This isn’t the place to analyze the state of the now three-week old war in the Middle East, except to say that it is clear that it has proved far more complex, and probably more protracted, than Donald Trump and his administration envisaged. His Director of the National Counterterrorism Center has resigned, saying that Iran “posed no imminent threat”. Formerly a Trump loyalist, the President responded to the resignation of his own nominated appointee by saying that “he was weak on security”. Lacking justified cause and defined outcome, the direct costs of the war to the US are already huge, whilst those to the global economy are incalculable. Already, it looks to be a case study of inept strategic and scenario planning, born of malignity and hubris, and perhaps not so very different in that respect from Putin’s attack on Ukraine.
One result of this ineptitude has been that, having embarked on this action without consulting any of America’s NATO allies, or those countries most impacted by its consequences, and having repeatedly insulted the UK in particular, Trump demanded that those same allies clear up the mess he is creating, quite falsely suggesting that NATO members have some obligation to do so. He then became enraged with them, and again with the UK in particular, for their understandable lack of enthusiasm to comply, as a prelude to petulantly declaring he didn’t need their help anyway. Even the US-Israel alliance is now under strain. So to inept planning we can add dire statecraft: Trump is, ahem, ‘no Churchill’.
At all events nobody, perhaps least of all Trump, has any idea when or where all this will end or, as Gideon Rachman of the Financial Times lays out, what its long-term repercussions (£) will be. Any thought that the outcome might at least be the overthrow of Iran’s repellent regime now seems unlikely and it is still less likely that, were that to eventuate, it would be replaced by a more palatable one. If anything, as Rachman gloomily concludes, the regime “may yet emerge in a stronger position internationally”. Whether or not that proves to be the case, the war will surely have many unintended and unexpected consequences, including for post-Brexit Britain.
The Home Front
Certainly the Iran war can already be seen to have profound implications for the UK, at least some of which relate more or less directly to Brexit and its aftermath. For one thing, it has sharply underlined the point I made at the time of the Greenland crisis: that, acknowledged or not, Keir Starmer cannot avoid the choice he has claimed not to exist between Europe and the US, if only because Trump keeps forcing that choice upon him. Thus, as with Greenland, but even more pointedly, Starmer has continued to rebuff the US by openly refusing to involve the UK in the attack on Iran.
On the other side of the equation, it is quite clear that the UK and the EU are in the same unenviable boat, enmeshed in a dependent relationship with an undependable partner. From that general situation flow such things as the UK and EU’s shared problem of how to deal, or cope, with the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and the related problem of how to deal with the US decision to lift sanctions on Russian oil exports.
This unfolding situation has also had several impacts on domestic politics, of which the most obvious since my previous post has been that both Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage have had to abruptly discard (and disown) their initial position that the UK should have joined forces with the US. In Badenoch’s case, she now even has the nerve to counsel against giving the kind of unconditional support she originally urged, whilst still repeating her repellent claim (discussed in my previous post) that Starmer’s policy is based on “trying to appease a sectarian vote”. For both Badenoch and Farage, the change may be because they realized that the public are not generally supportive of the war, dislike and distrust Trump, and are very much concerned about its impact on fuel prices and the subsequent consequences of that.
Even so, it is worth recalling the nature of the initial criticisms they made of Starmer for not ‘joining in’ as well as some of the reasons they now give for keeping a distance from the conflict, for these are very similar. The initial criticism was widely couched in the language of humiliation, betrayal, and weakness, and several right-wing commentators, including Allison Pearson in the Telegraph (£), leapt gleefully on Trump’s negative comparison of Starmer with Winston Churchill as evidence of this humiliation. Then, when the line changed to one of non-involvement, this was accompanied by laments that this was because the UK was too weak in terms of military capacity to contribute to the war and that this, in Nigel Farage’s words, demonstrated the “humiliating state that we’ve sunk to today.”
It is certainly true that the UK’s military has been hollowed-out in recent years, and a great many people (myself included, for what very little that’s worth) have been warning about that, especially given the threat from Russia and the unreliability of Trump’s America, both things to which Farage, in particular, was entirely indifferent. It’s also true that this military weakness has been made evident by the current war. But that can hardly be laid at the door of the present government, since the problem long precedes its arrival, and in any case it is irrelevant to the decision not to join with the US in the sense that, as with every other country in the world except Israel, the UK thinks it would be ill-advised, even if we had the ability. However, the populist discussion of defence policy is not framed in terms of a rational assessment of threats and UK preparedness to respond to them. It is framed in terms of humiliation and betrayal.
This connects directly with the themes of this blog. For these were precisely the terms in which the Brexiters constantly talked about the Brexit process, week-in and week-out from almost as soon as the vote to leave was taken. That the same terms have now become embedded in political discourse, apart from in relation to Brexit itself, is one of the reasons why I have made Brexitism as well as Brexit the focus of the blog. It is also the case that throughout the Brexit process the imagery and mythologization of the Second World War have been a constant presence, and within that Churchill, of course, holds an iconic position. So there is a thread connecting, for example, Boris Johnson’s (mendacious) invocation of Churchill when campaigning for Brexit with the supposed humiliation of the draft-dodger Trump repeatedly taunting the British Prime Minister for his lack of Churchillian credentials.
Pound foolish
It may seem absurd to move from the weighty matter of war to writing about what pictures will appear on British banknotes. But exactly that topic has provoked an angry convulsion amongst the populist right and in doing so demonstrated just how deeply embedded is the mindset I have just outlined.
In brief, a couple of weeks ago the Bank of England announced that the next generation of banknotes will feature images of British wildlife. This followed a public consultation exercise conducted last year when a variety of possible themes were proposed, of which ‘nature’ proved to be the most popular. So far, so boring. But the announcement provoked a wave of angry reaction, primarily from the political right but also, rather more surprisingly, from LibDem leader Ed Davey, which centred on the fact that in the process this would mean that – yes – Winston Churchill will no longer feature on the £5 note. (It was variously claimed he would be replaced by a badger, a beaver, or a hedgehog: in fact, the exact images have yet to be decided.)
