Ted Hughes: “The Last Letter”, 2010

I asked Melvyn Bragg to guest-edit an issue of the magazine in October 2010. We both wanted something special for it – and Melvyn duly delivered when he persuaded Carol Hughes, the widow of Ted Hughes, to allow us to publish a previously unseen poem by the late poet laureate. It was no ordinary poem. It was “The Last Letter”, about the final tormented days in the life of Hughes’s first wife, Sylvia Plath, who killed herself in 1963. “What happened that night? Your final night,” it begins. So personally painful was the subject of the poem that Hughes had excluded it from his 1998 collection of poems exploring his relationship with Plath, Birthday Letters. “You get a scoop like that once in a career,” a colleague said to me. The Ted Hughes estate has never granted permission for the poem to be published online but it was included in Statesmanship: The Best of the New Statesman, for which I wrote the introduction and edited (Weidenfeld & Nicolson 2019; revised and updated 2021). Daniel Trilling, who worked closely with Melvyn on the issue, wrote about the poem’s publication here. You can read the full poem here.

Hugh Grant: The bugger, bugged, April 2011

In 2011, we had three guest-edited issues, the first of which being Jemima Khan’s (now Goldsmith) in the early spring, in what turned out to be a golden year for the New Statesman. Jemima asked her friend Hugh Grant to write a piece. He equivocated. For a long while, we did not think we would get anything from him. And then he had an idea. A good idea. He would go undercover to bug a former tabloid reporter who was now running a pub in Kent. He had once spied on and bugged the actor. Hugh would do the same to him – by secretly recording their conversation as they chatted in the pub. Let’s say the piece travelled!

Rowan Williams: Leader, 2011

As Jemima’s guest-edited issue was published, I was already at work on a special project with Rowan Williams, then archbishop of Canterbury. Rowan’s guest-edited magazine was wide-ranging – there were contributions from the Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Gordon Brown and AS Byatt – but it was his lead editorial that received most attention. In fact, it dominated the news agenda for several days and led the main BBC bulletins. Rowan’s intervention caused a major rift between Lambeth Palace and 10 Downing Street – there were sackings! – after he denounced the Conservative-led coalition’s austerity programme. The “big society” was a “stale” slogan that was viewed with “widespread suspicion”, he wrote. He also accused Cameron and Osborne (and Clegg let’s not forget) of enacting “radical, long-term policies for which no one voted”.

Christopher Hitchens: The last interview, 2011

Another guest-edited issue to end 2011, this time by Richard Dawkins. Could he speak to Christopher Hitchens, who was dying from cancer at a hospital in Texas, we wondered. He could. The in-person interview was published the day after Hitchens died in December 2011. It was his last interview. As news of it travelled around the world, our website was overwhelmed with visitors and crashed repeatedly under the weight of traffic. Hitch’s final message was simple and direct: “Never be afraid of stridency.”

Kate Atkinson: “darktime”, 2011

We don’t publish much short fiction. But we did publish “darktime”, a dystopian satire by Kate Atkinson, in which the world is suddenly plunged into inexplicable darkness. I found the story so strange and compelling that I have often thought about it over the years, wondering whether it could have been expanded into a novel or could yet be made into a movie. You can read it for a limited time here.

Clive James: “Driftwood Houses”, 2014

We published several notable poems by Clive James during the final years of his life as he struggled with leukaemia, bouts of pneumonia and chronic emphysema. James had a late-career flourishing as a poet. He was too ill to travel or get out much and spent long days at home in Cambridge, reading, writing and re-evaluating his life. When you are waiting to die, one course of action, James said, was “inaction”. The other is “to go on working, as if you have all the time in the world”. In “Driftwood Houses” he recalls a distant family holiday and contrasts the happiness he felt then as his daughters gathered shells on a beach with his current plight: “I’ve hit a wall.” There are expressions of sadness and loss, but the final line suggests contentment: “As I lie restless yet most blessed of men.”

Kate Mossman: The curious afterlife of Terence Trent D’Arby, 2015

In 2015 our star interviewer Kate Mossman travelled to Milan to meet the man who used to be called Terence Trent D’Arby, a strikingly handsome pop-funk singer whose debut album sold one million copies in the first three days of release. But then in 1995 he changed his name to Sananda Maitreya after a series of dreams. “I was killed when I was 27,” he told Kate. And yet, he is still alive. But he is no longer Terence Trent D’Arby, and Kate was asked not to mention that name. Who was he now? Kate’s interview became an online sensation on publication and is one of the most read pieces on our website.

John Gray: The closing of the liberal mind, 2016

The great John Gray is liberalism’s most penetrating critic. In a series of essays in the New Statesman, published throughout my editorship, John has analysed why Western liberal elites kept losing elections they expected to win and why their policies and positions have created the blowback that they now call populism. From being the vanguard of the future, John wrote in 2016, the year of Brexit and Trump’s first presidential victory, the liberal order is crumbling. “But they insist that the solution to the crisis of liberalism is clear. What is needed is more of the same.” Well, Kamala Harris believed that too, with predictable results.

Ed Docx: The peak, 2020

Is this the best piece of creative non-fiction written during the pandemic years? The novelist Ed Docx writes from the perspective of Dr Jim Down, a consultant at a Covid ICU unit at University College Hospital in London during the first peak of the pandemic. It is a 7,000-word work of non-fiction but has the psychological complexity and imaginative power of fiction. Not only does Docx tell us what it is like to be Dr Jim Down, he imaginatively becomes him as people all around in the Covid ward are “ill with the same new disease”. Even as they work in the ICU unit, Docx writes, “the staff are all dealing with the fear of actually dying themselves”.

Bryan Magee: Pensées, 2021

I admired Magee for his work as a populariser of philosophy, public educator and communicator of complex ideas. This edited selection of some of the thoughts and observations written in his private notebooks (shared with me by his literary executor Henry Hardy) over many years reveals the interests and obsessions familiar to anyone who has read his books or watched his BBC TV series Men of Ideas and The Great Philosophers. I selected, ordered and numbered these thoughts, or pensées – Magee called them “notes” – as he would have wished. “If a day comes when I prepare them for publication, I shall try to put them into an order that adds to their readability, and will then renumber them,” he wrote. “If anyone else performs this task he should do the same thing.” He wanted each one numbered, “but only to make it possible to refer to it without having to quote it”. My selection reveals a mind working away at the same intractable dilemmas and grappling with the fundamental questions of being.

But being Gary Lineker is not normal by anyone’s measure. His career has been one of continuous success. He is the former star England football striker who after retirement became a BBC institution and its highest-paid presenter and, more recently, a podcast impresario, co-founder of Goalhanger, the independent production group whose The Rest Is… podcast series is among the most successful in the world.

There have been dark shadows, however. His first-born son, George, was seriously ill as a baby with leukaemia, and Lineker is twice divorced. “But by and large,” he told me, “I’ve had it good – I’ve had it really good. I often think, ‘Why me? Why me? Why me?’ I was blessed with a skill to play football.”

Lineker recalls how his life changed completely after the 1986 World Cup in Mexico, at which he won the Golden Boot as the tournament’s highest scorer, although England lost 2-1 in the quarter-final to the eventual winners Argentina – the match in which Diego Maradona punched the ball into the net, the so-called hand of God goal. (Steve Hodge, the former England midfielder, later sold at auction the shirt Maradona had worn in that game for £7.1m.)

Shortly after the Mexico World Cup, Lineker signed for Barcelona, then coached by Terry Venables, the most astute and inspiring coach Lineker says he ever played under. Nowadays, he can’t leave his house or travel on public transport, which he does regularly, without being stopped, or smiled at, or asked for a selfie.

“What would be more difficult to explain was if all that stopped,” he told me. “You’d go: ‘That’s not normal any more!’”

Of his upcoming departure from Match of the Day, he said: “I’m flummoxed as to why it’s such a big deal. I’m just the presenter of a football highlights show.”

But he knows he is much more than that. His interventions on social media on some of the most polarised political conflicts of our times – Brexit, the refugee crisis, climate change – have ignited media firestorms of indignation and disapproval. One such storm, after Lineker denounced the Conservative government’s plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda, led to his suspension from Match of the Day in March 2023, the programme he has presented since 1999.

In solidarity with their friend, pundits Alan Shearer and Ian Wright boycotted the show as that weekend live sports programmes across BBC networks were truncated or taken off air as the conflagration spread. Jon Holmes, Lineker’s longtime confidant and agent (“my second father”), was called in to make peace. He expertly cooled the temperature, negotiated with Tim Davie, the BBC director-general, and Lineker returned to our screens, baffled but not chastened.

“I got tearful when Ian and Alan did that,” Lineker says now of the debacle, “because they didn’t have to. I didn’t ask them, I didn’t expect it, but it was beautiful.”

As Lineker spoke, his eyes behind his Prada spectacles filled with tears and he peered out the window at the rough common land that surrounds his imposing, high-ceilinged house. We were sat on a sofa in his sitting room, close to a table on which a microphone he uses for The Rest Is Football podcast was positioned. Filbert – a Siberian Husky cross rescue dog, familiar from paparazzi shots of Lineker setting off for walks with the media camped outside his house – lay at his feet on the wooden floor as we chatted.

Being Gary Lineker also means being the subject of endless media scrutiny and persistent low-level sniping and abuse. When news dribbled out recently that he would stand down from Match of the Day at the end of the season – was he pushed by Alex Kay-Jelski, the BBC’s ambitious new head of sport, or did he choose the moment of his own departure? – another round of hostile media stories commenced. The news received as much prominence as the resignation of Justin Welby as Archbishop of Canterbury – which tells us, Lineker said, that “football’s the proper religion!” Boom, boom.

On proposed changes to the format of Match of the Day – which he still enjoys presenting, despite the travel back and forth to the BBC studios in Manchester, where it is broadcast live late on Saturday night – Lineker cautioned against them. The highlights show was founded in 1964 and he says it is “a mainstay for a lot of people in this country in terms of watching Premier League football, the one place where they can get their Premier League fix”.

He will continue after the end of the season to present coverage of live football on the BBC, his contract ending at the 2026 World Cup. “Linear TV is changing,” he said. “The new head of sport, Alex, wants to shuffle it up a bit, so if you’re going to do that, you might as well do it with someone new. I’m feeling good about [my departure]. It’s nice that it’s out there now.”

Lineker claims not to read what is written about him just as he chose as a player – for Leicester City, Everton, Barcelona, Spurs and England – not to seek out match reports unless he’d had a good game and scored. “But people tell you, so you get to hear. If you take a bit of social media – and it’s always the same people – and a couple of newspapers – and it’s always the same newspapers – you start to realise that it’s really only a tiny minority of people that hate you, and it’s generally those that are far right.”

But why should being Gary Lineker mean being hated at all? His on-screen persona – which has evolved after a nervous start sitting alongside and observing Des Lynam suavely orchestrate proceedings in the Match of the Day studio – is welcoming (“Thank you for joining us this evening”), conversational, relaxed and humorous. He has cross-generational appeal and Match of the Day, he points out, is always at the top of the most-watched programmes on BBC iPlayer.

In person, Lineker is not grand, garrulous or overly assertive. He is rather self-deprecating and likes quips (some of his jokes even land) but he is also reflective, looks you directly in the eye and listens carefully. Our photographer, Chris Floyd, who arrived at the house before me, even found him a “little wistful and melancholy”.

Matthew Syed, the columnist and writer, has a theory on why Lineker is hated: jealousy. “In many ways, you could say he is one of the most successful individuals in the UK, a master in the art of reinvention,” he said. “No wonder people despise him, at least judging by my social media feed (another forum that Lineker got to early, learned about and then came to dominate).”

Lineker accepts jealousy plays a part in how he is treated. “I think it’s inevitable. It is part of human beings, particularly British people: if you go to America, they’ve got a totally different view of their sporting heroes. It’s been led by the right-wing press: they don’t seem to like me very much and I seem to live in the Mail’s head, and they write pieces on me nearly every day, which is bizarre.”

Later, he said: “What you’ve got to remember is that as footballers we get used to getting a bit of stick… people chanting ‘Gary Lineker, you’re a wanker’ – especially when it’s the home fans!” Boom, boom.

“But the Daily Mail’s infatuation, I don’t know if it’s anything sexual or anything like that!” He laughed.

Lineker was radicalised by Brexit – or politicised is perhaps more accurate. He recalls being invited to a small private dinner with Michael Gove at which the then senior Conservative politician made the case for leaving the European Union. “I remember saying to Gove, halfway through the meal, ‘This sounds just like the plan you use to become the next leader of the Tory party, the next prime minister.’ He went: ‘I can look at you now and categorically tell you that there is absolutely no chance I will ever run for prime minister.’ Brexit happens and he’s running for prime minister! Politicians, I mean, really?”

After the Gove dinner, Lineker began to read seriously about the European Union and the potential effects of Brexit. “I needed to do my homework, and I started to do a lot on what it means. I just thought, ‘Christ, this would be a nightmare.’”

He then took to X, then Twitter, after some deliberation, to announce he would vote Remain. After which the gates of hell opened on him: he had become a belligerent in the culture wars, which he seemed to relish. His comments seemed performative. He had become what John Gray would call an ultra-liberal.

“Gary is living his life backwards,” one friend said. “As he gets older, he sounds more and more like a student.” Even Syed, who admires Lineker, says his political views are “lazy and superficial. There is little willingness to challenge his own core assumptions or think through implications… I’d often wince when reading his feed. In a strange way, all the practice and insight he applied to the social world seemed absent in his engagement with the political one.”

Lineker does not consider himself to be a cultural warrior, a provocateur, or as someone who is even that political. He’s not an activist. He calls himself, instead, a “humanitarian” and has no interest in religion. “It’s bonkers that anyone believes in anything like that. We don’t understand how we’re here,” he said, peering out the window again and gesturing up at the clear, blue, late autumn sky.

“The fact we’re here is miraculous. What we needed to do was give it a story and why [the world] was made – I think they’re [religions are] the biggest conspiracy theories in history! But that’s just my view and I perfectly respect people’s rights to believe whatever they believe. Scientists have explained so much and learned so much more. They understand sort of how it started – but how did it start before that? It’s like madness, but is it some bloke with a white beard in the clouds?”

What matters to Lineker are other human beings – and their plight, here on Earth. “Imagine if it happened here,” he said to me, his tone hardening. “Imagine if we were a country that was being bombed and suddenly you’ve got to flee with anything that you can grab and try [to] live somewhere else because you’re going to get killed. Imagine if that happened and you had to take massive risks to cross a continent, including boat trips that are really precarious and dangerous – because you had got no real choice. And then eventually, when you get somewhere, they really don’t want you, they can’t stand you and they want you out. I just looked at it from their perspective and, yes, you can’t take everyone but we should take our fair share, as should all nations around the world, because it’s only going to get worse, with climate change and wars.”

He does not regret comparing Conservative policy on migration to 1930s Germany. “It just seemed awful. It was illegal, in the end. But I just can’t see how you can do something like that. What human being acts to a fellow human being in that way?”

He thinks the BBC is gripped by fear of the right-wing press and over-reacted by suspending him. “They recognise that now. It was a very surreal few days. I wasn’t stressed by it – because that’s my personality. But I found it intriguing, amusing and baffling, because I thought: ‘This is over me replying to someone who has taken a real dig at me, in civil language, and all of a sudden… that tweet would only have been seen by a few people. I did the reply and woke up in the morning and I’d got, like, 300 messages on my phone. It was basically orchestrated by the Daily Mail, saying I’d accused the Tory government of being Nazis – which was far from the truth. I just said some of the language they are using is not dissimilar to that used in the 1930s in Germany, which was correct, factually correct. Then it just blew up from there. Even if I’d been wrong – and I don’t think I was, and I still don’t – it would have been still over the top.”

He called Tim Davie and urged him “not to appease the Daily Mail”, as he puts it. “That’s where the BBC sometimes has a failing. It’s a little bit terrified of the BBC-haters. They will always hate it regardless. Stop worrying about them and focus on all the people that love the BBC. It’s an incredible service: it’s an institution that’s respected across the globe.”

That the corporation, occupying a space in public life between the state and the market, aspires to be impartial, “especially in these times when everything is so divisive”, is what Lineker most respects about the institution. “I don’t think we support ourselves enough [at the BBC], and we get scared about what the haters think.”

He also acknowledged that the BBC is in an existential struggle for relevance in an age of proliferating streaming services and media fragmentation. The case for the licence fee will have to be made afresh. “There might be some form of change in the model of funding, I’m only guessing. It’s difficult. When they change it, how do they change it? Do you make it subscription? But in ten years’ time, who knows how our viewing will be. But it’s worth preserving in whatever way we can.”

He cannot understand why some Conservatives are hostile to the ethos of public service broadcasting. “Conserve it. My dad was a Tory. That’s what Conservatism is – conserving things, surely! Why would you want to lose the BBC, the thing that is so incredibly respected around the world?”

He resents how, as Conservative culture secretary, John Whittingdale – a hard right-winger – forced the BBC to publish presenters’ salaries (the talent, as they are known). “I was annoyed about that fact. Who wants their salaries published? And every July, I hide behind the sofa, because I’m going to get it. And the reality is, I’ve been at the BBC a long time. I’m not obsessed [with] money. Because if I was at another channel, I’d been earning a lot more. I had plenty of approaches over the years, plenty of offers. I just felt a loyalty to the BBC, so I kind of stuck it out.”

