https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n12/tom-crewe/carnival-of-self-harm
Tom Crewe
Haywire: A Political History of Britain since 2000
by Andrew Hindmoor.
Allen Lane, 628 pp., £35, June, 978 0 241 65171 1
No Way Out: Brexit from the Backstop to Boris
by Tim Shipman.
William Collins, 698 pp., £26, April, 978 0 00 830894 0
The Abuse of Power: Confronting Injustice in Public Life
by Theresa May.
Headline, 368 pp., £12.99, May, 978 1 0354 0991 4
The Conservative Party after Brexit: Turmoil and Transformation
by Tim Bale.
Polity, 368 pp., £25, March 2023, 978 1 5095 4601 5
Johnson at 10: The Inside Story
by Anthony Seldon and Raymond Newell.
Atlantic, 640 pp., £12.99, April, 978 1 83895 804 6
The Plot: The Political Assassination of Boris Johnson
by Nadine Dorries.
HarperCollins, 336 pp., £25, November 2023, 978 0 00 862342 5
Politics on the Edge: A Memoir from Within
by Rory Stewart.
Vintage, 454 pp., £10.99, June, 978 1 5299 2286 8
Ten Years to Save the West: Lessons from the Only Conservative in the Room
by Liz Truss.
Biteback, 311 pp., £20, April, 978 1 78590 857 6
Tory Nation: The Dark Legacy of the World’s Most Successful Political Party
by Samuel Earle.
Simon & Schuster, 294 pp., £10.99, February, 978 1 3985 1853 7

Short-term​ thinking has been the fatal tendency of the Conservative governments to which Britain has been subjected since 2010. David Cameron’s declaration in January 2013 that, if the Conservatives won the next election, they would offer a referendum on membership of the EU – which wasn’t a significant concern, never mind a priority, for British voters – is a fine example. Usually, it is attributed to Tory fears about being outflanked on the right by Ukip, and to Cameron’s calculation that his promise wouldn’t have to be fulfilled because the Tories would fall short in the 2015 election and therefore remain in coalition with the pro-European Liberal Democrats. In Haywire, his steely account of Britain’s backfiring start to the new millennium, Andrew Hindmoor suggests that Cameron’s announcement was intended as a sop to those on the right of his party who were agitating against his plan to introduce gay marriage (when it came to a vote, nearly half the parliamentary party anyhow opposed the bill, and it passed only with support from the opposition). The result was that Cameron went into the 2015 election with the referendum as a manifesto promise, and unexpectedly won it. The referendum went ahead just over a year later, on 23 June 2016. Cameron announced his resignation the following morning.

Short-term thinking also explains Cameron’s refusal to allow the civil service to prepare for a Leave victory, for fear it would look defeatist. After Theresa May replaced him as prime minister, it became clear that no one had any idea what to do, or even what could be done. ‘The British state had not done a shred of preparation,’ May’s deputy, Damian Green, told Tim Shipman. ‘The whole machine went on a journey, and part of that journey was to discover problems that hadn’t been discussed at the time of the referendum.’ The EU, however, was prepared and laid out its timetable for up to two years of negotiations, to begin when Britain formally signalled its desire to secede from the union by invoking Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty. Until then, it would allow no discussions. But rather than pause to consider her options and build consensus after what had been a close referendum result (52:48), May tacked sharply towards a hard Brexit. And she did so without consulting her cabinet. Her chancellor, Philip Hammond, listened to her declare at the Tory Party Conference in October 2016 that after Brexit, Britain would accept no European laws, would take control of its own immigration policy, would have its own trade deal with the EU and would be outside the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice. ‘I was absolutely horrified by what I was hearing,’ Hammond said later, in an interview for the Brexit Witness Archive.

All I remember thinking was, ‘There will be a television camera that will be on your face. If you move a muscle, it will be the story on the front page of every newspaper tomorrow’ ... I just remember focusing my entire energy on maintaining a rictus half-smile ... and then [got] out of the room without speaking to any journalists. I was completely and utterly horrified by what I felt was almost a coup.

Hammond flew straight to Washington for the annual IMF conference:

When I arrived in Washington, it was to discover that the pound was in free fall ... I then had to get out on the TV in Washington, to try to reinterpret the prime minister’s speech for the markets in a way that would try to stop the slide in sterling ... It was a disaster on all fronts, a total unmitigated disaster that scarred her prime ministership ... but I think she only realised later how badly that had constrained her ability to deliver any kind of practical Brexit at all ... I’m not even sure that she understood ... how extreme the words coming out of her mouth really were.