This, according to Nigel Farage [warning: link to X], was “the definition of woke” whilst Kemi Badenoch was even more alarmed, saying it was “erasing our history”. Then, the populist ‘intellectuals’ weighed in. Matt Goodwin stressed, both on GB News [warning: link to X] and his Substack newsletter [warning: link to Goodwin’s Substack newsletter] that this was not a trivial matter because it was “not about banknote design, but something much deeper, something more insidious” which turned out to be “the slow erosion of our national memory”. He went on to invoke sociologist Frank Furedi’s claim that there is “a war against the past” underway. Furedi, for those lucky enough not to know, is one of the peculiar and unpleasant group of former Revolutionary Communist Party members, including former Brexit Party MEP Claire Fox, which morphed into the peculiar and unpleasant group of libertarian ‘contrarians’ who created Spiked Online.
Indeed, Spiked Online also joined the fray, with Gareth Roberts writing of how the Bank of England’s plans have “rightly riled up the nation”. Along the way, Roberts sneered at the very fact of there having been a public consultation, suggesting it would have been better for someone “in charge” to have made the decision, the implication presumably being that this was an example of wasteful state bureaucracy. Of course, had the decision been made in this way such commentators would undoubtedly have been outraged that ‘the elite’ had failed to consult ‘the people’. But Roberts’ main gripe, like Farage and most of the other complainers, was that this arose because of the Bank’s ‘woke’ desire to avoid the use of divisive images, and that Churchill was now regarded as divisive as a result of ‘wokeism’.
Plain foolish
This was, to be blunt, total gibberish. The claim arose because in the original consultation document one of the principles informing the themes offered to the public was that they should not be divisive (which is hardly unreasonable: who would want divisive images on the national currency anyway?) That is, it had nothing to do with Churchill, or indeed any other individual figure, and nor could it have done since these were, precisely, themes (i.e. not identifying the specific images to be used within those themes). One of those themes was ‘Notable Historical Figures’ but this came third, after both ‘Nature’ and ‘Architecture and Landmarks’. Had ‘historical figures’ been chosen, those pictured might or might not in the end have included Churchill. But this simply wasn’t what was at issue.
It was therefore an entirely manufactured outrage, but coalescing that outrage around the depiction of Churchill enabled the connection to be made with a wider set of claims about, in the first instance, Churchill generally. Thus Roberts linked to an earlier article in Spiked by – guess who? – Frank Furedi, fulminating about how Churchill “is a potent symbol of the civilisation culture warriors revile”. This then provided the gateway to the more general claims about history being erased and our national memory being eroded, a recurrent trope of Brexitism (see my post of November 2025 for more detail on the connections between Brexit, Brexitism, and the populist backlash against ‘woke’ history).
Actually, if anything, it showed historical ignorance and a failure of national memory. Churchill has only featured on banknotes since 2016, and historical figures of any sort only since 1970. This is hardly some ancient national tradition. For that matter, as a child one of my hobbies was collecting old farthing coins [1], which had been abolished in 1956 but which, since 1937, had carried the image of a wren. Prior to that, the image had been none other than Britannia herself, but would anyone seriously suggest that this change arose from some avant la lettre wokery bent on erasing the proud symbols of our national identity?
Plain mad
It is easy to mock all this, of course, but that would be a mistake. Even if one thinks that it just is the synthetic anger of people who are determined to get angry about anything then the very fact of that determination, and the reasons for it, are of interest. Goodwin said it was not trivial because in his eyes, and those of his fellow-ideologues, it is not. For him, it seems to connect with the ideas expressed in his latest book, published this week, entitled Suicide of a Nation: Immigration, Islam, Identity. That highly provocative, and surely rather mad, title in turn relates to the wider theme, currently influential within the populist right, of “suicidal empathy”. This term was coined by Canadian marketing academic Gad Saad and is to be developed in his own forthcoming book of that title, the book (and the concept) being enthusiastically endorsed by Elon Musk.
As with Goodwin and others with similar political commitments, Saad’s basic idea seems to be that through immigration, and especially Muslim immigration, ‘the elite’ is complicit in enacting the “suicide” of, variously, American, British or European culture (and thus carries at least echoes of the infamous racist conspiracy theory of the ‘Great Replacement’). Effectively, it is the same idea as that propounded by Rupert Lowe, Tommy Robinson, Nigel Farage and, just this week (£), the Conservative shadow justice secretary and hard Brexit architect Nick Timothy, but given a precarious patina of intellectualism. Or, to put it another way, it is the familiar ‘I just want my country back’ moan but using long words (in passing, note that many of the news stories upon which this worldview feeds are forensically dissected by Emma Monk’s excellent Monk Debunks Substack newsletter).
In this way, absurd as the row about banknotes may seem, it is actually a sliver within what, for some, is a war every bit as real, and perhaps more important, as that raging in the Middle East. Indeed, it is undoubtedly the case that for some, at least on the US right, most notably the morally broken and dangerously incompetent Secretary for War Pete Hegseth, the two wars are actually part of a single religious war. For that matter, it’s not unreasonable to link, for example, Hegseth’s determination to remove the scourge of ‘Diversity, Equity and Inclusion’ (DEI) in the US military with, for example, Goodwin’s attempt to connect the banknote non-issue to DEI activism (about 30 seconds into the clip).
Thus, coming back more directly to the main argument of this post, the row over the banknotes is a fresh illustration of the narrative of humiliation, betrayal and weakness. For it connects to the idea of a nation losing its identity, culture and history; its military prowess and its symbols of greatness and, most toxic of all, the idea that this is happening not by chance or the ineluctable passage of history but ‘suicidally’, due to the ‘treason of the clerks’.