I asked Lineker if he understood why, as a senior BBC presenter whose salary is paid for by the licence fee, his comments on social media angered so many on the right. Apart from his Brexit intervention, he said that his comments were “not political but humanitarian”. Nor as a sports presenter were there any BBC restrictions on what he could say back then; they were introduced later in response to various scandals.

“At that point, there was no issue about BBC presenters saying what they wanted, unless you were in news and current affairs. Then they started to change the rules. You say, ‘Well, hang on, you’ve moved the goalposts. Now what am I supposed to do, just say nothing?’ After that, I was very careful about doing anything politically, but on the humanitarian issues, I could carry on.” Until he couldn’t – because the guidelines were rewritten again after his suspension in March 2023.

Reflecting on his career as a footballer, Lineker believes that he lacked empathy. “I was focused on football, so driven, so ambitious. It consumed my life to an extent that you just cared about scoring goals.” And he scored a lot of them.

He says he became “more empathetic” after he had children and because of George’s illness. “You start having different perspectives on life – football finishes. Looking back at the me when I was young, I wouldn’t have cared about things that you start to care about in life as you get older. And the transition began in the public domain because of social media.”

When he began using Twitter (he now calls X “shitter”), Lineker asked himself: “‘What do I do with this?’ Well, tell people what you are. And the following, it grew and grew really quickly.”

He now seldom uses the platform except for promotional and occasionally charitable purposes. “It’s just gone down the toilet. It was never a truly friendly place anyway, but now it’s utterly awful, since Musk has ruined it.”

Lineker monitors events in the Middle East and the war in Gaza. He follows on Instagram a ten-year-old girl named Renad Attallah who lives in the besieged Strip and posts about her life there. He has spoken before of how pictures and footage of people’s suffering inside the Strip have made him “cry on a regular basis”.

“They still do,” he told me. “It’s just got worse and worse, hasn’t it? There’s nothing we can do. You feel a bit helpless. I mean, it’s awful. I don’t know how you can be on a side on this, other than the side of the children and the side of the women and the innocent people that are being killed constantly now. Yes, same sympathies on October 7, and before October 7 there were things that happened, but what’s going on now is just…”

His voice faded and he lowered his head. He mentioned Attallah again. “If something happened to her” – his eyes filled with tears – “I’d genuinely… she’s a brilliant little chef, and so sweet, you think [he whispers]: ‘Fuck, how could people kill these people? How can they do that? How can you even contemplate – it’s fucking awful.”

I ask him if he has ever messaged her on Instagram.

“You can, yes, and I’ve donated and stuff like that, because she’s brilliant. She’s become more than an influencer – she’s got four, five million followers or something silly [in fact, she has just under one million], but you just think, ‘God, every night she goes to bed it might happen, or she gets shot in the street.’ It’s not about anti-Semitism – it’s about anti- the killing of innocent women, children and men as well. I just want it to stop.’”

His stance on the Israel-Gaza war has led to accusations that he is anti-Israeli and ignorant of the deeper context of the Israel-Palestine conflict. He pushed back. “I’m anti-Israel government. I’m not in the slightest bit anti-Semitic. I’m not anti-anybody. I am anti-bad people, and there are really bad people involved in this. Eventually, whether it’s five years’, ten years’, 20 years’ time, I think we’ll look at that and we’ll see it the same way as Iraq times ten. I do, I just genuinely do.”

As Lineker watches the suffering of victims of war and conflict everywhere, he believes the world has entered a “dark period”. And he regrets the British government is not more influential in the Middle East. “We’re a powerless little country really, now. You don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes, whether they’re trying. I’m sure they are: they must be. It’s easy to be critical when you don’t know what’s going on.”

We have wandered far from the Match of the Day studio now. Being Gary Lineker means that people ask him not just about football and the BBC but about some of the world’s defining issues – about war, geopolitics, the migration crisis, climate change. He has brought this on himself, perhaps, through his social media activity but also because he has a restless mind and does not avoid questions or offer stock, rehearsed replies: he speaks from the heart. In his later years as a footballer, he was already thinking about a career in broadcasting and used to hang out with journalists and ask them about their trade, how they worked and prepared, what they did. Fellow England players Chris Waddle and Paul Gascoigne used to call him “Junior Des”, after Lynam, whose wry, amused presentation style Lineker admired, studied and would in time emulate.

But we should end with football. I used to play a lot in childhood, but knew I would never be as good as I wanted to be. I would see other boys, however, who knew instinctively how to play, where to move, how to find space, how to run. They knew they were good. Some of the boys I played against in the Harlow recreational leagues in Essex became professionals, but never reached the summit of the game as Lineker did.

When did Lineker know he was good?

“As a boy I knew I was good – I was really quick,” he told me. “When I was 11, 12 years old, I scored something like 160 goals in a season, combined between my school and Sunday team. I was quicker than everyone else and a good finisher, so I got spotted by scouts. I went to Leicester at 12, trained every couple of days. But the kids there, I always thought, were better than me. I was tiny, 5ft 5in and nine stone, but I hadn’t reached puberty – I didn’t till I was 17. I used to hide in the showers and stuff. But as I got stronger, I improved. I didn’t get into the England team until I was 24. I wasn’t a [Wayne] Rooney or [Michael] Owen.”

During the recent European Championships in Germany, Lineker was criticised for calling Gareth Southgate’s England team “shit” on his The Rest Is Football podcast. Southgate later complained of the “dark atmosphere” around the team.

Asked who had criticised him, I told Lineker that I’d heard some of the senior England players were irritated by the comments, which were widely reported. “We saw them after the final,” he said of the players, “and they were fine. People try to create something where it actually isn’t there. Everybody was critical of England at the Euros, the way they were playing in the group games, the last 16, they were awful, really awful. It was so bad. It was shit. I never understand why people get offended. They don’t – maybe the Daily Mail do – but I think we were just honest.”

He admires Southgate as a communicator and diplomat but has not seen him since the end of the tournament. “He did a brilliant job in bringing the England team back to where they are respected and liked again by the public. But he’s a sort of underdog, defensive coach, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but with the quality of players we have, it’s the right time to change it.”

What Lineker appreciates most about modern football is what he considers to be its inclusivity. He does not deny racism exists in the game and he is not naively idealistic but, he says, “Look inside the dressing rooms: black guy, white guy, Asian, Muslim, Catholic – they all get on beautifully, because we’re humans. But we’re kind of forced to be against each other.”

Inadvertently he had moved seamlessly back to cultural politics or what he prefers to call humanitarian concerns, a constant preoccupation.

Being Gary Lineker means never being at rest. When he is not broadcasting or speaking about football, he is discussing future projects and podcasts, who and what might work and why, with Tony Pastor and Jack Davenport, his business partners at Goalhanger. “The hard thing is trying to find the right hosts, getting the kind of chemistry.”

He mentions the success of The Rest Is History podcast, presented by Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook, both old friends of the New Statesman. The rapport between the two amiable historians contributes to its great attraction. “After a slow start,” Lineker said, the podcast has “millions, millions, tens of millions of listeners. It’s the world’s biggest history podcast and it’s probably not far off being the world’s biggest podcast. Their live shows, they’ve just sold out every venue they’ve been to in America.”

When they meet, Lineker, Pastor and Davenport marvel at the good luck of it all. “We often go out and have a few drinks and we go: ‘How the fuck is this, we’ve become these media moguls, almost, with influence!’ And it’s such fun. Everything else in my life I’ve done there’s been a negative side: when you’re a footballer, you get a bit; when you’re in the BBC, you get a bit, for obvious reasons. But suddenly, with this, you get stopped every day by people who say: ‘The Rest Is History is amazing.’ Or, “I love The Rest Is Politics.’ Or, ‘Oh, Gary, I want to thank you for The Rest Is Football.’ It’s nuts. I don’t believe in gods and stuff, as I told you, but I wonder if there’s a planet somewhere that’s got PlayStation and there’s someone playing me who’s a really good player! I’ve had the most amazing life. Because if I drop dead tomorrow – well, let’s get my birthday out of the way first, I’m 64 on Saturday [30 November] – I’m thankful to my PlayStation friend.”

This appears in the Christmas 2024 issue of the New Statesman magazine, on sale 6 December 2024 – 9 January 2025

[See also: Gregg Wallace and the revenge of the middle-class, middle-aged women]

Listen to the New Statesman podcast

A highlight of my editorship was working on the 180-page centenary issue of the magazine in April 2013 as well as the two collector’s editions we published that showcased our wonderful archive – HG Wells, George Orwell, JB Priestley, Christabel Pankhurst, Virginia Woolf, Bertrand Russell, Claire Tomalin, Christopher Hitchens, AS Byatt, Clive James, etc. Back then I received from the historian and former BBC executive Hugh Purcell a long, fascinating essay on John Freeman, the inscrutable former New Statesman editor who became British ambassador to the United States. Hugh and I met soon afterwards, and he later introduced me to Norman Mackenzie, who had worked on the New Statesman during the “golden years” of Kingsley Martin’s editorship, from 1931 to 1960. Norman was 91 and in poor health when I first visited him at home in Lewes (he died in June 2013). But he was lucid and, after several decades when he had stopped reading the magazine because of the “silly left”, he had resubscribed. “It’s like coming back to the place after 30 years away to find someone has been polishing the doorknobs,” he told me.

Norman wrote for the centenary issue, and it was a pleasure to talk to him about working for Martin and the radical spirit of the New Statesman. He recalled lunches with Orwell – then a struggling freelancer who loathed Martin because he’d refused to publish Orwell’s dispatches from the Spanish Civil War – and Monday editorial meetings at the offices in Great Turnstile Street in central London, cherishing the moment the cartoonist Vicky would erupt into the room with his latest sketches.

One afternoon, on the train back from Lewes, Hugh mentioned the moment he knew he was ready to stand down as editor of the BBC’s Start the Week. “The programme was as good as it could be and one was running out of ideas,” he said. I am not running out of ideas, but having grappled with non-negotiable weekly print deadlines (as well as daily digital ones) for so long, one feels the burden of repetition – if not quite the Nietzschean sense of eternal recurrence.

A notable challenge for any New Statesman editor is to know what to do about the Labour Party, which through the decades has attempted to abuse, manipulate or control the magazine. In recent years,we have pursued our own sceptical, independent liberal politics with vigour. One decision we made, however, was to endorse Ed Miliband in 2010. By November 2014, convinced that he would lead Labour to defeat, we warned in a special issue that he was “running out of time”. His response to our intervention, widely covered in the media, was never to speak to me again. But a few days after the publication of our issue – as letters calling for his resignation reportedly circulated among his MPs – Miliband attempted to relaunch his leadership on a visit to Harlow in Essex, my hometown, accompanied by the BBC’s political editor. I had written that Miliband did not understand the aspirations of Essex Man and Woman and approached politics as if it were an elevated Oxford PPE seminar. “This is an election we can win, this is an election I’m determined we win, and I know we can with the vision we have for how we change Britain,” Miliband said at Harlow College, where I’d been a sixth-former.

In the event, Ed Miliband lost the 2015 election, squandering 40 of Labour’s 41 Scottish Westminster seats. David Cameron had been gifted a surprise majority. But the Conservative leader was now compelled to honour the pledge he’d first made in a speech at Bloomberg’s London HQ in 2013 to hold a binary plebiscite on the UK’s membership of the European Union. A period of turmoil and extraordinary politics had begun.

In the autumn of 2008, when I became editor, I received a handwritten postcard from Anthony Howard, editor from 1972 to 1978. I got to know Tony when he was obituaries editor of the Times in the 1990s; he sometimes used to enjoy a post-lunch nap in his glass-fronted office before waking to pass proofs, talk about politics and share some Fleet Street gossip. “As almost the Old Man and the Sea of the enterprise,” he wrote, “I hasten to send you all my congratulations. You’ll find it a tough job but I’m sure you’ll do it brilliantly. If you ever feel I can do anything to help, you only have to ask… As for you, you must dig in and stick it out till the paper’s centenary in 2013!”

Well, I stuck it out, for longer than we both expected. Now I should like to thank my colleagues for their enthusiasm, dedication, unstinting support and total commitment to quality journalism. The good ship New Statesman sails on.

Jason Cowley was editor of the New Statesman from 2008 to 2024

This appears in the Christmas 2024 issue of the New Statesman magazine, on sale 6 December 2024 – 9 January 2025

[See also: Bill Gates: the Optimist’s Dilemma]

This would happen several times over the next 45 minutes. The effect of the interruptions was to darken the room but lighten the mood. Gates relaxed. We shared a few jokes. He opened up, although he would not discuss the forthcoming US election (we met before the vote but as Elon Musk had declared his support for Donald Trump – “Musk is quite unique. I mean he’s very involved in politics, I read today,” Gates said, smiling.)

Gates was in London for 24 hours on his way back from the World Health summit in Berlin. The next day he would meet Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves in Downing Street. He and Starmer had spoken before by telephone after the general election and he’d previously met David Lammy, the Foreign Secretary, in New York. He hoped to nudge Labour into reaffirming the UK’s commitment to spend 0.7 per cent of national income on international aid and development, as it did during the New Labour years.

The UK is one of six original donors to the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (Gavi), co-funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the largest sovereign donor to its core programmes.

“We’re saying to the UK now,” Gates said, “‘Hey, you know, Labour’s back and please maintain, despite all these pressures on that [overseas aid] budget – including this refugee thing but all sorts of things – maintain your leadership in Gavi.”

This was before the Labour Budget, however. Boris Johnson dissolved the Department for Overseas Development, or DFID, in 2020, but Gates points out that even in the early years of the Conservative-led coalition, the UK maintained its commitment to spending 0.7 per cent of national income on international development. “They were confused, so they wouldn’t talk about it,” he said. “And then they cut the budget to 0.5 per cent. Labour’s got a challenge to renew the leadership.”

He acknowledged the UK’s economic plight: stagnant growth, dismal productivity, diminished state capacity, a health and social care crisis. “I mean, which is more important, fixing the NHS, helping Ukraine, climate change, which there’s a lot of domestic spending and very ambitious goals on that. Fortunately, we’re asking for a few per cent of the budget. It’s tough to be a politician, because of the willingness [he meant the reluctance of people] to pay higher taxes. The amount rich countries spend on old people is very high: people don’t like to say that, but if you say, ‘OK, of the incremental tax collection, how much has gone to elderly health, elderly pensions?’ It’s a very high percentage, and so people are a little dissatisfied about the investments in the young. And our men, how are they feeling, how are they succeeding? The non-urban areas – there’s plenty of problems. But it would be tragic to move away from something that’s worked so well.”

In the event, Gates was frustrated by the Labour Budget. On 31 October, he issued a statement in which he described the decision to cut the overseas aid budget as “a disappointing outcome for the world’s most vulnerable people”. The UK was withdrawing from its overseas aid leadership role and this “leaves us all at greater risk”.

Here, then, is the optimist’s dilemma in microcosm: the world is not as Bill Gates wishes it to be or believed it once was or would like to imagine. History does not move progressively forward in a linear way. In a world in turmoil the gains of progress can be reversed or lost. His priorities – as one of the world’s richest men and greatest philanthropists – are increasingly not shared by nation states committed to national exceptionalism and to spending more of their GDP on defence and security. The potential for technological innovation, Gates believes, is boundless, and yet something has been lost, the spirit of transnational and multilateral collaboration that illuminated the early years of the century. How do we encourage every nation to do what it can to help the poorest in a zero-sum world? Gates seeks light but darkness is visible everywhere.

As the founder of Microsoft, Gates believes in the inevitability of progress – this defines his optimism – and the transformative power of technology, especially AI, to solve humanity’s greatest challenges. He doesn’t say this explicitly, but he believes in his own capacity to change the world. He has already done it twice – through Microsoft, which created accessible computing for the masses, and the Gates Foundation, with its transformative investment in immunisation, women’s education and children’s health in the poorest parts of the world. We have developed climate resistant seeds, Gates says, and are close to the near eradication of polio. His moonshot is that no child should die of a preventable disease.

He showed me a small AI-enabled ultrasound “birth predicator device” which can be attached to a mobile phone. “You scan the pregnant woman’s belly, using this, and then a piece of AI software asks will this be a difficult pregnancy, and then, if so [you act]. To get the information takes a few seconds. We have a pipeline of things like that, if the financing stays strong – and we can talk about why it might not, because rich-world budgets are very tight.”

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was created in 2000. It has an endowment of $75.2bn, which is $22bn more than Harvard University’s, and is the world’s third largest charitable organisation. Professor Michael Barrett, a leading British infection biologist whose research into the eradication of sleeping sickness benefited from several Gates grants in the early years, spoke to me of how the original launch of the Foundation “catalysed a whole new approach and idea of philanthropy”, and led the fight against malaria, TB, polio and Aids as well as neglected tropical diseases: “It was not just the cash he injected but other impacts, such as bringing the CEOs of big pharmaceutical companies around the table to commit their resources to help the fight.”

Yet as the Foundation prepares for its 25th anniversary in 2025, Gates and his team believe the world is at a “crossroads” – or has reached “a tipping or inflection point”. They couldn’t quite decide on the best metaphor to encapsulate their anxieties. But key public health indicators and development goals are going into reverse.

The data his team shares with me shows the global debt crisis, for instance, means that 25 of the world’s poorest countries are now spending more on debt than on education, health and social protection combined. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) – with a deadline of 2030 – are slipping further out of reach. International development spending isn’t keeping pace with where it’s needed most. And the Covid-19 pandemic showed how a health crisis somewhere can become a health crisis everywhere.

“The big wildcard is the global political thing,” Gates told me. “Wars are the way to go backwards most efficiently. Can we avoid both local and big wars? US-China is a big concern. Both sides seem to be getting better at irritating each other. But I remain optimistic.”