After the speech, Ivan Rogers, Britain’s permanent representative to the EU, said to May: ‘You’ve made a decision. This gives me clarity. I can work with this. We’re leaving the customs union.’ ‘I have agreed to no such thing,’ May fired back. But perhaps an even more crucial aspect of her speech was the pledge that Britain would invoke Article 50 no later than the following March. When Rogers was informed of this beforehand, he said: ‘Fuck! That’s obviously insane. It reduces her leverage.’ Others agreed, but they were all ignored, in favour of such sages as Iain Duncan Smith. ‘You have no idea how bad this is,’ Rogers told the cabinet secretary, Jeremy Heywood. ‘She’s put herself in an incredibly weak negotiating position. She’s blown herself up, she just doesn’t know it yet.’

We know how it went after that (neither Hammond nor Rogers is mentioned in May’s semi-memoir, The Abuse of Power). Or we think we do. In fact, it is useful to view events, in the telling of Hindmoor, Shipman and Tim Bale, with an aerial clarity unavailable at the time. In April 2017, May, lulled by her long lead in the polls and the disarray in the Labour Party partly triggered by Jeremy Corbyn’s even sprightlier desire to get going on Article 50 (he talked of activating it the day after the result), decided to call a snap election for 8 June. She had inherited a Tory majority of ten, and wanted a bigger one that would allow her to pass her version of Brexit, but then botched the campaign and lost her majority, becoming dependent on the votes of the Democratic Unionist Party in the Commons. According to Shipman, her most serious error was subsequently to accede to the EU’s insistence that negotiations could not be advanced until the issue of the Irish border was resolved. This focused May’s mind, and produced a surprising, though ultimately self-undermining outcome. Once she realised that the hard Brexit she had advanced in her conference speech threatened the return of a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic she had no choice but to retreat. The Withdrawal Agreement she eventually produced, alongside the infamous ‘backstop’ (in the event of a breakdown in negotiations between the UK and EU, the backstop would allow an open border by keeping the whole of the UK within a form of customs union and Northern Ireland within the single market), implied close alignment with the EU in the interests of smoother trade. The problem for May was that her tough talk had helped to increase polarisation, with the result that her proposal satisfied no one. She didn’t have the political nous to sell it (especially not to the Labour Party) or the votes in Parliament to pass it. In her book, she is scathing about the ‘abuse of power’ that was MPs voting according to their own lights rather than considering the needs of the country, but her idealisation of ‘service’, worthy as it is, gives the impression of someone not only with little instinct for the art of politics, but also incapable of recognising the strong limitations and biases of her own worldview. After a series of crushing parliamentary defeats she was forced out, and replaced by Boris Johnson, who promised to exit on the planned date of 31 October whether or not there was a deal with the EU: ‘no ifs, no buts’.

In the end, despite all his bluster and disregard for constitutional forms – his prorogation of Parliament, intended to scupper attempts to legislate against ‘no deal’, was judged illegal by the Supreme Court – Johnson was forced to request an extension to the deadline. The Brexit he eventually agreed with the EU was far harder than May’s, introducing non-tariff barriers to trade and supposedly solving the Irish issue by drawing a border in the Irish Sea, so that goods would have to be checked between Britain and Northern Ireland (an idea May had rejected as an impossible breach of the UK’s territorial integrity, and Johnson himself had previously scorned). This ‘oven-ready’ deal was taken to the electorate in December 2019, and Johnson secured a majority of eighty.

The coronation of Johnson, a known chancer and proven liar, easy prey for his desires and deeply mistrusted by the public (only 14 per cent of whom believed he was honest and of good character) as well as by those who knew him, was classic Tory short-termism. May apparently thought him ‘morally unfit’ for the job. Nobody could be more short-term than a man who, if it was to his benefit, would tell anyone just about anything, and have no qualms about going back on it hours or minutes later. After winning the December 2019 election, one of his first acts was to tell the EU that the ‘oven-ready’ deal was still missing key ingredients. The Johnson government was even more swaggering and bullying in its post-election incarnation. It’s shocking to be reminded that it tried to exclude reporters from unsympathetic papers such as the Mirror and the Independent from a press briefing, backing down only when the other news outfits walked out. It also announced that it was boycotting BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, ITV’s Good Morning Britain and Channel 4 News, all in punishment for alleged bias. These boycotts were abandoned only after the Covid pandemic struck, not all of them immediately.