The Churchillian challenge
Despite the increasingly hysterical and almost unhinged language being used by these populists, there is perhaps a sense that the steam behind their project is abating. Indeed, perhaps that is why the language they are using is becoming so uncontrolled. If so, one reason for that could well be that for many months now Trump’s administration, the most direct embodiment of that project, has itself become so obviously unhinged, and the chaotic mess he has created with his war on Iran makes that even more glaring.
Certainly in the UK there are now clear signs that Reform’s poll ratings have started to slip. There are also signs that Starmer is getting a little bolder, not just in standing up to Trump but also in condemning the populist right. The two are somewhat linked, as his judgements about the Iran War have been in line with public opinion and enabled him to expose the foolishness of both Badenoch and Farage. He was also notably quick to condemn Nick Timothy’s anti-Muslim remarks this week. Meanwhile, internal Labour opposition looks set to lead to at least some softening of the government’s draconian immigration plans.
On Europe, too, the government has now begun to speak much more openly about the case for closer regulatory alignment, including in a speech this week by Chancellor Rachel Reeves. Whether she and the government have understood that alignment, in itself, doesn’t mean access, which also requires certification and legal oversight from the EU, remains to be seen. Perhaps they have, since, albeit quietly, the realities of ‘dynamic alignment’ are being accepted wholesale in the government’s attempts to complete an SPS deal with the EU.
More to the point, even at its most maximal an alignment policy does relatively little to reduce the costs of Brexit which, strikingly, Reeves referred to by using the 8% estimate from last year’s NBER report (and its higher end, at that) rather than the standard 4% OBR figure built into the official budget; striking because the higher the costs are admitted to be, the more they mandate a stronger response than that of the reset. Certainly others within the Labour Party have begun to be increasingly vociferous in advocating such a response, with Sadiq Khan this week calling for the party to adopt a ‘rejoin’ policy at the next election. Notably, in making this argument Khan referenced not just the costs of Brexit but the changing world order created by Trump.
These may be straws in the wind, or perhaps to think so is just clutching at straws, and long-term readers of this blog will know that I am more inclined to be Cassandra-like than Pollyannaish. But there is at least the possibility that one of the many unintended consequences of the Iran war may be to change the course of the politics of Brexit and Brexitism. Who knows, perhaps in the end we will have reason, as Hegseth yesterday urged us, to “thank President Trump”. However, for that to happen will also require what we might reasonably call a more Churchillian politics, in two senses.
On the one hand, whilst there were many contradictions and ambiguities of Churchill’s views about what became the EU there was at least one strong strand within them which recognized its strategic necessity. That necessity would now be described in different terms to those used by Churchill, since the world, Europe, and Britain are now very different, but its basic contours still hold good. On the other hand, whilst again there were many facets to Churchill’s long political career, many of them less than edifying, to say the least, his primary historical legacy will always be that of providing the national leadership needed in a world at war [2].
It is just such a combination of strategy and leadership which Britain needs if it is to take the opportunity to renew itself in the world being created by Trump’s war.
Notes
[1] The aim being to amass as many different years as possible. Those thinking this suggests I was a strange child will have their suspicions confirmed by the fact that at the same sort of time I collected empty crisp packets, the aim in that case being to find as many different makes and flavours as possible – which was not as easy as it sounds when Golden Wonder ‘Ready Salted’ was so ubiquitous. In mitigation, this was in the 1970s, when we had to make our own entertainment, although my attempts to interest visitors and relatives in my crisp packet collection suggested that, even in those days, greater excitement was available.
[2] The populist idea that recognizing the flaws and well as the qualities of Churchill is some kind of disrespectful, woke revisionism is utterly dimwitted (as it is when applied to the more general recognition that British history as a whole is a mixture of the great and the terrible). It was a point well-made by the Irish Taoiseach, Micheál Martin this week when he defended Keir Starmer against Trump’s criticisms during a meeting at the White House which, itself, could be read as an example of how Trump has clarified the commonality of interests between the UK and EU members.
Friday, 20 March 2026
Friday, 6 March 2026
Real war and culture war
Much of the news of the last fortnight has been pushed into the background by last weekend’s US-Israel attack on Iran and the regional conflict it has engendered. Where this will end is unclear, not least since it has no coherent aims. That is mainly well beyond the scope of this blog, but there are plenty of connections with Brexit and Brexitism.
Post-Brexit geo-politics
One is just that, as with Greenland, Venezuela and Ukraine, not to mention climate change and tariff wars, it is yet another example of an international crisis where the UK’s position and interests are far closer to those of countries like France and Germany, and the EU generally, than to the US. Indeed, as regards Iran, specifically, that has been obvious since Trump pulled out of the nuclear deal in 2018. Now, however the conflict proceeds, it is almost inevitable that the EU and the UK will face common challenges in living with its aftermath which, if only for geographical reasons, will impinge far more on the European continent than on the US. As such, the crisis is a reminder of the fundamental strategic incongruity of Brexit.
It also, again as with other crises, provides a further illustration of the additional pressures Brexit places on the UK in its attempt to navigate around Trump’s capriciousness, spite, and bullying. As Guardian columnist Rafael Behr argued, there are no good options for Keir Starmer in this situation. Nor would there be for any other Prime Minister. I don’t, however, entirely agree with Behr that Starmer’s response pleases nobody. Personally, I think he has handled it as well as anyone could and many commentators, including Financial Times columnist Janan Ganesh (£), have said something similar.