He said the “footnotes” to his optimism were bioterrorism, nuclear weapons and the disruptive potential of AI, for good and ill. “When [Steven] Pinker says things have gone well, he doesn’t say they’ll necessarily stay that way. We had World War I, World War II, we did use nuclear weapons, amazingly only twice and not since then, but there’s no guarantees. People of my age, in the 1970s, we were thinking, ‘Oh, my God, nuclear weapons!’ I feel like this generation doesn’t worry enough about it, and yet I admit you’ve got to worry about how we adapt to AI and bioterrorism and geopolitics at the same time – and climate change, although there I think the innovation will mean we avoid having a major disaster.”

The measurable gains in global health outcomes – especially in the Global South, made between 2000 and 2020 when the Global Fund for Aids, TB and Malaria saved 59 million lives, child mortality and rates of infectious diseases were halved and Gavi immunised more than 1.1 billion children and helped low-income families prevent more than 18.8 million future deaths – are stalling or reversing.

“The pandemic was a huge setback,” Gates said. “Rich countries became more indebted, the health service stuff. Our vaccine coverage levels in many countries are still not back to the pre-pandemic level.”

Later, after the third time the lights came back on in the room, he returned to why it is imperative for rich countries to do more to support poorer states, especially in Africa. The population of Africa and the Middle East is predicted to increase from 1.7 billion to 4.4 billion by the end of the century, when 40 per cent of the world’s population will be African.

“We have moral clarity that we are all humans,” Gates said, “and we owe it to the developing countries, particularly the low-income countries, to help them out. Whenever something bad happens – Ukraine, Middle East, political polarisation, US-China – this focus on Africa goes down. We now have 25 per cent of the aid, down from 40 per cent, going there, and we do look nostalgically back on 2008, when at the G8 meeting all the leaders came and signed and said: ‘OK, we are going to maintain this moral commitment.’ The UK deserves a lot of credit, but not just the UK. I’d say at the top of my list are the people I learn from like Bob Geldof, Bono. Today you have Jamie Drummond talking about, ‘OK, how do we recreate that visibility, that moral clarity’ [of 2008]. The financial crisis became something that distracted people. Now, the UK stayed true, and every year less children die, but you could say that was our peak. We went down somewhat from there.”

In a 2015 TED Talk, Bill Gates warned of the threat to the world of a pandemic caused by an airborne SARS-like virus. “Unfortunately, 90 per cent of the viewing of my TED Talk was after the pandemic hit, not before it hit,” he said ruefully. But his prescience had been noted.

“In that case, yes, but some people said that I must have made it happen to be able to say I predicted it!”

Gates is reviled by vaccine-sceptics even though, because of the success of vaccination programmes, polio is down to just a few reported cases in the world (Nigeria, South Sudan, Afghanistan) and Guinea worm has fallen from more than 3 million cases in the 1980s to just a few dozen cases today. These are diseases that could be completely eradicated, as smallpox was before them.

Online conspiracy theorists believe Gates is part of a corrupt global cabal that controls the world. That he was an associate of Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted sex offender who died in prison, only inflames the conspiracists.

I asked Gates how he felt to be the subject of so many ugly online rumours – what does it to do to his morale to be entangled in vast webs of conspiracy?

“The pandemic certainly heightened this distrust of health authorities, and that’s very unfortunate, because it causes a lot of people not to seek out the [Covid] vaccine,” he replied. “In fact, if you were over 60 or had certain health conditions, the vaccine was very dramatic and so literally millions died because they didn’t seek out the vaccine. We have a little bit less of a problem with vaccine integrity in developing countries, because the diseases we’re protecting against are prevalent enough that you see deaths, and a measles death is a very ugly death.”

I pushed him on the conspiracy theories and the abuse he endures. He is aware of it but is also protected by the power of his worldwide team; the Gates Foundation is like a quasi-state with its executive decision-making authority, its huge R&D budget and, in effect, its own foreign policy.

“If you’re asking for me personally,” he said, “the world has treated me well enough that overall, I don’t go around and say, ‘You bastards, how could you say these things about me?’ I mean, I have to take it with a sense of humour. You worry that some crazy person might attack me, or, even worse, [attack] members of my family or something, but fortunately, I’ve had people yell at me, and vague threats, but nothing where anything’s happened.”

He paused to reflect more on social media, its advantages but also its toxic effects and the wider degradation of public discourse. “I thought digital tools that made information available were an unadulterated good. [But] the exact tactics of how you have free speech and yet also certain pernicious things [being widely shared] about health or conspiracy theories about politicians and so on, how we balance that… I hope somebody else is very innovative, because in the political realm it’s making democracies a little less stable.”

He has spoken to his daughter, Phoebe, about how one might best regulate social media while preserving free speech. “She understands way better than I do. She says, ‘Dad, don’t send me an email!’ She wants me to send her more texts. My three children, one is on no social networks at all, one is a little bit, but Phoebe, the youngest, is quite active and expects me to see every post she makes.”

(In recent days, I tried to contact Gates again through his London office. I wanted to know what he thought of Trump’s crushing victory and the proposed appointment of a notorious vaccine-sceptic, Robert F Kennedy Jr, as the next US health secretary. The return message was that he did not want “to provide any further reflections”.)

A cliché of corporate away days and management theory is to ask: what keeps world leaders and  FTSE 100 CEOs awake at night? Gates is used to being asked this question, so I reframed it. Is he introspective, I wondered – he is 69 and a grandfather: what has he learned about himself?

“Well, I hope I’m introspective. I mean, self-improvement is pretty important. As [the late Richard] Feynman says, the easiest person to fool is yourself.”

Back when he was in his twenties, after he had dropped out of Harvard, Gates “picked one thing, which was being the leader in software and being monomaniacal. I didn’t believe in vacations, didn’t even let myself read all these scientific things that, once I got into my thirties, I let myself go back to being polymathic. Now most of the work I do is by picking teams and reviewing teams. I’m not writing code, I’ve never gone into the lab and made a vaccine. I still write quite a bit and of course I like to read a lot and enjoy learning all the health stuff.”

Unlike his former wife, Melinda, who is a committed Catholic, Gates is not religious. He does not share Silicon Valley’s obsession with human longevity, with the 100-year life, with cryogenics, and so on. He keeps fit by playing tennis and, in a recent Netflix docuseries, was filmed doing push-ups at his desk at home in Seattle. “The AI told me to do that,” he said. “I’m hoping my cognitive contribution goes on 20-plus years, because then I’ll have a chance to see malaria eradication and huge, huge progress.”

He does not believe in the great-man theory of history nor that today’s tech titans are world-historic figures whose actions define the spirit of the age, contemporary Napoleons no less. “I’m a kind of innovation person, that until electricity got invented, I don’t care how many great men were born: what did they do? Then we invented electricity, and so the Industrial Revolution – when did lifespans go from average 30 up to over 70? That’s really energy intensification and then the academic tradition, scientific traditions, understanding health. The last 200 years of all man’s existence has been incredible. So there were incredible people born [before], but so what?”

The new Trump administration is determined to embrace Silicon Valley disruption and innovation – to build, as Dominic Cummings put it in a recent talk in Oxford, “like Silicon Valley does – ie super-fast and optimised for speed and engineering”. Peter Kyle, Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, has described what he calls the world’s changing balance of power. “If you look at the big five tech companies [Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft], each spends more on R&D than Britain does,” he told the Times. “So we are dealing with companies that can innovate on a scale that the state can’t and none of them is accountable to general populations – they’re accountable to their customers and shareholders.”

Observing the billionaires and oligarchs gathering around Trump – Musk has been appointed to lead the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) – it can feel as if we are returning to a kind of baronial system, where super-wealthy individuals aspire to have the power to fulfil the traditional functions of the state. Perhaps this is already happening. Gates’ philanthropy is international development; Musk has provided Starlink for free to those affected by recent hurricanes in the United States; Google is buying its own small nuclear power stations. In this new era, the tech titans do not fear monopoly but seek it. Gates was a determined monopolist, and Microsoft became embroiled in a landmark American antitrust case.

He has spoken about how robotic AIs can act as tutors, carers and mental health professionals. But who should own those robots? A private company or the state? Again, is he comfortable with people’s basic needs being dependent on private companies? After all, as Peter Thiel, another tech titan, says, “Competition is for losers.”

“Ah, he’s kind of a cynic who says a lot of strange things,” Gates said of Thiel. “It is true that if your only goal in life is profitability, you’d prefer not to have much competition, but the AI space is very, very competitive.”

Gates favours “estate taxes” (“I’m stunned that more countries don’t have estate taxes, China for instance”) as well as higher income taxes: “I would tax more progressively and then whatever you have left after you pay your taxes, hopefully you take your energy, prominence and resources and give back to society… With these tech titans – under my rules – we’d still have a lot of money. Bernie Sanders would outlaw billionaires: that’s not the right answer. But I’m a big believer that if you have a large fortune, you should be quite philanthropic: you should not spoil your kids too much and each person has to figure out what that is, and then beyond that you have an obligation to give back.”

Gates and Warren Buffett established the Giving Pledge and among those he encouraged to sign it was Sam Bankman-Fried, the now disgraced and imprisoned cryptocurrency geek and former self-styled effective altruist (EA). Gates is not an EA but, like them, he and the Foundation operate by an ultra-utilitarian calculus: “In the world I work in, we set numeric goals.”

Before we parted, I asked Gates what had surprised him most about human nature, and he said: “I’m very positive about human nature. The human condition is better today than at any time in history, and people don’t step back and see that!”

But he paused, as if a dark shadow had fallen across the room. The optimist’s dilemma was framed like this by Colin S Gray, author of The Geopolitics of the Nuclear Era: “Optimism and pessimism can be perilous attitudes that undergird policy. But of the two, optimism is apt to kill with greater certainty.” “I am an optimist,” Gates repeated. “But I’m worried about polarisation, I always worry about bioterrorism, I worry about nuclear weapons, I worry about climate change, and now I would add AI; although it’s the most positive innovation, it happens so quickly that it will be quite disruptive.”

That’s a lot to be worried about, then.

Bill Gates knows that the world of the so-called global health boom he is nostalgic for, of the early 2000s when global political and economic integration was accelerating, has fragmented. Today we live in a world of competing civilisations. Conspiracists and anti-vaxxers will be prominent in the second Trump administration. JD Vance, the vice-president-elect, has described non-profit organisations, including the Gates Foundation, because they are tax-sheltered and seek to perpetuate power and wealth, as “cancers on American society”, champions of “well-endowed leftism”.

Anupreeta Das, author of Billionaire, Nerd, Savior, King: Bill Gates and His Quest to Shape Our World, wrote that the launch of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation “completely refurbished the image of Gates, the jagged edges of the monopolist softened by the halo of the philanthropist”. But one wonders now if Gates feels his influence waning as the new national populism hardens against him and his philanthropic and liberal globalist ethos. He complains about the collapse in state capacity in the West but doesn’t draw a connection with the rise of the billionaire class and the hollowing out of the state and a sense of mass disaffection.

Gates pushed back against the notion the Foundation occupies a space beyond democratic accountability. He welcomes criticism – so long as he considers it to be constructive, not ad hominem. “Take malaria,” he said. “We are such a big funder in malaria that if we mess up our malaria strategy, will somebody tell us that they have a different idea? I wish there were more people doing serious criticism, like saying: ‘Oh, you say you’re about saving lives: why aren’t you investing in this? Why did you miss that?’ If you just say, ‘Nobody should have that much money!’ OK, fine, maybe, but as long as I have it, isn’t this the best way for it to go back to society?”

This is the cover story of the 29 November – 5 December 2024 issue of the New Statesman magazine

[See also: Like Thatcherism, Donald Trump is here to stay]

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In the final days of the campaign, certainly following the publication of a rogue poll in Iowa 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.

This was wishful thinking. In mitigation, as my colleague Megan Gibson wrote in these pages two weeks ago, Harris was 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 establishment was 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 $1bn, had more than enough time to reveal her limitations; as vice-president she was the “incumbent”. She had four years to demonstrate her capabilities but, for much of that 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.  

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. It was complacently assumed that her victory would be transient, and the consensus politics of the postwar 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 the 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 the American people? Why has the Republican Party allowed itself to be captured? 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.

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 Deneen 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.”

“No one,” Philip Roth said shortly before he died, “could have imagined that the 21st-century catastrophe to befall the USA… would appear not, say, in the terrifying guise of an Orwellian Big Brother but in the ominously ridiculous commedia dell’arte 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.

The answer was the soprano Emma Walshe, who was not on stage but, as we discovered, in the walkway directly below me, together with the three other “absent” singers. This second choir could not be seen by most of the audience but could be heard, and the purity of their voices and resulting stereophonic effects were as sublime as they were moving.

Saffron Hall, which I have written about before in these pages, is both a 740-seat musical venue and the main hall of Saffron Walden County High School, in the old, well-preserved Quaker town in north-west Essex. The acoustics are exceptional, and the programme of classical and jazz concerts attracts some of the world’s finest musicians and orchestras.

Founded in 1973 by Peter Phillips, who was conducting, the Tallis Scholars are committed to interpreting the sacred vocal music of the Renaissance. But they roam across centuries (John Tavener wrote for them) and featured in the concert were new pieces by Charlotte Robertson and Ryan Collis, winners of the 2024 National Centre for Early Music Young Composers Award. And the good news for readers is that “Mysteries and Miracles” was recorded by BBC Radio 3 for a future broadcast at 5pm on Sunday 17 November 2024. Don’t miss it.  

[See also: Rachel Reeves escapes her own straitjacket]

England is not locked in civil war and nor is it as riven and culturally divided as France, Sweden, Germany or the Netherlands, European countries where nationalist populist movements are rising fast. But the riots, occurring in some of the most deprived areas of the country, towns where people believe they are without political representation, have revealed intractable class, social and geographic divisions.

Periodic outbreaks of mob violence are part of the long history of these islands – consider the gin riots, or the anti-Catholic Gordon riots of 1780, or the Mosley riots of the 1930s, or the riots of 1981 in Brixton, Birmingham, Bristol, Manchester and Liverpool that I observed from afar with rapt fascination while at school during the early Thatcher years. Something about the mood in the country feels new and different this time, however, as far-right thugs organising via instant messaging apps clash with the self-styled Muslim Defence League in the racially segregated former mill towns of the post-industrial north-west and in the Midlands. We are experiencing the sectarianisation of mainland Britain, prefigured in Northern Ireland, where there have also been anti-migrant protests in August.

Starmer was compelled to use the full force of the Hobbesian state to quash anarchy and reimpose public order. He acted swiftly and decisively to contain agitators and neo-fascists who had been inflamed by misinformation circulating freely on Telegram, X/Twitter, Facebook, TikTok and Signal. In the days following the horrific murder of three girls and the wounding of many others in a knife attack by a 17-year-old assassin on a children’s dance class in a quiet residential street in Southport on 29 July, we witnessed frightening outbreaks of public disorder across the country, from the south-west to the north-east.

Within hours of the girls’ murder being reported, the hashtag “#EnoughIsEnough” was trending. The killer had been falsely identified by agents of chaos on social media as a Muslim asylum seeker who had arrived illegally on a small boat; for some far-right agitators a tipping point had been reached. It was time to take to the streets. Videos and other posts by Tommy Robinson, the former frontman of the now-defunct far-right English Defence League, and whose X/Twitter account was reactivated last year on Musk’s authority, were viewed on average 54.3 million times a day from 30 July to 9 August, according to the Centre for Countering Digital Hate. Social media, Starmer said, was “not a law-free zone”. He has pledged to challenge the unregulated power of the tech platforms in the weeks ahead. Good luck with that, one might say.

As many as 1,000 people have been arrested so far and almost 550 charged as the rioters, racist thugs and online provocateurs are jailed in an overwhelming and necessary demonstration of state power. There can be no liberty without security and order imposed through what Hobbes called the “common power” of the sovereign or state: Leviathan. As a former director of public prosecutions, Starmer knows how to use the law to punish offenders and enforce order. “You will regret your actions,” he told them. “We warned of the consequences and we will deliver those consequences,” said Stephen Parkinson, the current director of public prosecutions. “It’s not about exacting revenge, it’s about delivering justice.”

[See also: How to fix a nation]

The Prime Minister acted in the belief that more riots were to follow on the evening of Wednesday 7 August. In the event, they never happened and were superseded instead by widespread anti-racist counter-protests. The moment of maximum danger had passed but the hatred and division in deep England had been revealed for all to see. Turn away in fear and loathing if you wish, but worse will follow if people’s smouldering resentment about mass migration and porous borders – as well as run-down high streets, broken community services, sub-standard housing and long-standing economic neglect – are not systematically addressed.

It is clear, too, that the British model of policing by consent, which presupposed shared cultural norms, is breaking down. We have on one side complaints from Nigel Farage and the right about arbitrary or selective law enforcement, so-called two-tier policing, and from the other side a complete lack of trust in the police, especially among some minority ethnic communities.

Starmer’s response to the riots was unequivocal. He is not a fluent and nimble communicator. But he is determinedly serious and, under extreme pressure at the peak of the riots, he showed he was a calm and decisive administrator. His Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, by contrast, allowed herself to be interviewed about the riots on ITV’s Good Morning Britain by her husband, Ed Balls, a former Labour MP and occasional presenter of the programme. This was a moment as farcical as when Roland Rudd, a PR tycoon and prominent anti-Brexit campaigner, argued for a second referendum on BBC’s Today programme while attending the annual Davos jamboree.