Johnson, of course, was the very worst man for that moment. As Covid advanced through Europe, he missed five meetings of Cobra, the committee that deals with national emergencies. At one early press conference, he boasted of having shaken hands with everyone on a hospital visit. Not long into the national lockdown, which he belatedly announced in March 2020, he contracted the virus himself and spent three nights in intensive care. For the rest of the pandemic he veered between the advice given to him by the experts (restrictions imposed early would halt the spread of infection) and his libertarian instincts (played on by his chancellor, Rishi Sunak, a vocal body of Tory MPs and the Tory-supporting press, all of whom were aligned with the views of Tory Party members). This produced such aperçus from Johnson as – in response to an anti-lockdown article by Peter ‘Bonkers’ Hitchens – ‘My heart is with Bonkers. I don’t believe in any of this, it’s all bullshit. I wish I’d been the mayor in Jaws and kept the beaches open.’ And – in response to data showing that the median age of people dying of Covid was over eighty – ‘That is above life expectancy ... so get Covid and live longer ... I no longer buy all this NHS overwhelmed stuff. Folks I think we may need to recalibrate. There are max 3m in this country aged over eighty.’ And: ‘No more fucking lockdowns – let the bodies pile high in their thousands!’ Predictably, Britain got the worst of all worlds: three national lockdowns; the second highest excess death rate among G7 countries (315 per 100,000); the largest drop in GDP, at 10 per cent; and the slowest economic recovery. Johnson’s dither and delay cost lives, both before March 2020, and then, more damagingly, before he called the second lockdown, which began on 5 November and morphed into the third after Christmas. It had taken 251 days (between 2 March and 7 November) for Covid to claim its first 50,000 lives in the UK; it took 79 days to claim the next 50,000 (between 8 November and 25 January).

Both Johnson and his government survived the pandemic, even emerging with some credit after a successful vaccine roll-out. Slowly, normality returned to everyday life, but the behaviour of the gang in charge at Westminster got stranger and stranger. Following Johnson’s lead, the government seemed determined not only to invent new ways of avoiding scrutiny, opposition and blame, but – should these prove unavoidable – to outface them brazenly while attempting to sow distrust as to their motivation. The government tried to install friendly MPs as committee chairs, rather than allowing the committee members to decide, as is usual. International law was spoken of lightly: the government planned to break it, but only ‘in a specific and limited way’, as the Northern Ireland secretary, Brandon Lewis, assured Parliament. This strengthened the impression of the party’s newfound scepticism about domestic law (when the Supreme Court declared the 2019 prorogation illegal, Kwasi Kwarteng, a member of cabinet, announced on TV: ‘I’m not saying this, but many people are saying the judges are biased’). Robert Jenrick, the communities secretary, was found to have been lobbied by a property developer whom he then helped to avoid millions in tax (the developer followed up with a donation to the Conservative Party), but faced no punishment. Priti Patel, the home secretary, was found to have broken the ministerial code by bullying her staff, driving her most senior civil servant to resign, but again faced no punishment, prompting the resignation of the author of the report, Sir Alex Allen, the independent adviser on ministers’ interests. It was revealed that Johnson had refurbished the prime minister’s Downing Street flat with £112,000 provided by Tory donors, but Lord Geidt, Allen’s successor, found that Johnson had been unaware of where the money had come from. Geidt himself resigned after his decision was subjected to criticism (he wasn’t replaced). Johnson was, however, reprimanded for failing to declare which kind friend had paid for his post-election holiday on Mustique. Johnson put one Tory donor, Peter Cruddas, in the Lords, against the recommendation of the appointments commission; Cruddas shortly afterwards provided another £500,000 donation. The Tory MP Owen Paterson was found by the Committee on Standards to have received payment for advocating for a private firm in Parliament. Johnson whipped the party to oppose his suspension from Parliament and wanted to bring in a new process to make it harder to suspend MPs. Following an outcry, the decision not to vote on Paterson’s suspension was reversed, and he resigned from Parliament. At the ensuing by-election, his safe seat was won by the Lib Dems on a huge swing.