Rather, the point is that Starmer is now so beleaguered that his many opponents are unwilling to give him any credit at all, or even to acknowledge that there are any difficulties or dilemmas for the UK. And even amongst those who are willing to acknowledge those difficulties, his position means he has very little goodwill or political capital to draw upon. Thus there are at least hints in the opinion polls so far that the public support the way the war is being handled whilst thinking that Starmer is handling it badly.
The Brexit imprint
The particular way that the domestic discussion has played out so far also bears the imprint of Brexit and Brexitism. There are many nuances to this, but in very broad terms public opinion polls show that the supporters of Reform and the Conservatives are considerably more likely to favour allowing the US to use UK bases to attack Iran than those of Labour, the Greens and the LibDems. Certainly the leaders of the former two parties castigated Starmer for not initially agreeing to such usage, as well as for being supposedly deficient, or at least dilatory, in protecting British military installations and assets in the conflict region.
Amongst the nuances, one of the more interesting is that, unlike Farage and Reform, Rupert Lowe and his new Restore Britain party are opposed to all UK involvement in the conflict (warning: links to the X cesspit where Lowe has found his natural home). This reflects a longstanding tension within the nationalist right between jingoistic bellicosity and isolationism, and in the past Farage, too, has been sceptical about UK military interventionism. Now this has become a new front in the growing schism, discussed in my previous post, between Reform and the even more extreme, or at least more openly extreme, far-right groups such as Lowe’s.
Of course, exactly the same tension exists in the US right, with Trump and the MAGA movement having in the past abjured such entanglements, especially in the Middle East. Trump’s new-found willingness for military adventurism has many explanations, including, I suspect, egotistical pleasure. But perhaps the key point is that what he and MAGA most objected to was the doctrine of ‘liberal interventionism’, which even in its least defensible manifestations had, or at least attempted to create, the façade of moral justification.
Trump’s doctrine, chillingly articulated by Secretary of War Pete Hesgeth this week, is an almost Nietzschean paean to a “warrior ethos” which disdains not just any residue of concern for international law but even “stupid rules of engagement”. As with any bully, the ultimate justification is the simple one: ‘because I can’. No doubt this has its own appeal to Farage, the one-time Flashman of Dulwich College, even were he not minded to support any initiative of Mr. Brexit, his hero in the White House, regardless of its merits. That support does not, of course, lead him to think Britain should accept any of the refugees the conflict will inevitably create and on this, at least, he and Lowe are agreed.
The intensifying culture war
There is also a more direct connection between Brexitism and the political reaction to the Iran crisis, articulated most clearly, and most disgracefully, by Kemi Badenoch when she alleged that Starmer’s initial decision to deny the US use of UK airbases was due to his desire to pander to Muslim voters. She explicitly spliced this together with the outcome of the Gorton and Denton by-election (discussed in more detail below) adding to what has been a deeply unpleasant upsurge in the culture war demonization of British Muslims.
Yet, as is shown not just by Lowe’s anti-war stance but that of some Tory MPs, including the most senior and one of the most right-wing of them, Sir Edward Leigh, as well as many MPs of all parties, opposition to or concern about UK involvement spans all political positions, ethnicities and faiths (even assuming, which is surely unwarranted, that ‘Muslims’ en masse have a particular view of it). For that matter, the majority of the general public (excluding ‘don’t knows’) are opposed to UK airbases being used by the US [1], something which only the exceptionally dull-minded need to be told does not imply support for Iran’s despicable theocratic regime. Why, then, ascribe Starmer’s decision to Muslims? And if this was its reason, then how does Badenoch explain the subsequent decision to allow the use of bases for ‘defensive’ operations?
Inevitably, Badenoch’s accusation was subsequently echoed by Trump, allowing him to return to his habitual attacks on Britain’s supposed ‘unrecognizability’ (which is code for Muslim immigration) and on London Mayor Sadiq Khan, as well as to repeat his criticism of Starmer’s lack of support for the war against Iran. This in turn allowed Badenoch, Farage, and others to criticize Starmer for damaging UK-US relations, and so the whole crazy, cross-pollinating stupidity rolls on and on. It is a grim irony that the Brexiters, who set such store by sovereignty, demand total fealty to a foreign president. And a grim reminder of their bogus patriotism that they encourage and amplify the verbal attacks of that president upon their own country.
Badenoch’s accusation was also a manifestation of an explosion of quite vile, as well as dishonest, claims on social media that the new Green MP, Hannah Spencer, had joined Muslims for a minute’s silence to honour the memory of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and another making the same claim about Home Secretary Shabana Mahmoud. These and similar claims were based on photographs that were self-evidently taken well before Khamanei was killed and had nothing whatsoever to do with him or his death. Yet they were circulated by numerous high-profile right-wing figures, as influential as they are unhinged, ranging from Allison Pearson to John Cleese, and shared thousands, if not millions, of times. (I’m not going to link to this sewage, so readers will have to take my word for it.)
In this way, all of the now familiar skein of interconnections between the US and UK populist right, Brexiters, Brexitists, and the post-Brexit rise of ethnonationalism have been in evidence in the domestic response to the Iran crisis [2]. No doubt that would have been true in any event, but, as Badenoch’s intervention illustrates, it took on a particular hue because of the previous week’s by-election in Gorton and Denton.
The Gorton and Denton result
The first thing to say about that is that Reform, and their peculiar and obnoxious candidate Matt Goodwin, failed to win. Of course, it would have been remarkable had they done so, as this was not an obvious target seat for them, but it bears saying because there had been a sense, purveyed not just by the party but the drama-hungry media, that victory was within grasp. And that did not seem impossible given opinion polls showing an almost even three-way split in support between Reform, Greens, and Labour. Had it gone Reform’s way, that would undoubtedly have generated a rash of commentary about Reform being on an unstoppable journey to government.