David Lammy, the new Foreign Secretary, spoke to me recently of the need to accept “the world as it is”, not as the left or liberals wish it to be. The same applies to this country. A new cold-eyed realism is required about the condition of England. We are told repeatedly by those who seldom leave the smarter parts of the capital that Britain is the best place in Europe to be an immigrant: the most integrated, the most welcoming of migrants, a country where a British Hindu Indian can become prime minister without scarcely a murmur of public dissent, and Bukayo Saka, a London-born Arsenal player of Nigerian heritage, is one of our most adored England footballers. Britishness is a civic identity, non-racial, inclusive and plural, and all the better for it. Being modern and English (or Welsh and Scottish) and British has nothing to do with ethnicity, skin colour, religion or blood-and-soil nationalism. The best part of what it means to be modern and British, therefore, is to be comfortable with having multiple or hyphenated identities. So far so good.

But a plural society needs more than plural politics and plural identities and to celebrate diversity and inclusion. It needs more than a gift for assimilating immigrants; it needs a sense of shared purpose and common endeavour, a commitment to the common good. That is absent.

A nation is more than an imagined community: it has a history that cannot be wished away. It has a material reality, cultural inheritance, established customs and forms of life, collective memories, institutional wisdom, an enduring connection between the living, the dead and those yet to be born. The Prime Minister, his chief strategist Morgan McSweeney and his speechwriter Alan Lockey understand this, which is why in his victory speech outside 10 Downing Street on 5 July Starmer spoke of wanting to lead the country on “a rediscovery of who we are”. The implication being that we as a people and as a nation do not know who we are. They accept privately, however, that they will need more than technocratic competence and an arid, managerial cult of “delivery” to create the sense of national cohesion they seek. For now, the Prime Minister remains a storyteller in search of a convincing story.

I wrote at the time of Starmer’s victory speech that he sounded less like an exultant winner than an exhausted survivor speaking at the end of a Shakespearean tragedy, harrowed by what had gone before, the chaos that had been, and warning of the need for patience and reconciliation. His tone was sombre, deliberately unheroic. It was as if he had a sense not just of what had been but of what was to come, the struggles ahead. But so soon?

Is populism Labour’s enemy, as Starmer and his closest advisers say – or merely a convenient, catch-all term to describe mutinous forces that the governing elites do not fully understand and cannot control? As John Gray writes in The New Leviathans, populism “has no clear meaning” but is “used by liberals to refer to political blowback against the social disruption produced by their own policies”.

Successive governments in Britain have attempted to depoliticise the issue of mass migration but have succeeded in only galvanising anti-immigrant sentiment because of their dishonesty (in 2010 David Cameron said he would reduce annual net migration to less than 100,000, which he knew would be impossible because of the EU’s freedom of movement), their false promises about taking back control after Brexit, and because austerity economics hollowed out the state and impoverished the public realm. The result: people lost confidence in democracy. Trust in British politics and elected politicians is at an all-time low, according to a National Centre for Social Research report published in June. Labour won a Commons majority of 174 on less than 34 per cent of the vote; Reform UK, Nigel Farage’s non-party party, won more than four million votes but only five seats. Forty per cent of those eligible to vote in the election chose not to. That is quite some democratic deficit under the first-past-the-post system.

Keir Starmer cannot be blamed for any of this but at least he understands what is at stake. Speaking at the New Statesman’s summer reception on 22 July, he warned: “You only have to look across the Channel at Europe and you see nationalism and populism in all its form and all its strengths. And do not think for a minute that that could never happen here. It could – and it might – if we fail in our project of delivering change.”

That was not quite right as it turned out: the forces of “nationalism and populism” were already at large in the country. “Something is going on,” Farage said to me when I interviewed and travelled with him in Essex during the election campaign. He blamed “societal decline” for what he considered to be the sense of mass disaffection in the country while claiming to have done more “than anyone else to defeat the far right”. Farage knows how to go as far as he needs to in his positioning and rhetoric but no further. But the far right is not defeated, as we saw during the riots. Its networks and belligerents are active on social media, and mobilising.

Christophe Guilluy, the French author and social geographer, spoke to the New Statesman in 2019 about how France “has been smashed into tiny, atomised pieces – there is no class solidarity only ‘issues’ and ‘identity politics’… The problem is, though, that even if there is no such thing as society as an abstract entity, there are still people – you can call them the working class, immigrants, the poor or whatever – and they are real and their suffering is real… You can’t just wish away a whole group of people and their way of life, a whole class.”

Through the power of the state, order has been restored after the riots but as the new Labour government embarks on the long process of social repair it feels as if the time is out of joint. David Lammy, author of Tribes, a memoir about transcending social and cultural division, says far-right rioters have “forgotten about what it means to be English” and should reintegrate “back into Britishness”. But what does it mean to be English, or even to integrate back into Britishness, when the Prime Minister himself says he wants to lead the country on a rediscovery of who we are? Does anyone know who we are now – or even care? Perhaps we are comfortable with the state of the nation – until riots break out, revealing an urban nightmare of division and hatred, a high-summer descent into what Saul Bellow called the moronic inferno. Britain has lost respect for the police, Yvette Cooper said on 12 August. “I am not prepared to tolerate the brazen abuse and contempt which a minority have felt able to show towards our men and women in uniform, or the disrespect for law and order that has been allowed to grow in recent years.”

This, then, is a moment of what Martin Amis called moral tightening. The Hobbesian question of order will be addressed. The police will be respected. The thugs and agitators will be charged. Labour’s post-liberal communitarianism will become more authoritarian. But then what?

If Keir Starmer is serious about national renewal (and he is), he will have to hit the far right hard but also find ways to include those who feel excluded and abandoned by Westminster in a new national story. These are not the far right but the people of peripheral England for whom democratic politics is not working, who don’t vote for Labour or any other party: the neglected, the ignored, the impoverished, the reviled, the mutinous. What do you do about these people and their anger, suffering and despair? As Guilluy says, you can’t simply wish away a whole class.

Jason Cowley’s book “Who Are We Now?” was published in 2022 by Picador

[See also: Keir Starmer has a chance to dominate the common ground]

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He spent nearly 30 years at the Independent as defence and diplomatic correspondent and editor. He was revered in our trade for his curiosity, bravery and determination to report from the world’s war zones. The last time I saw him he was preparing to head to the far north of Israel, to the Lebanon border – towards conflict and danger.  

This report by Charlotte Tobitt has just been published in our sister publication, UK Press Gazette: 

The Independent’s veteran war correspondent Kim Sengupta has died suddenly aged 68 in a “devastating loss” for the news title.

Sengupta had worked at the Independent since 1996 as defence and diplomatic correspondent and editor, covering every major conflict of the past 30 years. The newsbrand announced his death on Tuesday.

The Independent’s editor-in-chief, Geordie Greig, said: “The sudden death of Kim Sengupta is a devastating loss for the Independent as well as for the wider world of journalism. Kim was a reporter’s reporter. He lived for the story and courageously covered countless conflicts from Iraq to Ukraine.

“I first knew him more 40 years ago when he was a general reporter in Fleet Street, and from those early days hugely admired his tenacious and tireless ambition to quest and pursue. He lived and worked ferociously hard, more often than not on the frontline, with a Hemingway swagger as he travelled the globe for the Independent.

“Modestly, he downplayed the dangers of war even as he told of the trials and tribulations of reporting with zest, humour and humanity.”

During his career, in which he also worked as a reporter for the Daily Mail and the now-defunct Today newspaper before he joined the Independent, Sengupta covered conflicts including in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, the Balkans, Ukraine, Georgia, Kosovo, Mali, Sudan, Somalia, Kashmir, Israel, Gaza and Northern Ireland.

In 2012 Sengupta wrote for Press Gazette about the difficulties of reporting from Syria with frequent power outages and even satellite transmission being blocked – resulting in a temperamental 3G dongle being his only option. “For the first time ever, bear in mind I’ve worked everywhere from Helmand to Haiti, you simply couldn’t make it work.”

He added: “On safety, there’s not an awful lot you can do, because a lot of the attacks are not targeted but random. It’s not as bad as Baghdad from 2004 to 2008, where you faced suicide bombings.

“The obvious thing to do was not hang to around with large numbers of rebel fighters for too long, not to stay in particular areas for too long and although the shelling and air strikes were random, there were certain times when they were less frequent than others and it was a case of using the time to maximise how much you can cover.”

Speaking on a Reporters Without Borders panel last year, Sengupta said reporting from Ukraine was “dangerous” for journalists but not as much as in Iraq in “the really bad days”.

“But the difference is it’s the first war that many of us have covered [in which] two relatively modern states” were fighting, he said.

Sengupta’s awards and credits include being named Journalist of the Year at the Asian Media Awards in 2016.

Afterwards he said of the industry: “It’s tough. Print journalism in particular is going through tremendous problems at the moment with falling circulation, falling advertising.

“But when I speak to students at universities and schools, there are extraordinary numbers that want to be journalists.

“I ask them in the current climate: ‘Why do they want to be journalists when they could be making more money in the city or doing law?’

“But they still have got this desire to explain what journalism is, to try and understand issues. It’s going to be tough but they will enjoy it.”

Among his other award recognitions, Sengupta was a finalist for Foreign Affairs Journalist of the Year at the British Journalism Awards 2013 and his reporting from Iran was referenced in the shortlisting of The Independent for News Provider of the Year at the same awards in 2020. He was also shortlisted for the London Press Club’s Print Journalist of the Year award in 2020/21 and racked up three nominations for the Orwell Prize for Journalism.

Sengupta also gave back, including by acting as part of the judging panel for Private Eye’s Paul Foot Award for Investigative and Campaigning Journalism as recently as this year.

His final bylines were less than a week before his death, with a comment piece headlined: “Has Netanyahu finally lost support in America?” published on Thursday.

Chris Blackhurst, former editor at the Independent, said: “In many years of working with Kim Sengupta I never came across anyone so fearless.

“As editor, you get to appreciate which journalists are ‘high maintenance’, constantly and painfully seeking approval and reassurance. Kim, despite the places he went, was most definitely not one of those. If he said he was going somewhere, he went there.

“He had an extraordinary knack for talking to anyone, be they ambassadors or generals or privates or those of an unspecified background – security services most probably – and extracting information from them. Kim really was one of a kind.”

“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”.

***

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.

[See also: Can Labour end our national addiction to prison?]

Norrie is something of an outsider. The son of a Scottish father and Welsh mother, he was born in Johannesburg and spent much of his childhood in New Zealand before he moved to England aged 16. He was a tennis scholar at Texas Christian University and a champion player on the US college circuit. After a few years in London, he now lives in Monaco. One wonders why!

He seems a reticent fellow and is largely unknown here, perhaps because he is not a charismatic player. He has a one-dimensional game: an extraordinarily flat “bunt” backhand and repetitive, looping top-spin forehand and not much else. Like Draper, he has a lefty serve but no one would call it formidable. He compensates for his lack of power through stamina and extreme fitness. “I like to keep the rallies long,” he says.

Norrie has been slipping down the rankings* but against Draper, who seemed distracted and irritable, he played as well as he could, winning in straight sets. He lost in the next round, however, to the lanky German Sascha Zverev, watched by Pep Guardiola, among others, from the Royal Box on Centre Court. “Bayern Munich need a coach, man,” Zverev called out in his post-match interview. Fact check: they have hired Vincent Kompany, formerly of Burnley, who were relegated from the Prem last season. Perhaps that’s why Zverev feels Bayern still need a new coach even though they have a new coach.

My interest in tennis has been revitalised by our son, who is 15. He plays the game and closely follows the men’s and women’s tours. Most days he greets me not with “good morning” but, “Draper lost again, 7-5, 6-4 in a 250 in Bulgaria”; or, “Raducanu has injured her wrist”; or, “Tommy Paul is now the top-ranked American”. He then peers intently at the BBC Sport website, or at the live rankings page, or at that day’s schedule for a tournament somewhere in the world.

We even keep watch on the second-level Challenger Tour, the self-described “stepping stone to the ATP Tour”. But for many players the Challenger is less a stepping stone than a stepping down: hey buddy, this is who you are, where you belong! Imagine how good you must be to be playing on the Challenger, and yet one suspects this is not the level you wanted to be at when you started out as a brilliant junior. 

In 1996, for Esquire magazine, David Foster Wallace, who was a gifted teenage tennis player, spent several months on the road with the American “journeyman” Michael Joyce. Wallace was haunted by the fine margins that separate the very good from the great. Joyce never made it into the world’s top 50, and yet he was for a time a top-100 player. “Try to imagine,” Wallace wrote, “what it would be like to be among the hundred best in the world at something. At anything. I have tried to imagine; it’s hard.”

Yet life on tour was also hard for Joyce: the constant travelling, the near-continuous losses, the struggle to make decent money. It was not a glamorous life.

When I was a child my mother’s newspaper of choice was the Daily Mail. I loved the sports pages most of all and particularly the pieces by the tennis correspondent, Laurie Pignon. (Thank you to Leo McKinstry for reminding me of his name.) He seemed to have the best job in the world. One week he would be in Palm Springs, then Madrid, then Rome, then at Roland-Garros in Paris and then at Wimbledon. Later in the summer he would be at Flushing Meadows for the US Open. And then he’d spend January in Melbourne. There was no internet back then, no demand for “hot takes”, or blogs, or spoken analysis self-recorded on a mobile and uploaded to Twitter/X. He travelled (presumably business class), wrote his daily piece, dined well in his hotel, and moved on to the next tournament, the next city. Or that was how I imagined his life to be. As I said, the best job in the world.

* Draper is at 27 in the live ATP rankings, Norrie at 42

[See also: The last days of Andy Murray]

***

As well as the Conservatives, the SNP must show more humility. The party was routed in Scotland, losing 39 seats; 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 2000-04, 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. 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 is 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 MP, Julie 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, Green and Reform. We discussed the environment, housing, transport, the polluted Stort and Lea rivers, the common good, 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 more than 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 and 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 Birmingham Yardley, in her diary on page 13 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 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.

[See also: Why foreign affairs will define the Starmer era]

I arrived in Taipei City ahead of the inauguration of Lai Ching-te – or William Lai – as the eighth president of Taiwan, another smooth transition of power in the self-governing democracy that is uniquely threatened by Xi Jinping’s superpower of 1.4 billion people. Only 11 minor states (plus the Holy See) have formal diplomatic relations with Taiwan and their heads of states and other dignitaries 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) 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’s prevailed ever since Chiang Kai-shek (“the Generalissimo”) and the Chinese Nationalist Party (the Kuomintang, or KMT) lost the civil war on the mainland in 1949. When they relocated to Taiwan, the KMT took 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 (ROC) from 1928 to 1949, and the KMT dreamed of reclaiming the mainland and uniting the country 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, the celebrated choreographer and founder of the renowned Cloud Gate dance company, told me over lunch one day. “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 two days after Lai’s inauguration, for the first time, 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 US fight for Taiwan if the People’s Liberation Army invaded? Can the status quo hold in the region? And is Xi, 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), make 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 ten 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 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 resulting 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.”

During my trip I reread 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 had seen 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 warships continue their menacing daily manoeuvres in the Taiwan Strait.  

[See also: The Lammy Doctrine]

It begins in the drab constituency office of a back-bench MP named Monica (Anna Maxwell Martin). We are never told her party, but she is presumably Labour and delivers an amusing barb at the expense of the Liberal Democrats, the perennial fall-guys. She is talking to one of her children on the phone. Maxwell Martin, whom I never tire of watching, is briefly in Motherland mode, showcasing her repertoire of facial tics and grimaces. Visiting the office is a security specialist, Alec (James Corden), dressed in shorts, white socks and a fleece. He is fitting cameras and a panic alarm under her desk – a bleak reminder that two MPs have been murdered since 2016. They start talking. It turns out they used to go to the same school. There is a lightness and playfulness to their early exchanges. Corden is in good, jaunty, Essex-man form, and one settles in for an evening of comedy – until the mood shifts ominously.

Corden is a brilliant comic actor, but Alec is a challenging role: a disturbed veteran of the Afghanistan misadventure, estranged from his wife and mired in a dispute in the family courts. He is on anti-psychotics and out of luck. “No one is having a conversation about men,” he complains. Monica is sympathetic but, in return visits, Alec becomes needy and demanding, even menacing. There is a third character, Mellor (Zachary Hart), a cynical police officer who later seeks to profit from Monica’s misfortune.

It’s thrilling to watch actors as good as this, and so familiar from television, on stage. But what begins as a comedy of manners and misunderstanding becomes something much darker: a drama about a broken man who has lost all faith in democracy and justice. At least it ends on a note of reconciliation.

The Constituent
The Old Vic, London, SE1, until 10 August

[See more: A new A View from the Bridge captures the play’s humour and darkness]

Questions of empire, identity, race and belonging preoccupy David Lammy. He is a son of the Caribbean diaspora and grew up in Tottenham, north London, in the constituency he has represented as a Labour MP since 2000 and describes as having “the most diverse postcode in Europe, a community of over 200 languages”. He was never part of the London left, or radical Labour, unlike Bernie Grant (his predecessor as MP for Tottenham), Diane Abbott (whom he likes and admires), or Jeremy Corbyn, and believes his role in politics is always to seek “common ground”.