It was Long Covid that finally did for Johnson’s government. The Tories were found to have established a ‘high priority lane’ at the start of the pandemic, which allowed MPs and members of the Lords to recommend firms that could assist with PPE and so on (one Tory peer, Michelle Mone, recommended a firm that went on to receive £200 million, without mentioning that she and her husband would be beneficiaries). As chancellor, Sunak was accused of failing to prevent or pursue an estimated £5 billion of Covid-related fraud. Johnson’s ‘let the bodies pile high’ declaration found its way into the press, but much worse, in December 2021 it was discovered that, while people were legally obliged to stay at home, to keep away from friends and family even if they were dying in hospital and to maintain social distancing rules while in public spaces, the government had hosted at least sixteen illegal gatherings, some of them held during the ‘cancelled’ Christmas of 2020. An especially (though, one supposes, unrelatedly) rowdy party had been held on the eve of Prince Philip’s funeral, accounts of which (a suitcase full of wine, a broken child’s swing) contrasted with photographs of the queen sitting masked and alone in St George’s Chapel at Windsor the following day. The police became involved, handing down 126 fixed penalty notices, including for Johnson and Sunak, the most senior politicians ever to be punished by the law. Johnson’s personal poll ratings, never very good, hurtled downwards. When he was found to have appointed the aptly named Chris Pincher as a Tory whip in full knowledge of his history of groping men in bars, and then publicly denied it – the lie exposed by an outraged civil servant – the Tory Party’s conscience briefly bestirred itself. In a bizarre spectacle sustained over two days, 61 ministers resigned from the government, while Johnson tried to brazen even this out (apparently he talked of calling another election to avoid his defenestration; should he have gone through with this threat and called the Palace, officials intended the queen to be ‘out’). It was no use, and he announced his resignation on 7 July 2022.

‘Rarely in three hundred years,’ Anthony Seldon and Raymond Newell conclude,

and never since 1916 has a prime minister been so poor at appointments, so incompetent at running cabinet government or so incapable of finding a stable team to run Number 10. The prime minister is the chief executive, yet he belittled the executive and allowed his ministers to do the same, but without producing badly needed practical solutions for improvement. Nor did he act on ambitious plans to reform central government after Brexit. It is hard to find a prime minister who has done more to damage the fabric of government.

Someone should tell Nadine Dorries. Once wielding great power as Johnson’s culture secretary, she has produced a terrifyingly strange book that purports to reveal a malevolent conspiracy to remove the People’s Boris from power, led by Dominic Cummings and for the benefit of Sunak, and set in train immediately after the 2019 election. What I hesitate to call the details are for the birds (‘Much of what I know,’ she broods, ‘will never see the light of day due to the “legals”’). The truly arresting thing is the prose.

‘Were you seen coming in?’

I put my glass on the table.

‘I was.’

She looked over my shoulder.

‘No one’s looking now. You know what used to happen when Dominic Cummings arranged to meet the journalist Simon Walters, formerly at the Daily Mail?’

I frowned. ‘No, why would I, and why would he be doing that? Cummings had nothing to do with the media, did he? That was the head of Number 10 comms’s job.’

She laughed. ‘You are so, so going to have your eyes opened.’

Boris is presented as terribly noble, though pained, in his exile (‘But why, why, why would they do this? We were running the country. Why?’) and there is a touching moment when Dorries visits him at home just after he has left Number 10.

I was impressed with how he had laid the tray with delicate china and had apologised for there being no strainer. The phone on his desk rang. His silhouette was framed in the peculiar light and something made both Carrie and I look over. His response was sombre, his voice deep. He stood abruptly, pushing back the chair and, without saying a single word, hurried from the room, his phone in hand. Carrie and I exchanged looks, no words were spoken. I guessed that whatever Boris had been told, it related to our ailing queen. As I left the house, the heavens wept, the dark sky over London parted and a huge rainbow spanned the King’s Road. I knew then in my heart that the call had been to tell Boris that our queen had passed.

One of the many things Dorries’s ‘theory’ can’t account for is the reason the plotters moved in Liz Truss to succeed Johnson, rather than their main man, Sunak. Rory Stewart, a cabinet minister under May and now Britain’s most successful failed politician, sees Truss’s elevation, like Johnson’s, as proof of deep decay in the British political system, which he excoriates in his memoir ‘from within’. He highlights the way a political culture that rewarded blind loyalty – Cameron apparently liked to say: ‘I divide the world between team players and wankers. Don’t be a wanker’ – led to over-promotions and shallow-minded government as well as creating the potential for sudden switches of allegiance. Truss was a cabinet minister within four years of becoming an MP in 2010, and in the decade that followed, cycled through five more posts before becoming prime minister. This was a rapid rise, and no one who watched her on television or heard her on the radio, or who merely followed her activities as prime minister, could fail to be astonished by it. Stewart’s account of her backstage behaviour as environment secretary confirms that, as he has said elsewhere, she is ‘silly ... she wasn’t a serious person.’