So it matters that Reform failed, and failed by a significant margin. It also matters that, as happened at Caerphilly, when there was a route to defeat Reform and to reject Labour, voters took it. Thus in Gorton and Denton the Green vote (presumably) comprised those who straightforwardly support the Greens, those who voted Green to stop Reform, and those who voted Green as a rejection of Labour. By the day of the election, opinion polls suggested that the Greens were just slightly more likely to defeat Reform than Labour, making the choice for those to whom this was the top priority just slightly easier. Whether, had that not been the case, anti-Reform voters would have been willing to vote Labour is unknowable, but is something which will have an important bearing on the next general election.
Family voting?
What we can be sure of is that, had Reform won, by even a handful of votes, they would have hailed it as a democratic triumph in which the ‘silent majority’ of ‘ordinary, decent people’ had decisively spoken. As it was, they latched on to reports made by an organization called ‘Democracy Volunteers’, that there had been unusual volumes of ‘family voting’. This term, which refers to a practice outlawed by the 2023 Secret Ballots Act, seemed to be code for the claim that Muslim men had accompanied their female relatives into the polling booths and coerced them into voting for – presumably – the Greens. (Though, who knows, perhaps the implication was that white Christian Conservative patriarchs were reasserting ‘traditional family values’ by forcing their womenfolk to vote for Goodwin.)
There was a certain amount of social media ribaldry about the idea that the socially liberal female candidate of a party led by a gay Jewish man might have been the candidate of choice amongst traditionalist Muslim men. But, whilst that isn’t an unreasonable observation to make, it perhaps misses the nature of the accusation being made, which was two-fold: that the Green Party had concealed its social liberalism from some Muslim voters in election leaflets written in Urdu, and that the appeal it had for such voters was in its critique of Israel and support for Palestinians.
However, equally, even if these accusations were true, those making them never explained what is so wrong with emphasizing the party’s positions on these issues to voters who might support them, regardless of its position on other issues. All (successful) political parties build coalitions of voters with disparate, and often contradictory, priorities. We might also recall how, during the referendum, the Leave campaign deliberately and skillfully targeted different voter groups, including different ethnic groups, with messages tailored to their perceived concerns.
Whether or not the charge of ‘family voting’ was true, which is contested and is (rightly) under investigation, and despite that fact that, even if true, it is arithmetically implausible to think it could have been a clinching factor given the size of the Green majority, it quickly became linked to the claim that the Greens had won on the basis of “sectarianism”. This again seemed to be code for making an appeal to Muslims, or perhaps just anyone with dark skin. From this exploded a whole series of accusations about rigged postal voting and “foreign-born voters” having “stolen” the election.
These were not just social media talking points but, for example, were splashed on the front page of the Mail. This culminated in Farage announcing that Reform’s policy is now that foreigners will be banned from voting in elections, a reference to the longstanding right of nationals from qualifying Commonwealth countries, lawfully resident in the UK, to vote. One might now question the diligence with which Goodwin, if elected, would have worked for all his constituents and, for that matter, that of the existing Reform MPs in this respect.
Hypocrisy and ethno-nationalist sectarianism
It would be quite some task to unpick all the layers of hypocrisy in all this, so I’ll just make a few points. One is that Farage has constantly made complaints about electoral fraud, going back to at least 2014 which have rarely, if ever, been proven. But of course for operators like Farage that doesn’t matter: the accusation lodges in the public mind whereas the subsequent investigation showing it to be false is barely noticed. Another is to recall his own sanctimonious finger-wagging at ‘remainers’, when he insisted that "for a civilised democracy to work you need the losers' consent”. A third is how he, and other Brexiters, sought to galvanize Commonwealth immigrant voters to support Brexit. Indeed, many Brexiters argued that EU Freedom of Movement was effectively racist in discriminating against Commonwealth, especially South Asian, immigration.
Hypocrisy aside, these highly racialized allegations of electoral fraud have a particular salience because of the recent surge of ethno-nationalism, which now calls into question whether British nationals are ‘really’ British and/or English if they, or perhaps even their parents and grandparents, were not born here, at least if they are not white. It is actually this, if anything, which deserves the label of ‘sectarianism’ and, moreover, rather than sectarianism explaining the Green’s victory, it was the sectarianism of pitching almost entirely to ‘white working class’ voters which explains Reform’s failure to win.
What Reform’s reaction to this failure shows is that it will not be enough to defeat them (and similar parties) at the ballot box in order to expunge their influence. Indeed, there seems every prospect, and some indication, that if Reform fail to win the next general election then, Trump-like, they will cry foul. It may even be that, just as it often seemed as if the Brexiters would have preferred to have lost the referendum, the Brexitists would prefer to lose the next election, but to destabilize the country even further by positioning the victors as illegitimate and the entire democratic system as corrupted.
Questions for Labour
Against this background, the Gorton and Denton result also posed some serious questions for the Labour Party. At one level, these can be thought about in terms of electoral strategy and, as such, their answer is pretty obvious and has been very widely identified. That answer can be expressed in various ways, but was summed up by Sadiq Khan’s argument that Labour have to “stop channelling Reform and unite with progressives”. In effect, this is “the real leadership crisis” facing Keir Starmer which I discussed in my previous post.
However, the issues go much deeper than Starmer and much longer ago, after the 2021 Hartlepool by election, I set out some of these. Not all of that post has stood the test of time [3], but the central point holds: in very brief, the need to calibrate to representing Labour’s actual (potential) electoral coalition rather than that which historically existed. In that post, and elsewhere (£), I pointed out that part of the barrier to this is one of political psychology, whereby the party is heavily invested in the idea that male manual workers in manufacturing industry are the template for working-class authenticity. Since then, I’ve become increasingly convinced that this is actually a manifestation of precisely the same nostalgia which is now so evident as a driver for the political right and Brexitism.