“Sometimes people have said, ‘David’s a bit of a chameleon,’ or whatever,” he said to me over coffee one recent morning at a Turkish-Kurdish café in Tottenham. We were sitting a short walk away from his former primary school, which he left at the age of ten after being awarded an Inner London Education Authority choral scholarship to attend the King’s School, Peterborough, then a state boarding school. “But it’s not that,” he continued. “I’m interested in the common ground and that is the story of my life. David Cameron asked me to do a review on the criminal justice system; I’m able to converse with the left in my party. I’m a product of the inner city and of Middle England, of Tottenham and Peterborough, of Britain and the Caribbean.”

Early in his parliamentary career Lammy, who is 51, was a Blairite moderniser. Today he says he is a communitarian and on foreign policy identities as a “progressive realist”. Yet on a recent visit to Washington, his seventh trip to the United States as shadow foreign secretary – at an early-morning event at the Hudson Institute at which he spoke alongside Jim Risch, a hard-line Republican senator and Beltway fixer – he told his audience he was a “good Christian boy” and “conservative”. Here, then, are the many faces of David Lammy, Britain’s chief-diplomat-in-waiting.

Lammy’s approach as shadow foreign secretary has been to reach out across difference and develop bipartisan relationships in the national interest. He has impressed Elbridge Colby, for one, the Republican foreign policy “realist” tipped as a possible national security adviser in a second Trump administration. “What I like about Lammy,” Colby says in a forthcoming New Statesman interview, “is that he’s… getting in touch with more of a European-focused strategic weight.”

Colby recently criticised Cameron for attempting to influence US domestic policy over the Ukraine war, as he is sceptical of the notion of “Global Britain”: “If you look at the realistic situation in the UK and the state of the armed forces and spending prognosis and reindustrialisation, and you look at the UK’s ability to project power, that is just not realistic.”

To his disparagers, however, Lammy is a shapeshifter and opportunist who will say whatever he needs to advance. Dominic Lawson, a former editor of the Spectator, recently wrote a Sunday Times column on this theme.

“I’m really relaxed about that criticism,” Lammy said. “If you want a politician who hasn’t changed his mind, then you go and interview Jeremy Corbyn, George Galloway, Jacob Rees-Mogg or Nigel Farage. Serious people change their minds, and they particularly change their minds when the facts change… In an increasingly diverse, sometimes polarised atmosphere, you’ve got to find the common ground. Diplomacy is about finding the common ground.”

But realism? I asked him when he first started to describe himself as a realist. He responded by laughing loudly and slapping me on the back. “Jason, you’re talking to a black man who grew up poor in Tottenham, who’s sitting here on the cusp of being foreign secretary and you ask me if I’m a realist? I’m the biggest realist you’re going to meet, buddy!”

The return of Trump

In May I travelled to Washington to spend several days with Lammy. There, he spoke to me about the desolation he felt during the long Labour civil war, from 2015 to 2019. He recalled standing outside parliament protesting at what had happened to Labour under the Corbyn leadership: the sectarianism, the intractable divisions. “It was one of the lowest periods of my political life,” he said. In the aftermath of the EU referendum, and on the back benches, Lammy chose to become a committed belligerent in the protracted Brexit culture wars, an anti-Trump Twitter warrior and ardent Remainer. He agitated for a second referendum. He denounced his enemies. He was less seeking common ground than taking sides, and he became a divisive national figure.

In his book Tribes, a condition-of-England memoir published in 2020, he wrote with foreboding of the rise of Donald Trump and of hard-right nationalist populism. Now, through necessity, he is more circumspect.

In Washington, Lammy was preparing the ground for what might happen in the autumn presidential election and had private meetings with notable Republican senators, including his “friend” JD Vance, author of the memoir Hillbilly Elegy, and Lindsey Graham, as well as a meeting with Mike Turner, of the House intelligence committee. He visited the opinion department at the conservative Wall Street Journal, where he was received warmly, and recently, in London, he met Mike Pompeo, the former secretary of state under Trump.

On our first evening together in Washington, Lammy and I attended a dinner at the home of the Wall Street Journal columnist Walter Russell Mead – other guests included Elliott Abrams, the Reagan-era neoconservative hawk and more recently a Trump envoy, and Ed Luttwak, a right-wing grand strategist – during which we discussed a possible Trump presidency. Lammy has great energy but was fatigued. He’d arrived much earlier that morning, via Newark, having flown overnight from London, and he was travelling around town to meetings in various Ubers. He kept engaged through the evening by drinking iced Coca-Cola but did not eat.

“The privilege of this job,” he told me the next day, “is you can travel, you can listen to friends and foes, to learn and really focus on what your party and country needs to do. I’m here now because we’re in an American election cycle and it’s too close to call. The truth is, if you’re doing your job seriously you have to work with whomever the American people choose. On this trip I’ve focused not just on meeting Republicans but on the breadth of Republican opinion: Reagan Republicans, Asia First Republicans, Maga Republicans – who are the inheritors of the Tea Party and are more isolationist – and it’s important to meet them to understand where those motivations come from.”

When we met in Tottenham, more than a month later, we talked again about his excellent relationship with senior Republicans. But what of Trump, I asked. Does Lammy regret what he wrote and said about him during his first term? When he answered, I noticed he was particular about using Trump’s full name.

“It’s important, Jason, and we sensed this when we were in the United States together: the rhetoric that comes with Donald Trump comes with Donald Trump. That is the man, that is the personality, and he navigates the global stage with huge personality and that rhetoric continues. But you do have to distinguish between the rhetoric and the actuality. It is still the case that a Donald Trump administration will include the broad coalition that is the Republican Party. He likes argument and he likes to see the rows within the party reflected in his conversations. On foreign policy particularly, Donald Trump does not want the United States to be on the losing side, and Donald Trump is a politician who’s been able to change his mind, or be more flexible strategically, domestically on abortion; more flexible strategically on the issue of funding for Ukraine.”

Is Trump a pragmatist?

“He’s a businessman. When he’s talking about America First, he’s not wanting to get, in his language, screwed on a deal. That does make him pragmatic, of course.”

OK, he’s a pragmatist. But do you think he’s reprehensible – in what he represents, how he behaves?

Lammy paused.

“Umm, Trump is part of a United States I’ve known all my life.”

For the first time he had not used the former president’s full name.

“It’s a United States I’ve got tremendous respect for, and, in the end, he’s part of a democratic system, a democratic system that will produce different politicians, politicians different to me… It’s a huge mistake to disrespect a politics that significant parts of the population in America are attracted to, and indeed that we see in our own country.”

So you wouldn’t be worried if his advisers laid out some of your disparaging tweets about him on Trump’s desk?

“No, because I think there’s also parts of Trump’s record that have a very healthy relationship with the UK: he’s known to be fond of Scotland; he’s known to be fond of the Queen; he understands the key partnership that the UK has had with the US, particularly on issues of intelligence and military capability, and wants to find the deal and the common ground. He also understands that you’d be struggling to find any politician that didn’t have strong views on Donald Trump Mark I – and that includes our current Foreign Secretary, who I think called him a xenophobe and a misogynist in his book.”

Progressive realism

Lammy has been rethinking his politics. Working on Tribes unlocked new possibilities for him. If you read the book and his most recent essays and comment pieces on foreign policy, or spend time talking to him or his advisers, as I have in recent months, you get a sense of a politician trying hard to understand the world as it is today, not as it was when Tony Blair heralded the start of a new liberal progressive global order in 1997, or as many on the left would wish it to be. He is not an idealist but nor is he a tragic realist. He locates himself in an older Labour tradition of Clement Attlee, Winston Churchill’s deputy in the wartime coalition, and Ernest Bevin: clear-eyed, practical, pragmatic social democrats whose foreign policy was rooted in patriotism and the economic and social interests of the British people. The Attlee government commissioned Britain’s independent nuclear deterrent and was instrumental in the creation of Nato.

Lammy says that Britain faces a challenge in operating according to its values in a world that often doesn’t share them. That is what he means by “progressive realism”, a phrase he first showcased in an essay for Foreign Affairs magazine in April.

Jonathan Powell, chief of staff to Tony Blair, read the essay. “It will be good to have a foreign secretary who has actually thought about the role, expounded some views and even has a theory,” he told me. “There is every prospect he can be transformative as foreign secretary given his background and experience. The truth is Britain has become largely irrelevant around the world since Brexit. A first step will be to re-engage with our European neighbours and allies to create a relationship of trust. Boris Johnson’s antics and lies resulted in a complete breakdown in that trust. And it will be good news for Labour if Biden wins. There’s no doubt who the Biden lot are rooting for. If Trump wins, for whoever is in power in Britain it will be difficult. That is why rebuilding relations with Europe, especially on security and defence, is so important as reinsurance against the risk of a Trump presidency and an unreliable America.”

As we spoke in Tottenham, Lammy expressed particular concern about Britain’s relationship with the Global South and at how neglectful, even disrespectful, the Conservative government had been towards the leadership of states such as Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam. “I came into this job as shadow foreign secretary on the tail-end of the pandemic, with a powerful sense from the Global South that Britain has abandoned them and the West has abandoned them.”

Jonathan Powell said something similar. “We have a big problem with the Global South, especially after Gaza. Many already felt our response to Ukraine in contrast to our response to the wars in Ethiopia, which have killed far more people than the Ukraine war, showed the West’s double standards. The big divergence between the West and the Global South may take decades to fix. And China has in the process set itself up as the shop steward of the Global South.”

As shadow foreign secretary Lammy has made 17 visits to and engaged with 61 governments from the Global South since June 2022. Having made 56 international trips, he is, aides claim, “the most travelled shadow foreign secretary in history”, and yet shadow foreign secretary was a role he was unsure he wanted when Keir Starmer asked him about it in autumn 2021. “I needed time to think about it because I’d not been canvassing for it,” he told me in Washington. “I have young children and there would be a lot of travelling. But Keir said, ‘Look, you’ve just got these incredible networks of contacts and friends across the world. I need you in this role.’”

Lammy, the first black Briton to attend Harvard Law School, is a friend of Ben Rhodes, a former adviser to Barack Obama.

“I’ve known David since 2007,” Rhodes told me. “He has energy, a big personality, and I’ve always known him to be an incredibly curious person. He’s really thrown himself into the foreign affairs portfolio with that curiosity of wanting to learn more and meet more people, go more places.”

In 2018 Rhodes published The World as It Is, a memoir in which he describes his journey from the idealism of the early years working for the first Obama administration to a kind of disenchanted realism about the world and America’s role in it. “Maybe we pushed too hard. Maybe people just want to fall back into their tribe,” said Obama – who believed the most important thing a president could do on foreign policy is avoid a costly error – after Trump had won the 2016 presidential election. And then, even more emphatically, he asked Rhodes: “What if we were wrong?”

It’s a question liberals should be asking themselves more often as they reflect on a world fragmenting into rival blocks.

“Progressives,” Rhodes said when we spoke, “tend to want to remake the world. But we’re in a period in which our ambitions have to also focus on just averting catastrophe and kind of protecting what we have, while looking for those opportunities on things like climate change or technology where you can do something affirmative. To me, David’s ‘progressive realism’ is just kind of calibrating expectations, developing policies that fit a really disordered moment, and then being opportunistic in where you’re seeking the advance of a progressive agenda.”

The title of Rhodes’ book is an allusion to the opening sentence of VS Naipaul’s 1979 novel A Bend in the River, set in Kisangani (formerly Stanleyville), on the banks of the Congo River in what was then Zaire, a post-colonial state already collapsing into ruin. Like Lammy’s parents, who were from Guyana, Naipaul was part of the Caribbean diaspora. His forefathers came to Trinidad from India as indentured labour. His father worked as a journalist and had thwarted literary ambitions. The young Vidia won a scholarship to Oxford and became a writer – he magisterially referred to himself in conversations with me as “the writer” – but never returned home.

Naipaul travelled widely and restlessly in India and Pakistan, in several African states, the deep American South, Argentina, Indonesia and Iran. His subject was the end of empire and the struggles and upheavals of the post-colonial world and decolonised people. “When I talk about being an exile or a refugee, I’m not just using a metaphor,” he said. “I’m talking literally.”

The central character in A Bend in the River is an Indian merchant, Salim, who grew up among traders in East Africa and opens a shop in Kisangani. But he is lost. “He didn’t simply see himself in a place in the bush; he saw himself as part of an immense flow of history.”

Lammy, who references Naipaul’s book, as Obama also did in an interview with Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times, understands how it feels to be part of this immense flow of history. Naipaul was more than a realist, however: he did not believe in progress. But Lammy claims to be a “progressive realist”. He resists the quietism of Naipaul. Towards the end of A Bend in the River, Ferdinand, a town commissioner, warns: “We’re all going to hell, and every man knows this in his bones. We’re being killed. Nothing has any meaning… Everyone wants to make his money and run away. But where? That is what is driving people mad. They feel they’re losing the place they can run back to… But there is no place to go.”

Obama said he returned to Naipaul’s books and the opening line of A Bend in the River, “when I’m thinking about the hardness of the world sometimes, particularly in foreign policy, and I resist and fight against sometimes that very cynical, more realistic view of the world. And yet, there are times where it feels as if that may be true.”

Lammy does not speak like that. He is progressive in his beliefs on climate action and international law – since, as he puts it, “We are realist, not in spite of our realism. We believe that we need climate action and international law to stop the darkness getting so much worse, and the world so much more dangerous. These approaches are not only our values but our necessary, essential self-interest.”

A friend suggested that Lammy’s pragmatism – what he called his “utterly Starmerite approach” – was the real lesson one should take from reading Naipaul’s A Bend in the River. The propagandist fails to read the changing geopolitics and fails practically to look after his shop – allowing himself to become nothing. “This Lammy would never allow,” he said.

The Black Atlantic

Lammy has peered into the Naipaulian darkness, especially when thinking about slavery and the Black Atlantic: “I am a man made of the Atlantic.” He has what Paul Gilroy, adapting the idea of WEB Du Bois, calls a kind of “double consciousness”, or dual self-perception as a member of a colonised group in a former colonial power, of being both English and black. He understands the symbolism of what it would mean to his family, his community, his country, to be the first foreign secretary to be able to trace his “lineage back through the Atlantic slave trade”. Lammy, who is an English patriot, embraces his multiple identities – English, British, European, Caribbean, Atlanticist, a son of Tottenham and Peterborough – as representative of what it means to be modern.

“I’ve read Paul Gilroy’s books,” he told me. “There is a double consciousness – there might even be more than two, inevitably.”

As a child he had few possessions, few of what he calls “tangible things”, but recalls a poster of the world given to him by his father, who left the family when Lammy was 12. David used to study the poster for hours as he sat on the end of his bed. But, as he puts it now, there were important things he got wrong or did not understand or did not know.

“I talk in my book of the war breaking out in the Falklands and being confused and thinking that we were on the side of Argentina because we were Guyanese, and my mum disabusing me with, I think, a slap: that is not the position! So that’s the double consciousness at play. I would have been nine or ten at the time, and that’s been with me all of my life, that juxtaposition, that occupying of different worlds. It’s why, when I am in the Caribbean, in Africa, in the Indo-Pacific, foreign ministers say things to me that I don’t think they do say to David Cameron, because David Cameron is coming from a different place; he’s presenting in a different way. They say things to me about Britain’s past: there’s a formal and there’s an informal. I want to deploy that to the UK’s advantage, as an asset. But I’m also very British. It irritates me when I go around the world, when I’m in India, for example – I went to India the day after Macron had left – or I’m in Dubai, and they’re lauding French diplomacy. Because I am a Brit, I’m competitive, I want Britain with its mojo back! And I think we can get our mojo back.”

The end of the post-colonial era

Lammy believes we have reached the end of something important – not just of a long period of Conservative rule in Britain or of a long period of peace in Europe, but a certain Western-centric way of understanding and ordering the world. “This is the end of the post-colonial era,” he said boldly.

Rachel Reeves declared the end of liberal globalisation “as we know it”, in a speech in Washington last year, and now Lammy is announcing the end of the post-colonial era. These are big, ambitious statements Labour is making. But what exactly do they mean?

“Well, let’s just ground it in the facts,” Lammy said during our meeting in Tottenham. “Let’s go back to the Nineties, if you like. Britain’s economy was bigger than China’s – today, China’s is six times bigger than Britain’s. Countries like Turkey were barely on the map; Turkey had 12 embassies in the continent of Africa – today it has 44. India was just emerging – today India is a global superpower: it’s not a middle power, it’s a superpower with huge amounts of growth. India, China – they are huge manufacturing powers now. And our foreign policy has to meet the world as it is, and in that sense post-colonialism is over. And I might say also there is no room for cancel culture in foreign policy. Forget it: no one cares! Slightly facile arguments about what paintings are on the wall in the Foreign Office! I mean [laughing], let’s meet the world as it is, let’s talk about mature relationships today, and let’s recognise that actually there are other economies, neighbours, I think over this last period that have actually been doing better than us in this new environment – France is an example. If you want to get a sense of the modern world, I would encourage anyone to sit in the airport in Dubai and watch the world meeting one another… There can be a sniffiness to places like Dubai by the European elite, but that’s where it’s at, and, in that sense, post-colonialism is past.”

By announcing the end of the post-colonial era, Lammy is also announcing the arrival of a new era of multipolarity. Labour foreign policy will evolve to reflect this new world order. On the day before Rishi Sunak called the election, Lammy had begun rolling out what will be his first campaign as foreign secretary: an attack on the structure of global kleptocracy. “Given the City and the overseas territories, this is an area where Britain has enormous influence to make a huge positive difference,” a source told me. “It is a huge demand of the Global South which David has heard personally time and again, and key to dismantling the web of authoritarian influence in Western societies, and an issue the Tories have miserably failed to address. It’s practical foreign policy that recognises the foreign and domestic have blurred.”