Truss was far from the only person to benefit in this way. Dominic Raab was a junior minister for housing and planning before becoming May’s Brexit secretary in 2018; barely a year later he was foreign secretary; within four years, he was deputy prime minister. There has been a huge amount of change in the great offices of state since 2010: five prime ministers (as opposed to two in thirteen years of Labour government); eight foreign secretaries (as opposed to four); seven home secretaries, six of them since 2016 (as opposed to six); seven chancellors, six of them since 2016 (as opposed to two). The amount of churn lower down the cabinet has been even more significant: there have, for instance, been ten education secretaries. Hindmoor points out that, in April 2023, nearly half of the 22 elected members of Sunak’s cabinet, including the prime minister himself, had entered Parliament within the previous decade; only seven members had served in the Johnson cabinet of December 2019, all of them in different roles; only three had belonged to May’s cabinet in June 2017. What Stewart doesn’t seem to consider – in his own way, like Dorries, he is seeking a structural reason to explain his personal discontent – is the strong likelihood that this is a problem not of the British state, but of a highly unstable Conservative Party, one that made an MP’s stance on Brexit, or Johnson, or Truss, the litmus test for appointment.

This instability also magnified the importance of the party membership – around 170,000 mainly white, male pensioners – who account for 0.4 per cent of the electorate and whose views on all subjects are far to the right of the public (Bale regularly reminds the reader of this). They have chosen two prime ministers in the last five years (May and Sunak, unopposed candidates, got to Number 10 with the support of MPs), but their views must be perpetually borne in mind by any would-be leaders. This, in addition to the fact that two multi-candidate leadership elections have encouraged almost every halfway prominent Tory MP to stand and hence to pitch to the membership, must have contributed to the party’s rightward drift from the superficial liberalism of the Cameron years. Stewart does not engage with this reality either. His breathless David v. Goliath account of his leadership bid after May’s resignation in 2019, running against Johnson, makes much of his coming in fifth place in terms of support from Tory MPs. But it obscures not only the fact that Johnson was the runaway favourite with the members (he won with 66 per cent of the vote against Jeremy Hunt), but that Stewart was not even in their top five.

Against the wishes of the majority of Tory MPs, 57 per cent of party members chose Truss over Sunak in September 2022. Her election was closely followed by Kwasi Kwarteng’s kamikaze ‘mini-budget’, which, following on the heels of a huge commitment to cap every household’s energy bills for two years, announced plans to cut the basic rate of income tax, abolish the 45p top rate and cancel a planned rise in corporation tax (these and other initiatives added up to £45 billion of unfunded tax cuts). The markets took fright; the pound slid; the Bank of England initiated extraordinary measures. Soon almost everything had been reversed. But not before mortgage rates had shot up. In her unwarranted and unasked-for and barely remunerated memoir-cum-manifesto Ten Years to Save the West (for which she was paid an initial advance of £1512), Truss blames the ‘economic establishment’ for not properly warning her of the consequences of her policies and complains of a lack of support from everyone except party members, a ‘telling reminder of the disconnect’ between them and Tory MPs. She admits that it was a ‘relief’ to resign on 20 October. ‘The whole experience as prime minister had been quite surreal and my resignation felt like just another dramatic moment in a very strange film in which I had somehow been cast.’ Which is pretty much the way it felt from the outside. She lasted 49 days as prime minister. Short term.

Her replacement, Rishi Sunak, has been prime minister for less than two years, and has succeeded only in reanimating Cameron’s career (and life?) by sending him to the Foreign Office, while maintaining exceptionally low opinion ratings for himself and his party. Having called an election for 4 July, seemingly for want of a better idea, Sunak has now been reduced to adapting earlier party slogans: his remarkably uncatchy ‘Clear Plan. Bold Action. Secure Future’ (contra Labour’s ‘Change’) is a dim echo of May’s ‘Strong and Stable Government’ from 2017, and an even dimmer one of Cameron’s ‘Long-Term Economic Plan’ from 2015. All Sunak can really think to run on is what, until Truss, remained the party’s old faithful: its claim to be the trusted keeper of the British economy.

Nowhere​ has the Tory Party’s short-termism been more evident than in its policy of austerity and its cocksure Bullingdon-boy belief that it could avoid doing injury to itself while presiding over a carnival of national self-harm. The events and personalities I have described up to now are almost irrelevant. It is the disastrous stewardship of the economy and the public realm that has shattered Britain’s self-image as a prosperous, successful, well-functioning polity.