Labour’s terrible answers
As mentioned in my most recent post, there seemed to be a possibility that the ‘defenestration’ of Morgan McSweeney might mark an end to this kind of ‘Blue Labourism’ (though its grip on Labour goes deeper than McSweeney or his mentor Maurice Glasman). I finished that post by saying it was doubtful whether Starmer could rise to the challenge. There is now really no longer any room for doubt.
Starmer responded to the Greens’ by-election victory by making precisely the same accusation of “sectarianism” that Farage had levelled and, by linking this to the endorsement given to the Greens by the odious George Galloway, implicitly mirrored Reform’s claims about Islamification having played a decisive role. It was repellent in itself and, like so much else that Starmer does, politically maladroit, not least in ignoring what no doubt will have been the agonizing choice for some habitual Labour voters to support the Greens as the best chance of defeating Reform. That, as with his infamous ‘island of strangers’ speech, he later distanced himself from what he has said only underscores the maladroitness
At the same time, Shabana Mahmood announced that she intends to press ahead with her hard-line anti-immigration reforms. These include, most shamefully, retrospectively increasing the amount of time before existing immigrants can apply for indefinite leave to remain and making asylum awards temporary. Again, this is politically maladroit, just at the basic level of garnering electoral support: it won’t satisfy those minded to vote Reform and it will repel those minded to desert Labour to vote Green etc. And if, as may well happen, internal Labour opposition leads to it being abandoned then it will be chalked up not as a return to principle but yet another U-turn.
It is also maladroit in a more general sense. Labour’s most compelling pitch at the last election was that it would offer competence, but this policy is woefully incompetent in the context of now rapidly declining immigration and the economic need for more, and not less, immigration. It thus directly contradicts the government’s central policy of boosting economic growth as well as exacerbating its fiscal constraints. It is even incompetent in terms of any policy aim of integration, since making it harder to qualify for permanent residence makes it less likely that immigrants will integrate.
The competence issue matters because what is at stake here is not, as many commentators claim and, no doubt, some political activists and voters hope, that Labour need to respond to the by-election defeat with a ‘lurch to the left’. Setting an immigration policy which is fair, rational, and consonant with economic and demographic needs is not, in itself, ‘left-wing’. Operating an efficient and humane asylum process is not, in itself, ‘left-wing’. Making a clear distinction between immigration and asylum policies is not, in itself, ‘left-wing’. To think otherwise is to cede the idea that these are somehow ‘extreme’ propositions and that the policies of virtually zero immigration, mass deportation, and the near-total rejection of asylum seekers advocated by Reform and others are the ‘norm’ or ‘moderate’.
Yet this is what the Labour government has accepted, and it is the most glaring way in which it has accepted Brexitism. Of course it is also this which has always lain at the heart of the timidity of the Brexit ‘reset’ with the EU, a reset which even in its own limited terms was denounced this week (£) by the Commons foreign affairs committee as “suffering from a lack of direction, definition and drive”. If there was not so much other news, I would have more to say about that, including about Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ claim that she wants to go further in breaking down trade barriers with the EU. Since there is no evidence, and surely no possibility, that this presages a break with Labour’s ‘red lines’, for now all that needs to be said is that the dishonesty and delusions of Brexit and Brexitism continue unabated.
Small comforts
It’s hard to feel anything other than pessimism at the moment. However this war develops, as always with war it will be ordinary, blameless people who simply want to lead ordinary, peaceful lives who suffer most. Something similar could be said of those being relentlessly attacked in the domestic culture wars.
There is only a small, though not entirely negligible, comfort in being spared the spectacle of Matt Goodwin pontificating on these matters in the House of Commons. But perhaps a slightly greater one in what that may betoken about the British electorate.
Notes
[1] The way this question was asked in the survey linked to does not really disclose what the public think about the subtle but important distinction between the use of UK bases for the attack on Iran (which the government did not grant) and their use to launch defensive operations against Iranian counter-attacks which may imperil British subjects and assets (which the government approved). If it did, I suspect that the public would support the government’s decisions in both respects. That seems to be borne out by other survey data about what the UK’s military response to the war should be.
[2] There’s a whole post that could be written about that fact that somewhere in that skein is Dubai. Lauded by Richard Tice as an exemplar of safety, it has become a magnet for right-wing Britishimmigrants expats, most prominently Tice’s partner, the reliably graceless ‘journalist’ Isabel Oakeshott (£). There, such proud patriots gloat, one can escape the roving gangs, ‘two-tier’ justice, and Orwellian suppressions of the right to incite murder – not to mention, of course, the taxes – of ‘Broken Britain’. As a view of what some have called the “gangsters’ paradise” of Dubai, it was always as hopelessly one-sided as the depiction of Britain. Now, with a certain piquancy (£), our intrepid correspondent reports that “expats brace of what tomorrow may bring” (£) as the British State organizes a rather different repatriation to that envisaged by some of her co-ideologues. Equally piquant is the news (£) of those desperately trying to get back to Dubai so as to avoid falling foul of rules to qualify for tax residency.
[3] The most egregious failing is that I assumed, not unreasonably, but as it has out turned mistakenly, that Boris Johnson had re-made the Conservatives as an electorally successful populist party and seen off the challenge of Farage.
Post-Brexit geo-politics
One is just that, as with Greenland, Venezuela and Ukraine, not to mention climate change and tariff wars, it is yet another example of an international crisis where the UK’s position and interests are far closer to those of countries like France and Germany, and the EU generally, than to the US. Indeed, as regards Iran, specifically, that has been obvious since Trump pulled out of the nuclear deal in 2018. Now, however the conflict proceeds, it is almost inevitable that the EU and the UK will face common challenges in living with its aftermath which, if only for geographical reasons, will impinge far more on the European continent than on the US. As such, the crisis is a reminder of the fundamental strategic incongruity of Brexit.