Broken men

Towards the end of our most recent conversation, Lammy spoke about his father, who is buried in a cemetery in Houston, Texas. Usually so animated, he paused for a while and his voice became quiet. As a student at Harvard, Lammy had gone to America to gain confidence and self-definition among the country’s black professional middle class. “Being part of Harvard’s black alumni opened up a network for me that would not have been possible in Tottenham alone, or even through going to a good school in Peterborough – and it connects me to a certain American president,” he said. “I am very grateful to America.”

But his father died a “broken man” in America: an impecunious alcoholic. “He ended up a tragic figure in a way: a man broken by that Atlantic journey from the West Indies to the UK, broken by a changing economy in the Eighties and the industry he was in, which was taxidermy, running up against animal rights, and broken by alcoholism and addiction. He died a pauper in the United States, and all of us, certainly Labour politicians, tend to be able to recognise in the communities they represent those that have been broken by change.”

During the election campaign Lammy has been visiting former industrial towns, such as Grimsby and Mansfield. There, in those neglected or ignored communities, “you can see men like my father, broken by the changing times. And that’s why I say to you, in a concrete and real way, it’s my job, alongside Keir Starmer’s, to absolutely be crystal clear that we will not allow the United Kingdom to be broken by these tough geopolitical moments. We have assets here, we have capability here, we just need a strategy and a direction, of course, and we need to turn our page, frankly.”

Lammy was a guest at the Trooping the Colour ceremonies in Whitehall. He was invited by Alister Jack, the Scottish Secretary – “He’s got the best terrace on Whitehall on which to overlook the Trooping the Colour” – and among those present were Boris Johnson and James Cleverly, whom David Cameron succeeded as foreign secretary. The mood did not feel right, however; it felt somehow as if time itself was out of joint.

“There was a sort of demob happiness about them, a sort of casual frippery, a certain kind of public-school smallness,” Lammy said.

What he witnessed there on that terrace during the pageantry made him feel uncomfortable. “They are not the class of people that Britain needs to run it now, and that’s what my own life story tells me. The Labour Party’s full of people – Angela Rayner, for instance; I was with her yesterday, campaigning in Mansfield – she gets this.”

The implication is that Starmer’s people are the right class for these times. It’s significant how many senior shadow cabinet members – Starmer, Reeves, Lammy, Rayner, Wes Streeting, Bridget Phillipson – grew up in single-parent families, or with divorced parents, or in households struggling under the conditions of economic or psychological hardship. They were not born into the bourgeois liberal-left. They were all educated at state schools. They have a particular class consciousness.

“There’s something about a certain class of individuals at the end of the Raj not really having an account of the future,” Lammy said of Johnson and his insouciant and careless chums. “These people have squandered something. It just spoke of a class of people who have no real sense of the world as it is, whether it is in our own country or the world as we find it today.”

The revenge of history

The wheel has turned full circle: here we are on the eve of a projected Labour landslide victory. After the protracted upheavals of the pre- and post-Brexit period, can Britain begin to regain some influence and respect in the world? Can decline be arrested? Can Lammy’s “formal” and “informal” style of diplomacy rebuild relations with Europe and the Global South and persuade others to follow him? Can you be both a progressive and a realist? Or is the Naipaulian view of the world, as Barack Obama feared, closer to the truth of the matter in an age of darkness?

“What liberals misunderstand about the world,” Ben Rhodes told me, “is a sense of an inevitability of progress; you know, that we’re living this arc that was inexorably moving in the right direction. You had the end of the Cold War, you had the spread of democracy, you had the sense that the big questions had all been resolved. What we’ve learned is that history never goes away, and the pall of things like nationalism, which tend to run counter to the liberal impulses, is something that is always going to be there, and if you ignore it, you risk losing everything you care about.”

Labour believes if it gets the political and economic balance right, at home and abroad, Britain “can surge forward” through strong government, a strategic state and a mandate for change. Lammy wants to reset our relations with Europe and the EU. “There will be a lot of goodwill for Labour in Europe,” Jonathan Powell says. “It was the same for us in 1997. I remember meeting [Chancellor] Kohl outside the Chancellery in Bonn immediately after the election with Tony Blair – he greeted me with: ‘Ah, it’s the good Powell, not the bad Powell!’ My brother had worked for Thatcher. David Lammy and Keir Starmer will have a chance to make Britain relevant again – not as relevant as we were when in the EU, but as a voice for reason and progress in the world.”

But this is no longer the Europe of the Nineties. Can Labour and Lammy, who took a trenchant and divisive view of Brexit, read the geopolitics of a changing Europe? The war in Ukraine has fundamentally altered the European balance of power. France and Germany are no longer the central guiding powers. Power is shifting to Poland and the east, to what the historian Timothy Snyder calls the “bloodlands”, and it is here that Britain has acted through its unambiguous military and political support for Ukraine and with its alliance with Poland. The Scandinavian countries and Baltic states have gravitated towards this new axis of influence. On Ukraine, Britain, outside the EU and, therefore, more nimble in its response to foreign policy, has not been an onlooker but a European leader.

Lammy said: “We need a new approach to diplomacy with Europe and a new geopolitical partnership with the EU. That means speaking European.”

In the closing scene of A Bend in the River Salim escapes on the last steamer to leave the town as the anarchy of civil war breaks out. They stop at a village, but young men with guns board the steamer and try to take control of it. They are beaten back but the passengers travelling in a barge attached to the steamer are cut adrift. As the steamer continues downriver without them, Salim hears gunfire in the darkness and enraged voices.

David Lammy does not believe in the coming anarchy. He believes Labour has been gifted another chance to renew Britain at home and abroad. And he knows it must not be squandered. He knows that if we are complacent, as the post-Cold War liberals were, and if politicians ignore or scorn the aspirations and anxieties of the people whom they purport to represent, and if they continually break promises, as the Conservative government has, we risk losing everything we care about. Autocrats want us to be cynical and apathetic: cynical, nothing matters; apathetic, nothing can change.

The trick Lammy is trying to pull off is being clear-eyed enough to see the world in a Naipaulian way – that there are always going to be impulses in people under nations to revert to self-interested, atavistic, tribal instincts – but also idealistic enough to realise that these darkest impulses must be resisted, or else they’re going to overtake everything. After all, as he said to me as our Uber pulled up outside the White House on our final afternoon in Washington, “The world is what it is.” He repeated the statement, even more forcefully, as we said goodbye at the café in Tottenham, as a sign-off and perhaps as a warning too: “The world is what it is.”

David Lammy is as comfortable among the tight terraced streets of Tottenham as he is inside the Washington Beltway: local and global settings. Can he bring them together to create a foreign policy that resets Britain’s relations with the world, and works in the social and economic interests of the British people?

This article appears in the 28 June 2024 issue of the New Statesman

[See also: How to fix a nation]

In 2006 David Cameron described Ukip voters as “fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists”. In time they had their revenge on him, and many now support Reform: if anything, there are many more supporters of Farage today than there were when Cameron abruptly resigned as prime minister in 2016.

At the 2015 general election, nearly 4 million people voted for Ukip; Farage’s aides hope that as many as 6 million could vote for Reform this time. If Reform under the first-past-the-post system ends up with only a few MPs, or perhaps just one, Farage, Labour, which opposes electoral reform, would be confronted with a serious democratic deficit. “If I’d had six months of this, this would be very different,” Farage told me. “But I didn’t have six months. But I decided in the end, after all the prevarication, that I had enough time to at least make a good start, and we’re making a good start. There is momentum out there, and we are the subject of conversation.”

Many have denounced Farage as a post- or proto-fascist, but that is to misunderstand the style of his peculiarly English populism: part TV game-show host, part charismatic secular preacher. He’s even started calling himself “the political Billy Graham”.

“I’ve got this new technique, you see,” he said. “At the end of the meetings, I say, ‘Right, do you agree with me?’ And not everyone does, because a lot have come along and they’re open-minded, and that’s right, and some don’t like it and you get the odd shout – that’s fine. ‘Do you agree with me?’ I say. ‘Well, you agreeing with me is useless. I don’t want you just to agree with me. Do you think I can do this on my own? Do you think I can do this without you? I want you to raise your arms if you’re going to commit.’ They raise their arms, I say, ‘That’s it. Well, I made a promise to you, you have now all made a promise’ – this is what I call the Billy Graham.”

Farage once said to me: “If you think I am bad enough imagine what comes after me.” What is it he imagines might come after him? What are the dark forces he holds in check by going as far as he can in his anti-immigration rhetoric – and in comments about the rise of separatist Islamist politics in Britain – without going as far as those parties on the European continent which share a family resemblance with Reform, such as Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, the Sweden Democrats, Alternative for Germany, or Geert Wilders’ Freedom Party? When I asked about these parties and their similarities to Reform, Farage said: “-ish”. But he is impressed by Giorgia Meloni, the post-fascist prime minister of Italy. “Meloni’s done a very good job. She’s got control, she’s disappointed some of her more radical supporters, but you know what she’s done? By becoming a stable prime minister, she’s actually moved the needle on a variety of issues in Italy and made them respectable. I see her as being quite an interesting ally, quite pragmatic and sensible.”

Farage believes, as he put it to me, that he’s done more than anyone else to defeat the far right in this country. “Look,” he says, “when they got a million votes in the [2009] European elections, the BNP were the insurgent force of British politics; Ukip was a relative tiddler. Who destroyed the BNP? Was it [the former Labour minister] Peter Hain saying boycott them, or was it me taking them on? Paul Nuttall and I took on the BNP vote, directly, and we said, ‘Look, if you’re voting BNP because of deep frustration about what’s happening in your communities, you don’t need to vote for an organisation that is overtly hostile to others. We share your concerns but we’re not hostile, on a personal, human level.’ Knocked the guts out of them. No one did more to beat the far right in this country than me. If I wasn’t here, somebody with a bit more brain than Nick Griffin would emerge.”

Gerard Batten, in alliance with Tommy Robinson, formerly of the English Defence League, attempted to revive Ukip, from 2018-19, and moved the party to the neo-fascist right. “Batten is a charmless idiot,” Farage cut in.

He’s never met Robinson. “I’ve never wanted to,” he said, and mentions his various prison sentences. “Look… it’s not all a stitch-up, is it? But it could be a Tommy. Who knows what it could be? But all the while that I’m here, that figure’s not going to come.”

Farage doesn’t rule out attempting to take control of the Conservative Party after the election. “Preston Manning did that in Canada. We’ll have to see, it depends on what happens in the next 11, 12 days. If we maintain this momentum, then we could be in a very interesting position.”

Is there anyone he could work with on the Tory benches?

“Well, there are individuals, obviously, but not the party itself, no. I don’t see any prospect of that at all. They’ve destroyed themselves. If I’d gone fishing for the month in the Bahamas – and it was tempting, you know! – but if I’d done that, they still would have been wiped out. This is a breach of trust on an historic level. To have achieved an 80-seat majority and to have delivered on an agenda that was almost the opposite to what the expectant voters thought they were going to get, and frankly, they deserve all that’s coming to them.”

He is scathing about Boris Johnson and blames him most for creating the conditions of a collapse of trust in the Conservatives.

“He got pretty much everything wrong. I mean, the levels at which they set the entry requirements to come to the UK from the whole world… I said that day, ‘This means the numbers will go through the roof.’ It was so obvious. He didn’t care. Wasn’t bothered about that. The lunatic net zero agenda. I mean, think of that speech: ‘Build back beaver.’ Quite astonishing that a British prime minister literally wanted to take out of production 30 per cent of British agricultural land! The [Covid] lockdowns. ‘Oh, no, Boris is a libertarian.’ Really?”

It’s not just the Conservatives who have misread Faragism, however. The left struggles to understand what he has unlocked and channels as he leads the revolt of his “people’s army”, in whatever form it takes: Ukip, the Brexit Party and now Reform, the non-party party with its multitude of cranks standing as candidates at the election.

The Times has been investigating the background of many Reform candidates and revealing their repellent views. Of Reform candidates, Farage accepts that problems with them were “written in” as soon as he returned. “I have no idea who they are! I’ve never met any of them. We’re a start-up, of course we’re going to have – we’re a start-up! When he called the election Sunak knew that Reform was in no state to fight any election. It wasn’t Ukip: I mean, Ukip had a structure, an organically built structure; Reform didn’t have any of that. He calls the election, and I think, ‘Oh, well, damn and blast, I can’t do it. How do we build the structure, how do we raise the money, how do we find the staff we’re going to need, how do I fight a constituency and travel round the country?’ So for logical reasons, I thought, ‘No, I can’t do it.’ Those reasons, by the way, still apply!” 

He started to laugh.

But then something changed.

“I began to think about all the things I’d done really from 2011 onwards, which was to build an activist base around the country, to contest elections: to actually engage tens of thousands of people in politics who’d never actually ever been engaged physically in politics, and building what I called the ‘people’s army’, and the thought that those millions who’d followed me through general elections, European elections, referendum campaigns, they’d all come back in 2019, and kind of the feeling that I was letting them down. That was one thing that really preyed on the mind. And the other was the feeling something different was happening, particularly among young people, that I’d become for some reason an interesting figure to them.”

When we spoke, in 2017, Farage was waiting to see how Brexit would play out. But he said there might just be another political earthquake, “something seismic”, to come. “And it could be the Conservative Party that’s the most vulnerable to it.”

This election showed he was right about that, and yet he thinks something even bigger, even more seismic, will happen. “If you come and see me in six or seven years – if I’m still here. Well, who knows? And probably by then I won’t be the leader of this movement, somebody younger and brighter will be. But this movement’s going to grow, and politics in Britain will be unrecognisable from today.”

By the end of the 2020s, Farage believes there will have been fundamental electoral reform. “And with that, the Labour Party and the Conservative Party frankly will barely exist. I promise you it’s going to change. And it’s interesting: the only thing I’ve been really good at in my life – and I’ve done a few things quite well and done a few things quite badly, but I’ve done lots of things – is my ability to see change and what’s coming in the future. There is a massive change coming. The old order ain’t going to be there. I can see it coming.”

We met in Clacton, Essex, on Saturday 22 June, at Reform’s impromptu HQ, where Farage and his entourage are occupying two tatty rooms above an amusement arcade, a short walk from the sea front, which seemed desolate in the early morning summer drizzle. The previous day, Farage had given an interview to BBC Panorama in which he said the West provoked Russia’s war in Ukraine because of the EU’s and Nato’s eastward expansion.

Farage delights in outrage and his comments had outraged. The BBC was leading on the story across its platforms, excitably promoting its interview and inviting responses to it. The right-wing press was angry as well, and remained so for several days afterwards, and even the pro-Farage Telegraph, for which he writes, had splashed on it that Saturday morning. It also published a comment piece by Richard Kemp, a former soldier, who denounced Farage as not a serious leader.

As I drove east to Clacton (the closer I got the emptier and more silent were the roads), I listened to Ben Wallace, the former Conservative defence secretary, and a long-time confidant of Boris Johnson, pompously describing Farage on Radio’s 4 Today programme as an ignorant “pub bore”. (On Sunday 23 June, Boris Johnson denounced Farage as “morally repugnant”. Farage promptly responded, camply dressed in a white jacket and speaking with a loudhailer from the upper deck of an open-top bus, calling Johnson “the worst prime minister in modern times”.)

Later, we stopped for a pint at the Three Jays pub in Jaywick, the small coastal town that often features in those perennial narratives about faraway, left behind England. I asked Farage, who opposed the American-led invasion of Iraq as well as the intervention that ultimately led to the fall of General al-Gaddafi in Libya in 2011, if his comments on Putin and the Ukraine war had been his first serious false step of the campaign.

He scoffed at the suggestion.

But even your friends in the Telegraph have gone in hard against you over it, Kemp and others?

“It’s not a false step, because, you know, they can’t think outside the box, they’re not capable. They’re all warmongers!”

Even the Telegraph, your old friends there? 

“They all supported Libya, and what did that do? Isis didn’t exist before Libya. Boats weren’t crossing the Mediterranean before Libya. What do you think’s happening in Dover today? It’s all come from the fall of Libya. Am I going to – just because I get some criticism – change my mind on something I passionately felt a decade ago, spoke about in public? I predicted what would happen: Putin is a bad, dangerous individual, but a very clever, smart operator. If I see a drunk across the street, do I go over and prod him in the chest and hope he punches me? No, I don’t do that. Well, if you want conflict, yeah, if you want a punch-up, yeah, hold my jacket. I mean, that’s great! We didn’t need to do any of this. We didn’t need to do it. We have given that man a causus belli with the Russian people, and that is a fundamental geopolitical mistake. And Madeleine Albright [the former US secretary of state], who was part of that process under Clinton back in the Nineties, even she will now say we shouldn’t have done this.”

Earlier that morning, as I arrived at Reform HQ, a police officer and security guard surveyed me with suspicion before nodding me through without speaking. Farage, who was tanned and wearing a pink shirt, a tie and jacket, was sat at a table, looking at his phone, easily the smartest and most flamboyantly dressed guy in the room. He was receiving two texts a minute. A huge Union Jack flag was suspended on the wall opposite. After asking for coffee – “We can’t start without coffee” – he invited me to follow him into the adjacent room where he gave a short, rallying address to the assembled activists. Some had travelled seven hours from Wales and were delighted to meet him.

One would struggle to call Farage’s Clacton headquarters a war room. It is underfunded and understaffed and has the atmosphere of a run-down local newspaper that may soon publish its final edition. But Farage seemed oblivious to the dismal surroundings, and his team are confident he will be elected to parliament for the first time on 4 July. He has tormented Sunak throughout the campaign by threatening to lead a takeover of the Conservative Party but, for now, he is simply enjoying its misfortune and struggles, from the D-Day debacle to the insider betting scandal, which Farage expects will become even bigger. 