In June 2010, George Osborne, newly appointed chancellor, announced that in order to bring the nation’s finances under control (in the wake of the 2008 crash, gross government debt stood at 69 per cent of GDP), it would be necessary to reduce government borrowing by £120 billion within five years, to be achieved overwhelmingly by reducing government expenditure: public sector pay would be frozen; welfare benefits frozen, capped, reduced or merely downgraded in real terms; and the budget of every government department bar two (the NHS and international aid) slashed. Between 2010/11 and 2015/16, more than 50 per cent was cut from the central grant to local government; close to or more than 30 per cent from the budgets of the Department for Communities and Local Government, the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the Department for Work and Pensions, the Ministry of Justice and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport; more than 20 per cent from the Foreign Office and the Home Office; more than 10 per cent from the Department of Business, Industry and Skills, the Department for Transport and the Ministry of Defence; between 5 and 10 per cent from the departments for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and the Department for Education. Public sector net investment had grown from £6 billion a year in 2000/1 to £35 billion a year by 2007/8; yet, ‘showing a preference for the short term ... that would have done justice to the most rapacious of bankers’, as Hindmoor writes, public investment was cut by Osborne from £48 billion in 2010/11 to £36 billion in 2015/16. After the Tories were returned to power in 2015, no longer in coalition with the meekly enabling Lib Dems, the squeeze continued, and long outlasted the resignation of Cameron and the sacking of Osborne in the wake of the Brexit referendum. When in 2019 Osborne’s successor but one, Sajid Javid, announced that for the first time since 2010 all government departments would receive a budget increase, and that this represented ‘the end of austerity’, the Institute for Fiscal Studies pointed out that real government spending outside the NHS was 21 per cent lower, in per person terms, than in 2010.

Austerity was always a political choice. Aided by a juvenile note left by the outgoing Labour chief secretary to the treasury, Liam Byrne, to his successor – ‘Dear Chief Secretary, I’m afraid there is no money. Kind regards – and good luck!’ – Osborne framed Britain’s apparently parlous economic situation as a direct result not of the financial crash, but of Labour’s levels of public investment over its thirteen years in power. (Cameron took a copy of Byrne’s note on the campaign trail in 2015 and Sunak was still referring to it on the first day of this year’s election campaign.) The dominant, and supremely misleading, comparison was with the Greek economy. The dominant metaphor was the equally misleading one of the ‘maxed-out’ national credit card. As was pointed out at the time, though not very effectively by the Labour Party itself, this was a travesty of the facts. National economies are not like household finances (and Greece’s case was nothing like Britain’s). Labour’s levels of borrowing on the eve of the crash compared favourably with those of John Major’s Conservative government in the early 1990s; and – even if Labour’s petting of the financial sector had left Britain overexposed – in his Keynesian response to the crisis, Gordon Brown had pulled the economy back from the brink of disaster, even into modest growth by the time of the 2010 election. Labour had still gone into that campaign arguing that spending reductions would be necessary (largely at the insistence of Brown’s chancellor, Alistair Darling). But Osborne’s far grimmer prescription had no place for the view that, with interest rates at a historic low, it was an ideal time for the government to borrow to invest in the economy, maintaining services and jobs, boosting demand and growing the tax base, and thereby reducing the debt (something like the route chosen, with success, by President Obama). In fact, as Hindmoor notes, borrowing was so cheap in this period that, while the national debt continued to increase under the Tories (up 30 per cent by 2017), debt interest payments as a proportion of GDP ‘fell from 2.4 per cent in the early 2010s to 1.7 per cent in 2019’. The economy contracted under Osborne, before returning to growth; but the Office for Budget Responsibility (which Osborne set up) concluded that, by choosing to take an axe to an emergent recovery, the government had in fact reduced GDP by 1.4 per cent. In 2016, the OECD agreed that Osborne had adopted the wrong approach. As Hindmoor puts it, the ‘economy did not recover because of austerity. It recovered despite it.’ And yet, this weakened economy was shortly hammered by another Tory fetish: Brexit. And then by the Covid pandemic, which forced borrowing on a scale even larger than the crash. And then by Truss and Kwarteng’s market-spooking ‘mini-budget’. The cost of borrowing is now far higher than it was in 2010 and national debt is worth more than 100 per cent of GDP. Ctd....