It also, again as with other crises, provides a further illustration of the additional pressures Brexit places on the UK in its attempt to navigate around Trump’s capriciousness, spite, and bullying. As Guardian columnist Rafael Behr argued, there are no good options for Keir Starmer in this situation. Nor would there be for any other Prime Minister. I don’t, however, entirely agree with Behr that Starmer’s response pleases nobody. Personally, I think he has handled it as well as anyone could and many commentators, including Financial Times columnist Janan Ganesh (£), have said something similar.
Rather, the point is that Starmer is now so beleaguered that his many opponents are unwilling to give him any credit at all, or even to acknowledge that there are any difficulties or dilemmas for the UK. And even amongst those who are willing to acknowledge those difficulties, his position means he has very little goodwill or political capital to draw upon. Thus there are at least hints in the opinion polls so far that the public support the way the war is being handled whilst thinking that Starmer is handling it badly.
The Brexit imprint
The particular way that the domestic discussion has played out so far also bears the imprint of Brexit and Brexitism. There are many nuances to this, but in very broad terms public opinion polls show that the supporters of Reform and the Conservatives are considerably more likely to favour allowing the US to use UK bases to attack Iran than those of Labour, the Greens and the LibDems. Certainly the leaders of the former two parties castigated Starmer for not initially agreeing to such usage, as well as for being supposedly deficient, or at least dilatory, in protecting British military installations and assets in the conflict region.
Amongst the nuances, one of the more interesting is that, unlike Farage and Reform, Rupert Lowe and his new Restore Britain party are opposed to all UK involvement in the conflict (warning: links to the X cesspit where Lowe has found his natural home). This reflects a longstanding tension within the nationalist right between jingoistic bellicosity and isolationism, and in the past Farage, too, has been sceptical about UK military interventionism. Now this has become a new front in the growing schism, discussed in my previous post, between Reform and the even more extreme, or at least more openly extreme, far-right groups such as Lowe’s.
Of course, exactly the same tension exists in the US right, with Trump and the MAGA movement having in the past abjured such entanglements, especially in the Middle East. Trump’s new-found willingness for military adventurism has many explanations, including, I suspect, egotistical pleasure. But perhaps the key point is that what he and MAGA most objected to was the doctrine of ‘liberal interventionism’, which even in its least defensible manifestations had, or at least attempted to create, the façade of moral justification.
Trump’s doctrine, chillingly articulated by Secretary of War Pete Hesgeth this week, is an almost Nietzschean paean to a “warrior ethos” which disdains not just any residue of concern for international law but even “stupid rules of engagement”. As with any bully, the ultimate justification is the simple one: ‘because I can’. No doubt this has its own appeal to Farage, the one-time Flashman of Dulwich College, even were he not minded to support any initiative of Mr. Brexit, his hero in the White House, regardless of its merits. That support does not, of course, lead him to think Britain should accept any of the refugees the conflict will inevitably create and on this, at least, he and Lowe are agreed.
The intensifying culture war
There is also a more direct connection between Brexitism and the political reaction to the Iran crisis, articulated most clearly, and most disgracefully, by Kemi Badenoch when she alleged that Starmer’s initial decision to deny the US use of UK airbases was due to his desire to pander to Muslim voters. She explicitly spliced this together with the outcome of the Gorton and Denton by-election (discussed in more detail below) adding to what has been a deeply unpleasant upsurge in the culture war demonization of British Muslims.
Yet, as is shown not just by Lowe’s anti-war stance but that of some Tory MPs, including the most senior and one of the most right-wing of them, Sir Edward Leigh, as well as many MPs of all parties, opposition to or concern about UK involvement spans all political positions, ethnicities and faiths (even assuming, which is surely unwarranted, that ‘Muslims’ en masse have a particular view of it). For that matter, the majority of the general public (excluding ‘don’t knows’) are opposed to UK airbases being used by the US [1], something which only the exceptionally dull-minded need to be told does not imply support for Iran’s despicable theocratic regime. Why, then, ascribe Starmer’s decision to Muslims? And if this was its reason, then how does Badenoch explain the subsequent decision to allow the use of bases for ‘defensive’ operations?
Inevitably, Badenoch’s accusation was subsequently echoed by Trump, allowing him to return to his habitual attacks on Britain’s supposed ‘unrecognizability’ (which is code for Muslim immigration) and on London Mayor Sadiq Khan, as well as to repeat his criticism of Starmer’s lack of support for the war against Iran. This in turn allowed Badenoch, Farage, and others to criticize Starmer for damaging UK-US relations, and so the whole crazy, cross-pollinating stupidity rolls on and on. It is a grim irony that the Brexiters, who set such store by sovereignty, demand total fealty to a foreign president. And a grim reminder of their bogus patriotism that they encourage and amplify the verbal attacks of that president upon their own country.
Badenoch’s accusation was also a manifestation of an explosion of quite vile, as well as dishonest, claims on social media that the new Green MP, Hannah Spencer, had joined Muslims for a minute’s silence to honour the memory of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and another making the same claim about Home Secretary Shabana Mahmoud. These and similar claims were based on photographs that were self-evidently taken well before Khamanei was killed and had nothing whatsoever to do with him or his death. Yet they were circulated by numerous high-profile right-wing figures, as influential as they are unhinged, ranging from Allison Pearson to John Cleese, and shared thousands, if not millions, of times. (I’m not going to link to this sewage, so readers will have to take my word for it.)
In this way, all of the now familiar skein of interconnections between the US and UK populist right, Brexiters, Brexitists, and the post-Brexit rise of ethnonationalism have been in evidence in the domestic response to the Iran crisis [2]. No doubt that would have been true in any event, but, as Badenoch’s intervention illustrates, it took on a particular hue because of the previous week’s by-election in Gorton and Denton.