“When this betting scandal finally breaks, you wait. You ain’t seen nothing yet. If you look at the volumes on Betfair that day, all we’ve earmarked so far are three or four people, but Betfair’s one exchange. What I want to know is how many people walked into Ladbrokes or William Hill with £150 in cash, £200 in cash. If I wanted to do an insider trading betting scam, I’m not going on Betfair: I’m giving the lads cash. Don’t forget, I’ve worked in and around these industries. I know how the bad guys work, and so the Gambling Commission will get to the bottom of this… I mean, it’s like the Conservative Party are stealing the light bulbs as they leave the building.”

Reform is, in effect, a one-man show. Farage, leader and chief executive, calls it a start-up. It is a limited company set up to make a profit, but Farage said it will have to change to become “a mutual organisation with a governing board”. He laughed when I suggested he had taken his lead from Nicola Sturgeon and Peter Murrell, the husband-and-wife team who led the SNP until they suddenly didn’t. Except that, unlike the Sturgeon-Murrell duopoly, all power in Reform is concentrated in just one man: Farage, as Richard Tice discovered when he was abruptly replaced as leader a week into the campaign.

After we left Clacton, on what turned out to be a warm, bright day, I followed him for an hour along Frinton high street – “this is true-blue Tory Essex”, one aide said, “and they should be weighing the votes here” – but Farage was greeted, again and again, like a returning local celebrity. I have interviewed him twice before, in 2014 and 2017, and this time he seemed more confident, more at ease, more certain in his sense of mission and what he believes is his growing popularity.

He is an extraordinarily fluent speaker and nimble populist communicator who plays the game of politics as well as anyone. He laughs often and speaks loudly. He leans into controversy. He excoriates his detractors, especially Boris Johnson and the Daily Mail, which has hardened its hostility to him in recent weeks as the Conservative campaign unravels. Farage is a street agitator and TV raconteur in one package. He has an excellent memory and uses it to disarm and charm – or, when necessary, to attack and traduce. He forgets nothing, he told me. “I’m like the guy in Rain Man.” He fears no one.

I witnessed scarcely any hostility to him in Frinton. Most of those who approached, especially women, wanted a selfie or a signed brochure. “I know him,” one woman with a young child in a pushchair said to me. “He’s that bloke from the telly.” Her bewildered child ended up having her photograph taken with a beaming Farage.

One man who ran a charity shop asked Farage and his team to move on “because you’re bad for business, Nigel”. Another challenged him about his Putin comments and said: “Nigel, you’re an appeaser.” Even his opponents addressed him like someone they knew. It was similar with Boris Johnson on the campaign trail and his old rival in London, Ken Livingstone. Politicians who have mastered the cult of personality.

Another man said to Farage, as he emerged from a Greggs having stopped for coffee and a sausage roll: “Well done for stepping forward, Nigel.” Another shouted at him: “The closest we have to Enoch Powell: stop the boats!” Farage does not welcome comparisons to Powell and allowed the comment to pass without acknowledgement. Several women approached and told him they would vote for Reform but would not tell their husbands.

It was noticeable how many young people gathered around him. They knew him from his turn on ITV’s I’m a Celebrity…, they said, and from his TikTok videos. In 2017, when I last interviewed Farage, he said that only he and Jeremy Corbyn knew how to use Twitter properly. He and his long-time aide, Dan Jukes, were early adopters of TikTok, “during peacetime”, as they put it, and now they consider the young left-wing Labour MP Zarah Sultana to be their only serious rival on the platform among British politicians, in what is now presumably wartime, because of the election.

Farage is enjoying himself hugely while Starmer, who he says has done a “good job but is not a national leader”, and Sunak seem so agonised, so buttoned-up, their diction so circumscribed, their pronouncements so fearful, rehearsed, formulaic and mechanical. Farage speaks in interviews, on platforms, and in the street, in direct, straightforward sentences. He is not a politician in search of an idiom: he uses short words and rhetorical repetition effectively. He has his own style. And he means what he says. There is no one else like him, which is why I am not convinced that Reform or his movement would continue without him.

Apart from Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, Nigel Farage is the most consequential politician of the past 50 years, and yet he has never been an MP. That seems about to change. He may be a public school-educated former City trader, but he has broad cross-class appeal and has led three parties, two of which, the Brexit Party and Reform, he set up. He leads what he calls a “people’s army” of the disaffected, the angry, the marginalised and the reviled, and he is intent on the destruction of the Conservative Party, which he believes has betrayed its long-time voters and everyone who voted for Brexit.

Something is happening in the country, he keeps saying. Trust and confidence in British politics and our elected politicians is at an all-time low, and he wants to exploit it.

“I keep repeating this phrase, ‘Something is happening out there,’” he said. “I’m going to sum it up this way: a deep sense of unease that we’re losing something very special.”

What does he think is being lost, I asked.

He spoke of “social decline”, sounding for the first time more like an American religious conservative such as Rod Dreher. “The number of people who say to me, ‘I can’t wait to leave London,’ and that’s people of all classes and all income brackets, just the growth of law and order problems, the dominance now of the foreign gangs wherever you go. That’s bad, but I also think we’re in something of a moral decline. What I mean by that – I’m not a Methodist, as you know! – is that we are losing a sense of what we are, what we stand for, what the nation is. The sheer poisoning of the minds of our children, from an early age all through primary, secondary, tertiary education, telling kids how awful we are, we’re the most evil country that’s ever lived. And I just feel we’re losing a sense of the Judaeo-Christian principles which underpin everything.”

He leaned towards me and whispered: “And the mainstream parties don’t understand it. And that’s where – before the Brexit vote – I could see there was a big disconnect between the big-city domination of debate and what was happening out there in the real country. That disconnect is bigger now than it’s ever been.”

In 2014, Farage said to me that he was neither left nor right: he was a radical, in the tradition of John Bright. Since then, he has recalibrated. And he dismissed the suggestion that he was “hard right” as “nonsense”. Today, he said, he “supported the little guy against the big battalion. In some ways, my economic narrative against the global corporatists is quite left wing. Look, I fought the banks last year. I’m not for big global capital. Quite the opposite.”

Class-led voting alliances were shifting and our politics are increasingly volatile. Labour will win a big majority in this year’s election, but it could be squandered. Support for the party is broad but shallow.

“In 2014-15, voters put me to the left of Cameron,” Farage said. “I would now definitely be centre right, because the Tories have gone from being centre right to being centre. On social issues, on virtually everything. The whole of left/right politics as we call it is rebalancing in Europe, in America, everywhere else.”

He predicts that Marine Le Pen will become president of France. “Every French presidential election, she goes up by 5 [percentage points]. It reminds me of Ukip: fourth in 1999, third in 2004, second in 2009, first in 2014 in the European elections. That’s what she’s doing in France. Our differences are so fundamental on economics. I mean, she’s for retirement at 60, she’s state control of everything. A bit of economic nationalism is fine, I get that, I’m not sure selling off all our utilities to the Chinese is necessarily a very good idea, hence I’m not the Thatcherite my critics might say, but her economics is bonkers. But she represents something about being French that they see they’re losing in Marseille, in the northern suburbs of Paris. You look at the old World War One battlefields of Loos and round there, the old coalfields that were communist from 1945 – they’re all Le Pen. In the north, her strength is unbelievable.”

He concedes his old friend Donald Trump has been wounded by his recent criminal conviction. “The conviction’s hurt: it was designed to hurt. Short term, that has knocked them back a little bit. I still think he’ll win.”

Will Trump go to prison?

“I pray they don’t do that. I worry for America and where it’s going. I hate the moral superiority of the modern left in America. It is at a level that could provoke goodness knows what as a reaction and we don’t want that at all. God knows where it might go. But one of the reasons I’m a big Trump fan is because Putin wouldn’t have invaded Ukraine, it wouldn’t have happened. He signed the [bilateral agreement between Israel and Arab countries] Abraham Accords, an incredible achievement, and I think Hamas really did what they did because they knew that Saudi Arabia was about to join the club. You can dislike this New Yorker but he’s the first American president not to go to war. Would Trump have backed Libya? Would he, hell. Would Trump have backed Iraq? Would he, hell. This was a peace-making president. And I’m someone that believes in a strong deterrent, but I am naturally pro-peace not pro-war, and I’ve been that way, even on Afghanistan. I just thought, ‘What the hell are we doing?’”

How many votes can Reform win – five million, six million? “Every political party has a ceiling. Let’s not delude ourselves about this! Look, there’s no squeeze. There is no squeeze. In the last week, we’ve got stronger.” He paused for a long time. “To some extent, I’ve controlled my destiny over the first three and a half weeks. I’ve set agendas, I’ve got debates going, I’ve done stuff, and I’m going to try to go on doing that for the last week and a half. But probably it’ll be events that I can’t control.”

As I drove away from the Three Jays, Farage was in the beer garden, drinking gin and tonic because the real ale had run out and there was no spare barrel. Here he was, a street fighter and raconteur: and now the self-described Billy Graham of politics. His detractors believe he is much worse than that: a dangerous xenophobe. Jeremy Corbyn says as much in a recent interview with the New Statesman. But he does not care what anyone thinks. He is having too much fun. “I’ve got bags of energy, lots of optimism, I’m enjoying life enormously,” he said. “I enjoy whatever I do, I believe in what I believe in, I’m not afraid of anything, I’m not afraid of anyone. I’m just not. I’m a warrior. And I love it!”

[See also: Nigel Farage and the populist peril]

Eddie’s settled life in Brooklyn is disturbed by the arrival of two Sicilian brothers, cousins of Eddie’s wife, Beatrice (Kate Fleetwood). They are illegal immigrants seeking refuge at Eddie’s apartment as well as work in the docks. From the moment they appear Eddie is never at ease. The younger brother, Rodolpho (a largely comic turn by Callum Scott Howells), is blond, handsome, musical and effeminate. He’s also attracted to Eddie’s 17-year-old niece, Catherine (Nia Towle), and she to him.

Eddie is appalled. He and Beatrice have raised the girl since early childhood. They are like parents to her. But other forces are unlocked. Eddie is deeply protective of his niece but also sexually desires her, and his wife knows it. He loves the girl and wants to possess her.

West-as-Eddie is heavily built, conflicted and never still. He eats quickly, he discards the newspaper he cannot concentrate on and paces the spare Brooklyn apartment restlessly. We sense his torment and experience his rage as he accuses and abuses all who try to reason with him – his wife, his niece and especially Rodolpho. He has a “destiny”, we are told, by Alfieri (Martin Marquez), who serves as both narrator, a one-man Greek chorus, and as a minor character, a local lawyer from whom Eddie seeks guidance. Everyone can see what Eddie cannot: that there is no way out for him. He has started something only he can finish.

[See also: Spirited Away review: A feat of engineering and aesthetics]

***

No one did more than Farage to create the conditions for Brexit, nor 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 UK’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 voters to choose Remain and therefore the status quo. The truth is for many Brexit voters – especially working-class Labour voters who abandoned the party in 2019 – 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, scorned and ignored by metropolitan liberals, as I discovered when I visited 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 2019 general election 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 Conservative Party.

Labour is on course for a remarkable landslide victory. 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 – 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 Farage 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 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 him 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, Nigel Farage will be waiting among the ruins.

[See also: A whirlwind tour of Washington with David Lammy]

What does Nigel Farage know? What does any successful politician know? What did Tony Blair know that Ed Miliband did not? What does Jeremy Corbyn know that his detractors in the Parliamentary Labour Party do not?

In 2009, Michael Ignatieff, a cosmopolitan intellectual and former Harvard professor, became the unlikely leader of the Liberal Party of Canada. As he began the slog towards the Canadian federal election, from which he was initially expected to emerge as prime minister, Ignatieff was tormented by his inadequacies. High intelligence, deep, immersive reading and considerable literary and philosophical sophistication – he was the authorised biographer of Isaiah Berlin and a former Booker Prize-shortlisted novelist – were, he discovered, no guarantees for a career in politics or for winning a national election.

“I’ve spent my life as a writer, but you have no idea of the effect of words until you become a politician,” Ignatieff told his old friend, the New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik. “One word or participle in the wrong place and you can spend weeks apologising and explaining.”

It was as if he was already exhausted by the demands of high politics: “This is by a very long shot harder than being a professor at Harvard, harder than being a freelance writer, harder than anything I’ve ever done – in terms of its mental demands, its spiritual demands and its emotional demands.”

Ignatieff envied successful politicians, serial winners such as Blair and Bill Clinton. He knew they knew something he did not. But what did they know? What is it that a great politician knows, he kept asking himself. “The great ones have a skill that is just jaw-dropping, and I’m trying to learn that.”

Ignatieff never discovered the answer to his question or learned the required skills. Unlike Barack Obama, who was also professorial in demeanour, he had no gift for popular communication. Nor was he adept at the game of politics – or perhaps ruthless and fearless enough, though he was more than ambitious enough. He was routed in the 2011 election by the conservative Stephen Harper, even losing his own seat. Soon afterwards he retired from politics and retreated from Canada, humiliated and humbled by defeat, but wiser.

I was reminded of Ignatieff and his pertinent question – what does a successful politician know? – when I met Nigel Farage one recent morning at the offices of Leave.EU in Westminster. The previous evening, when I texted a friend to postpone our meeting because I was seeing Farage, he replied: “Why are you seeing him? I despise him.” This is not an isolated view, of course.

Farage, who now has his own talk radio show on LBC, is widely despised – not least because of his antics during the referendum campaign and his post-Brexit embrace of alt-right movements in America and Europe. He is despised not only by liberals and Remainers: mainstream Conservatives and many prominent Brexiteers, such as the MEP Daniel Hannan, are appalled by him and his closest associates at Leave.EU.

***

The Leave.EU offices are subdued and tatty – they have the atmosphere of a poorly resourced magazine or newspaper office the morning after press day – but at least there is an outside terrace, which allowed Farage to slip out for a cigarette on a cold, bright morning. The television was on in his office and it burbled away as we talked. A packet of Benson & Hedges cigarettes was on the desk and on the bookshelf nearby was a paperback copy of the Cambridge historian Robert Tombs’s great book The English and Their History. One of his aides brought him a coffee from Pret A Manger – “I can’t drink that instant stuff” – then Farage settled down, preferring initially to discuss the Ashes cricket series in Australia: a few overs of gentle conversational looseners before the pace quickened.

Farage was in a reflective mood. A former City broker in the metals market who was educated privately at Dulwich College in London (a school today popular with Russian oligarchs), he still sees himself as an anti-system radical, who occupies a space beyond left and right: he told me once that his hero was John Wilkes, the 18th-century parliamentary agitator and pamphleteer.

Unlike my friend, I do not despise Farage, even though I deplore much of what he says. What does he know? That’s what interests me. It’s not enough to condemn one’s opponents: it’s harder, yet more fruitful, to attempt to understand and explain the forces and individuals shaping the history of our era.

Speaking on 14 November in the Commons, Ken Clarke, perhaps the last true Tory parliamentary Europhile, called Farage the “most successful politician of my generation”. It’s hard to disagree, though he tried and failed seven times to become an MP.

More than any other politician – more than the cranks and headbangers on the Tory fringes – he created the conditions for Brexit, and we are living with the consequences. Through sheer force of will, charisma and a kind of relentless monomania, Farage transformed what was once a fringe cause into a national movement (the “people’s army” is what he calls his followers). He galvanised the Eurosceptics in the Conservative Party and harried David Cameron, who in 2006 dismissed Ukip supporters as “fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists, mostly”.

For all of Farage’s success at ventriloquising the sentiment of a large section of the population, his behaviour has often been contemptible: never more so than when, in the final week of the referendum campaign, he launched the anti-immigrant “breaking point” poster depicting a column of Muslim Syrian refugees in the Balkans, the wretched of the Earth. Farage deliberately conflated legitimate economic migration with the refugee crisis and illegal immigration: even the former Ukip MP Douglas Carswell called the poster “morally indefensible”.

Farage remains unapologetic. “Jacob [Rees-Mogg] says he thinks that poster won the referendum, because it dominated the debate for the last few days. The establishment hated it, the posh boys at Vote Leave hated it, but it was the right thing to do. Now, I don’t think we’d have won the referendum without Mrs Merkel. But that poster reminded people what Mrs Merkel had done.”

Farage was referring to the German chancellor’s decision in 2015, at the height of the worst refugee crisis in Europe since the end of the Second World War, to open the borders to more than a million dispossessed people from the Middle East and Africa.

“After the election in 2015, [Farage’s close associate] Chris Bruni-Lowe said to me, ‘If on the Sunday before the referendum we’re discussing three million jobs, we’ve lost.’ I launched the poster, there was a bit of commentary, I had double-page spreads in five national newspapers. There was the usual criticism of it. It was only when Jo Cox got murdered that they chose to focus on [the poster] as the big issue.”

The Labour MP was shot and stabbed on 16 June 2016 in Birstall, West Yorkshire, by Thomas Mair, who shouted “Britain first!” as he attacked her. Farage told me: “I remember thinking, ‘Can I live with this?’ Not because of what I’ve done – just the hatred, not my conscience… Basically, it’s your fault she’s dead. I came in here, a bit down. It was rough, and Chris said, ‘Remember what we said last year: what’s the conversation? It’s immigration.’

