of his premiership: his determination to legislate for equal marriage. The promise to hold a vote on EU membership was, in that reading, an attempt to buy off the homophobes – half of the parliamentary Conservative party.
That deal demonstrated how shallow the reformist rhetoric had been. The “disruptors”, far from being assuaged, eventually found their champion in Cameron’s nemesis, Boris Johnson. The constitutional historian Anthony Seldon memorably summed up Johnson’s motivation to me in an interview: “From the beginning it was striking that he believed in a cause far higher than Britain’s economic interests, than Britain’s relationship with Europe, than Britain’s place in the world, than the strength of the union. That cause was his own advancement.”
If Johnson was the template for this absence of even the pretence of probity or conscience, its ultimate iteration was surely Liz Truss, whose 49 days in power signed this administration’s death warrant. It is telling that Truss, along with Priti Patel and Matt Hancock, had been the prime beneficiaries of Cameron’s demands for loyalty at all costs, fast-tracked for their sycophancy (“team players” in his terms, rather than “wankers”).
Rory Stewart’s memoir of being near the heart of government in those years offers many scenes that illustrate the vacuity of that principle. Truss was Stewart’s ministerial superior at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. On his first day he presented a thought-out plan for his first months in office, a complex listening exercise to various experts leading to a plan of action for rivers and flood defence and national parks. Truss’s response to Stewart’s plan was simply to laugh. She told him to produce a plan, any old plan, in time for the weekend’s papers. And she also told him with a giggle to cut 20% of his department, on top of those cuts already agreed.
The best account of the consequences of that approach to government, which became the Tories’ defining character, was provided in the American journalist Michael Lewis’s book The Fifth Risk. Lewis examined at a human level the swathes of random cuts that the Trump administration made to American civil society as it flailed around in its ambition to “drain the swamp”. In many cases, those cuts fell squarely on the individuals with the institutional knowledge that might save the nation from disaster.
“If your ambition is to maximise short-term gain without regard to the long-term cost,” Lewis wrote, “you are better off not knowing the cost. If you want to preserve your personal immunity to the hard problem, it’s better never to really understand those problems. There is an upside to ignorance, and a downside to knowledge. Knowledge makes life messier. It makes it a bit more difficult for a person who wishes to shrink the world to a worldview.”
Lewis’s book, which came out just before the pandemic, examined the consequences of reducing government to a culture war. Of “having enough of experts” in Michael Gove’s phrase, if they told uncomfortable truths. It predicted precisely both the lack of institutional preparedness for a pandemic, and the disastrous response to it.
One effect of pursuing short-termism for so long is that its consequences inevitably start to be revealed while you are still in government. The latter years of the Tories’ car crash Life Review would, in this regard, feature scenes from a succession of public inquiries – into Covid, Grenfell, the (inherited) contaminated blood review, the Post Office scandal.
Sitting through any of these inquiries, day by day, has been to experience how the corrosive attacks on institutions have been felt within them; how many of the people who might have saved us, in Lewis’s terms, have become beleaguered or demoralised or sidelined or absent. There have been many theories as to why Sunak called his summer election. The most persuasive for me is that he wanted to get out before the bills for some of those derelictions of duty, and failures of regulation, have to be paid. Before the £10bn cost of compensating the contaminated blood families comes in, before Thames Water collapses with its £20bn debt.
It is fitting, in this regard, that this election year began with the ITV drama Mr Bates vs the Post Office. If any institution represented the traditions Cameron wanted to tap into with his Big Society it might have been the network of subpostmasters, serving their communities. There was something deeply emblematic about their systemic betrayal.
In the days after that series went out I spoke to Gwyneth Hughes, who had written the true-life drama, about why she thought it had touched such a nerve.
Since it aired, she said, “all of us on the team have emails full of people going, ‘I’ve got a story for you – and if anything, it’s worse than the Post Office’. I think a key reason it has been a runaway success,” she suggested, “is that an awful lot of people in this country feel, in their own small way, as though they have been going through something similar. They feel like those people hanging on to the wretched Horizon helpline, which they used to call the ‘hell line’. They feel unheard.”