“But it was obviously very unfortunate that a young woman got murdered, and all the rest of it… I don’t think her death ultimately changed the way people voted, but what it did do was kill the momentum. It did kill the momentum. Sorry, that’s the wrong word to use. It stopped the momentum. Because we had the ‘big M’ going. Momentum’s an odd thing, because when it’s going with you, you just feel it. You know it’s happening. So, yeah, that was quite a thing.”

That phrase, “quite a thing”: you could call it a euphemism.

***

Simon Heffer, a commentator, historian and authorised biographer of Enoch Powell, believes that Farage is one of the most important politicians of the entire postwar period. “Enoch was the first British Euro­sceptic,” he told me. “He kept the argument going throughout the 1970s and 1980s when most others had given up. As he faded, Farage took over, at the crucial moment when the Maastricht and subsequent treaties started to raid British sovereignty and democratic accountability. Nigel built up huge momentum over the 20 years before the referendum and, unlike the fantasists of Vote Leave with their £350m a week for the NHS, concentrated on the key intellectual argument for Brexit: the reclamation of sovereignty and the reinstitution of democratic accountability.

“And he galvanised the working class, whose criticisms of the EU and failed aspirations had been ignored by generations of Labour politicians, to support Brexit. He, not Boris Johnson or any of his crew of poseurs, was the key to the Brexiteers’ victory.”

Farage winced when I mentioned Heffer’s comment and Powell’s name. “Enoch was, er, a brilliant man,” he said, with unusual hesitancy, “but somehow the words he used, the analogy he chose, destroyed the debate [on immigration] for a quarter of a century. It made it impossible to even talk about it.”

He sensed an opportunity to reopen the debate with the enlargement of the EU in 2004, when ten new countries joined, eight of which had been part of the former communist eastern bloc. Of the existing member states in 2004, only the United Kingdom, Sweden and Ireland did not impose “transitional controls” restricting the freedom of movement of migrants from the new accession states, a fateful decision as it turned out. The New Labour government forecast that only 13,000 migrants would arrive from Poland and other eastern European countries; in the event, more than a million came to live and work in Britain as annual net migration, year after year, rose inexorably.

If – as Isaiah Berlin wrote in a celebrated essay in 1953 – the fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one big thing, Farage is a hedgehog. The single defining thing that he knows is how to exploit people’s unease about immigration. That was his great wager: the revivifying of the immigration debate.

“The European Union and immigration wasn’t an issue before 2004,” he told me. “It was the mistake of letting in the former communist countries. Many in Ukip said, ‘No, no, don’t do that, you mustn’t do that. They’ll call us all the names under the sun.’ I knew that touching the immigration issue was going to be very difficult. But I think the impact that had on me, the family, I think all of that was bad, yeah. And frankly… the only thing that upsets me about it is that, had it been wilfully and overtly a racist message, I might have deserved some of it. But it wasn’t. It never was. It never, ever was. It was a logical argument about numbers, society.”

The emergence of Ukip destroyed the British National Party. Farage made a direct appeal to its voters. “The problem was that with the demise of the BNP, the haters on the left had to have someone to hate, and that all transferred to me.”

He doesn’t like the term “working class” but agrees with Simon Heffer that his rhetoric and plain speaking appealed to those he calls “good, ordinary, decent” people.

“The one thing I had going for me is that I’m able to cross classes. You know I do what I do, I am what I am – people like it or they don’t like it, but I’m not confined to the Shires or the inner cities. I can do a bit of both. You know how our class system is… The sort of middle, upper-middle class never say what they think to anybody, you know, just in case. But the lower down the social scale you go, the more people are very blunt in what they say and how they approach things. So, I use direct language, never trying to come across as being too clever.”

Farage respects Jeremy Corbyn because he is not a conventional career politician. “Corbyn’s a bit different, and maybe that’s why he’s working with a certain segment… Corbyn’s popularity among the young is astonishing. But he comes across as very genuine. His technique is so similar to mine in an odd way, and Trump’s. He’s very similar to Trump, the way he does it!”

What does he do?

“One, the embrace of social media. He understands it; I understand it. If you look at the social media following of UK politicians, it’s just him and me. The rest are so
far behind us, it’s almost incredible.”

Both Farage and Corbyn have more than a million Twitter followers. I suggested that Ruth Davidson, the Scottish Conservative leader, is excellent on Twitter and understands how to use social media.

“Yes, she is. Her numbers at the moment are very small, but that may change. But she understands it. The rest of them haven’t got a clue. I mean Boris Johnson! Boris should be huge on social media and he’s not. Corbyn also gets that the big public meeting works. It energises people in the most incredible way.

“And some of the stuff he said in this general election was not entirely dissimilar to some of the stuff that I said in the previous general election. On the fact that you’re living in a society where the rich and powerful are richer and more powerful than they’ve probably ever been…

“And he comes across as genuinely caring about those that are having a tough time. And that’s his big card. I’ve got a certain admiration for that. What I don’t have an admiration for is the thought of [John] McDonnell running the British economy.”

***

Before this interview, the last time I had seen Farage in person was in November 2016 at the Spectator parliamentary awards dinner in London. There, he was presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award by George Osborne. Farage had been drinking and gave a raucous, triumphalist speech during which he mocked the “pasty-faced” Osborne, whom he loathes, and then told the guests, who included the Prime Minister, Theresa May, that Donald Trump would be “the next leader of the Western world”. Farage’s comments were received with derision. “Oh, come on,” he said that night. “What’s the matter with you? That’s… the attitude you all took to Brexit. [You said] it could never happen… [But] my achievement was to take an issue that was considered to be completely wrong, perhaps even immoral, and help to turn it into a mainstream view in British politics.”

It was a fair self-assessment and he was correct about Trump winning. Farage, who understands that in the age of social media outrage cuts through, has had an astounding effect on our politics. He is blamed for coarsening and poisoning the public discourse and inflaming racism and xenophobia, charges that he rejects. Instead, he told me that angry Remainers, such as Alastair Campbell, had created what has become a foul and feculent national conversation.

“I think some of what’s happened has been appalling. Alastair Campbell, he’s almost lost reason! I mean, the classic example of what’s happened since the referendum is the death of the Polish man in Harlow [in August 2016]. So, the story is: ‘Polish man gets beaten up because of race hate caused by Brexit.’ That’s the story. It’s everywhere: BBC Two’s Newsnight even ran a report saying, ‘Nigel Farage has blood on his hands.’

“Talk about fake news… The collective shock of the liberal establishment, they still can’t get to grips with it, and they’re trying to find a reason why this illogical thing, as they see it, happened. In this country, they put it down to lies, and in America, it’s the Russians!”

Ah, the Russians – let’s hope they love their children, too, as Sting sang.

Carole Cadwalladr, an Observer feature writer who has been investigating what she considers to have been malign outside influences on the EU referendum result, is convinced that Farage is at the centre of a network of alt-right white nationalists and libertarian billionaires who are intent not only on destabilising the West but engendering hate and overturning the liberal order. “Farage has been making speeches in the US for Roy Moore, for example. Is he being paid to do that? And if so by who?” she said when we spoke.

Cadwalladr has been abused on social media by Farageists and by Arron Banks and Andy Wigmore of Leave.EU, which posted an abusive video of her on Twitter. The video has since been removed and Wigmore told me that it was meant to be a joke and he regretted the upset it had caused.

“It seems to me that Wigmore and Banks are using Trumpian rhetoric for effect,” Cadwalladr said. “It doesn’t ring true. But Farage is ideological. That’s the difference. And he’s been given a free pass in Britain for too long. It’s disturbing. It’s made me question our institutions – including the press and media. There’s no covert conspiracy with Farage. He’s part of this overt, right-wing, pro-Putin bloc. He loves Putin. He supports Hungarian demagogues.”

Farage believes that Vladimir Putin is “a strong leader”, but he would never wish to live in Russia. “You know, 120 journalists have gone missing in the last nine years… I wouldn’t want Putin as my leader, no, no, no. This is not some unqualified fan club, far from it. But, you know, he’s a strong national leader who, when it comes to playing strategic global politics, is a bloomin’ sight smarter than No 10.”

Farage spoke with enormous gusto and energy, his voice animated. “There was a piece the other day,” he continued, “that said I was the only person that connected all the dots. That I was the centre of the web. I mean, it’s just baloney… A person of interest to the FBI, etc, etc. I can tell you hand on heart, it is total and utter baloney. I have virtually no Russian links at all.”

What about Donald Trump (we met before the American president disgracefully retweeted anti-Islamic propaganda from the account of the deputy leader of the neo-fascist Britain First movement)? Farage described himself as a “supporter” and said that Trump had restored America’s reputation as a powerful nation overseas. Farage was encouraged by the administration’s programme of deregulation and tax cuts for the wealthiest and corporations, but there had been no contact between them for many months.

Farage is, however, still in touch with Steve Bannon, the executive chairman of Breitbart News and a former Trump strategist at the White House. I suggested that, with the departure of Bannon, Trumpism had lost its ideological fervour and drive – after all, Bannon has a theory of history, however demented. Farage disagreed. “Trump had that belief system anyway,” he said. “Steve may have reinforced it.”

***

Before Ukip’s post-referendum collapse into irrelevance and Jeremy Corbyn’s rise, Farage reached out to and captured a certain demographic of Labour voters, several million of whom ended up voting for Brexit. One of the most serious mistakes made by Ed Miliband as Labour leader was to underestimate Ukip, which he believed would hurt the Conservative Party more than Labour. By the time of the 2015 general election, increasing numbers of voters were abandoning Labour for the so-called people’s army.

The Labour-to-Ukip defectors were, on the whole, not city-dwelling liberals. They mostly lived in towns and did not have degrees. They were anxious about immigration, fearful of change, pessimistic about the future and weary of austerity. Caricatured as those “left behind” by globalisation, they made themselves heard at the referendum in 2016, an act of rebellion that the Blue Labour thinker Jonathan Rutherford likens to an Orwellian “tug from below”.

“Cameron would not have won the election in 2015 had it not been for the Ukip vote,” Farage told me. And if Cameron had not won the election, there would have been no referendum. “We hurt Labour far more than we hurt the Conservatives. And I remember thinking, ‘These cretins.’ The Daily Mail didn’t understand it! The Sun didn’t understand! They didn’t understand it! We were digging deep into that Labour vote. And that was the gap Miliband created. It was the gap that, Jason, you saw earlier than almost anybody, to be frank, and we did well with them. We did very well with them. So, 2015 was an odd moment, because… we had four million votes and we’d got nothing for it [Ukip ended up with one MP in 2015]. But we had a referendum!”

Call it the revenge of the fruitcakes.

On 14 November, Farage made a speech in the European Parliament during which he denounced George Soros, the 87-year-old billionaire financier who funds the Open Society Foundations, which supports civil society and liberal democracy. Soros has been traduced in his home country of Hungary and is the victim of conspiracy theories and anti-Semitism. I put it to Farage that his speech had been interpreted as an anti-Semitic “dog whistle”. For the first time, he became angry.

“Fuck off, for God’s sake. Excuse my language – but honestly, isn’t that incredible? Is this what we’ve sunk to? If you attack Soros, you’re anti-Semitic? They’re desperate aren’t they, these people? You know why? They’re losing. Because even if Brexit’s delayed, even if it’s not done properly, public opinion is hardening around the kind of things that I campaigned for, for all those years. They’re losing.”

What is it they are losing?

“Their very nice, comfortable, narrow vision of what the world is and what it should be: that’s what they’re losing. But honestly, for goodness sake. Soros? If we talk about Russian influence, let’s talk about Soros’s influence. It’s massive. David Miliband’s paid by him… And I’m being told I can’t talk about it. I mean, please. Anti-Semitic – bloody hell. Think of all the prominent Jewish people that have stood up and supported me over the course of the last few years. Sorry, that makes me angry.”

***

In his book The Shipwrecked Mind, the American academic Mark Lilla draws a distinction between the conservative and the reactionary mind. Reactionaries are, in their way, “just as radical as revolutionaries and just as destructive”. Farage is a radical and a reactionary: his instincts are destructive. He wanted to blow up the British establishment. He wanted to smash an elite consensus. He is relaxed about the idea that Britain might exit the EU without a free trade deal. He delights in describing Brexit as an “earthquake”, the aftershocks of which continue to move the ground beneath our feet.

“I’ve thought for a long time,” he told me, “that this question about Europe and our relationship with it was one that had the potential to realign British politics. 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.”

This year, far-right parties have suffered notable electoral reversals in France, Austria and the Netherlands but they have not been decisively defeated. We are not witnessing the return of a more liberal, optimistic Europe. Marine Le Pen won 34 per cent of the vote in the second round of the presidential election against Emmanuel Macron, after reverting in the final weeks of the campaign to the politics of her father, an old-style Vichy fascist. To defeat Geert Wilders’s anti-Muslim Freedom Party in the Netherlands, the centre-right Dutch prime minister, Mark Rutte, had to adopt some of his rival’s positions and borrow much of his xenophobic rhetoric. In the illiberal democracies of eastern Europe – Poland, Hungary – an ugly form of the old right has re-emerged. The Czech Republic has embraced anti-establishment populism after the ruling Social Democrats were crushed by ANO (“Yes”), an insurgent party led by a billionaire oligarch, Andrej Babiš.

Meanwhile, Angela Merkel’s centre-right government has been severely weakened in Germany and her standing diminished after the far-right Alternative für Deutschland, energised by the migrant crisis, won nearly 13 per cent of vote in the federal election in September: it now has representation for the first time and is the third-largest party in the Bundestag.

“All that has happened, especially in France, is that the rise of the far right has been paused,” said the philosopher John Gray. “What’s driving all this, I think, is that the emerging European state, or super-state, cannot discharge some of the primary functions of a state. It claims many of the prerogatives and authorities of a state, but it hasn’t got the means to deliver on the functions of a state – which do include control of borders.”

But the liberal order, although threatened, is not crumbling. The EU27 end 2017 in a stronger, more unified position than they began it, in spite of the turmoil in Spain and the intensifying Euroscepticism in Italy. In the US, the worst excesses of Donald Trump are being constrained by the courts, by Congress and the free press. And Brexit, as Farage knows, has not yet happened.

According to John Gray, “Farage is taking an Oswald Mosley-like gamble. I’m not saying he’s a fascist, but he’s reinventing himself as an alt-right politician in a culture that, despite everything, has no room for the alt-right. He has made a fundamental strategic error. Let’s say he’s arrived at a point of non-arrival. There is no alt-right position for him to connect to, because the great achievement of British politics has always been to marginalise the far right. The dark European stain that has re-emerged – and now the American stain – is altogether different. As for Farage, I think he’ll be beached in five years and probably end up in America as a shock jock.”

The man himself thinks differently. “America is very tempting. But I’m just a bit too English really! I like going to Lord’s.”

At the end of our conversation, Farage accepted that the Brexit negotiations were in trouble. He was alarmed by the economic forecasts but accepted no responsibility or blame. “It’s not Brexit that’s caused the uncertainty,” he said. “It’s Theresa May. Let’s be honest about it: the prospect of a hard-left government with McDonnell as chancellor and Corbyn as leader is scarring business.”

He believes that the Prime Minister has no conviction. “Brexit is an instruction from the electorate to turn around the ship of state by 180 degrees,” Farage said. “You cannot do that unless you believe in what you’re doing. You have to actually, passionately believe in what you’re doing. Ignore all criticism, you just have to do it. It’s like an act of going to war… And she’s managing the different wings of the party as if this is politics as normal.”

Boris Johnson – whom Farage thinks should leave politics to become an academic and television celebrity – has disappointed him. The next prime minister, he said, will come from outside the cabinet, and it could be Jacob Rees-Mogg, his choice. “Whether it’s on the question of a transition deal, whether it’s on the question of ‘go whistle’ – Boris has been very weak. The likelihood is that we will leave the European Union legally but finish wrapped up in a whole series of transition deals that mean we’re not able to take advantage of the positive sides of Brexit.”

***

The ultimate irony of Brexit is that the UK is now more at the mercy of the EU than ever. And though Farage can afford to run this ideological experiment, many of those who voted Leave cannot. He expects Labour to offer a second referendum on the unresolved Europe question in its next manifesto. “I have a feeling that Labour will fight the 2022 general election, if we go that long – we will not be fully out, we will still be in a transition of some kind – on a ticket of either, ‘We’ll have a referendum to rebalance our relationship’ (which would not be fully rejoining, but it could be a single market compromise), or an EEA compromise, or something. That’s a very realistic possibility.”

At which point, Farage may return to front-line politics, perhaps at the head of a new party or movement. “My position is this: if they really make a mess of Brexit, and if there’s a job that has to be done…”

He lowered his voice almost to a whisper and looked straight at me. “I’ve got no choice! Actually, I honestly don’t really want to. I’ve done it. I don’t want to do it again. You know climbing mountains without crampons is quite tough – you take on the establishment. But, no, if the gap is there, if it needs to be done, if the job needs to be finished, I’ll do it.”

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.

Jason Cowley writes a weekly editor’s note in the New Statesman’s “Saturday Read” newsletter. Sign up to receive it here

[See also: Here in Israel people feel deeply unsafe and the two-state solution looks doomed]

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; 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 for 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 Israel Defense Forces 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 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, battle-hardened, Iran-backed Shia militant group inside Lebanon.

We are introduced to a man whose brother, a member of the “first response team” that led the counter-attack 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 Aza. 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. “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 20 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, 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 Labor 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 50 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 has been prime minister three times since 1996, had brought only division and conflict to Israel. Likud, his party, 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 OK 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.

[See also: War and the West Bank]