The Gorton and Denton result
The first thing to say about that is that Reform, and their peculiar and obnoxious candidate Matt Goodwin, failed to win. Of course, it would have been remarkable had they done so, as this was not an obvious target seat for them, but it bears saying because there had been a sense, purveyed not just by the party but the drama-hungry media, that victory was within grasp. And that did not seem impossible given opinion polls showing an almost even three-way split in support between Reform, Greens, and Labour. Had it gone Reform’s way, that would undoubtedly have generated a rash of commentary about Reform being on an unstoppable journey to government.
So it matters that Reform failed, and failed by a significant margin. It also matters that, as happened at Caerphilly, when there was a route to defeat Reform and to reject Labour, voters took it. Thus in Gorton and Denton the Green vote (presumably) comprised those who straightforwardly support the Greens, those who voted Green to stop Reform, and those who voted Green as a rejection of Labour. By the day of the election, opinion polls suggested that the Greens were just slightly more likely to defeat Reform than Labour, making the choice for those to whom this was the top priority just slightly easier. Whether, had that not been the case, anti-Reform voters would have been willing to vote Labour is unknowable, but is something which will have an important bearing on the next general election.
Family voting?
What we can be sure of is that, had Reform won, by even a handful of votes, they would have hailed it as a democratic triumph in which the ‘silent majority’ of ‘ordinary, decent people’ had decisively spoken. As it was, they latched on to reports made by an organization called ‘Democracy Volunteers’, that there had been unusual volumes of ‘family voting’. This term, which refers to a practice outlawed by the 2023 Secret Ballots Act, seemed to be code for the claim that Muslim men had accompanied their female relatives into the polling booths and coerced them into voting for – presumably – the Greens. (Though, who knows, perhaps the implication was that white Christian Conservative patriarchs were reasserting ‘traditional family values’ by forcing their womenfolk to vote for Goodwin.)
There was a certain amount of social media ribaldry about the idea that the socially liberal female candidate of a party led by a gay Jewish man might have been the candidate of choice amongst traditionalist Muslim men. But, whilst that isn’t an unreasonable observation to make, it perhaps misses the nature of the accusation being made, which was two-fold: that the Green Party had concealed its social liberalism from some Muslim voters in election leaflets written in Urdu, and that the appeal it had for such voters was in its critique of Israel and support for Palestinians.
However, equally, even if these accusations were true, those making them never explained what is so wrong with emphasizing the party’s positions on these issues to voters who might support them, regardless of its position on other issues. All (successful) political parties build coalitions of voters with disparate, and often contradictory, priorities. We might also recall how, during the referendum, the Leave campaign deliberately and skillfully targeted different voter groups, including different ethnic groups, with messages tailored to their perceived concerns.
Whether or not the charge of ‘family voting’ was true, which is contested and is (rightly) under investigation, and despite that fact that, even if true, it is arithmetically implausible to think it could have been a clinching factor given the size of the Green majority, it quickly became linked to the claim that the Greens had won on the basis of “sectarianism”. This again seemed to be code for making an appeal to Muslims, or perhaps just anyone with dark skin. From this exploded a whole series of accusations about rigged postal voting and “foreign-born voters” having “stolen” the election.
These were not just social media talking points but, for example, were splashed on the front page of the Mail. This culminated in Farage announcing that Reform’s policy is now that foreigners will be banned from voting in elections, a reference to the longstanding right of nationals from qualifying Commonwealth countries, lawfully resident in the UK, to vote. One might now question the diligence with which Goodwin, if elected, would have worked for all his constituents and, for that matter, that of the existing Reform MPs in this respect.
Hypocrisy and ethno-nationalist sectarianism
It would be quite some task to unpick all the layers of hypocrisy in all this, so I’ll just make a few points. One is that Farage has constantly made complaints about electoral fraud, going back to at least 2014 which have rarely, if ever, been proven. But of course for operators like Farage that doesn’t matter: the accusation lodges in the public mind whereas the subsequent investigation showing it to be false is barely noticed. Another is to recall his own sanctimonious finger-wagging at ‘remainers’, when he insisted that "for a civilised democracy to work you need the losers' consent”. A third is how he, and other Brexiters, sought to galvanize Commonwealth immigrant voters to support Brexit. Indeed, many Brexiters argued that EU Freedom of Movement was effectively racist in discriminating against Commonwealth, especially South Asian, immigration.
Hypocrisy aside, these highly racialized allegations of electoral fraud have a particular salience because of the recent surge of ethno-nationalism, which now calls into question whether British nationals are ‘really’ British and/or English if they, or perhaps even their parents and grandparents, were not born here, at least if they are not white. It is actually this, if anything, which deserves the label of ‘sectarianism’ and, moreover, rather than sectarianism explaining the Green’s victory, it was the sectarianism of pitching almost entirely to ‘white working class’ voters which explains Reform’s failure to win.
What Reform’s reaction to this failure shows is that it will not be enough to defeat them (and similar parties) at the ballot box in order to expunge their influence. Indeed, there seems every prospect, and some indication, that if Reform fail to win the next general election then, Trump-like, they will cry foul. It may even be that, just as it often seemed as if the Brexiters would have preferred to have lost the referendum, the Brexitists would prefer to lose the next election, but to destabilize the country even further by positioning the victors as illegitimate and the entire democratic system as corrupted.
Questions for Labour
Against this background, the Gorton and Denton result also posed some serious questions for the Labour Party. At one level, these can be thought about in terms of electoral strategy and, as such, their answer is pretty obvious and has been very widely identified. That answer can be expressed in various ways, but was summed up by Sadiq Khan’s argument that Labour have to “stop channelling Reform and unite with progressives”. In effect, this is “the real leadership crisis” facing Keir Starmer which I discussed in my previous post.
However, the issues go much deeper than Starmer and much longer ago, after the 2021 Hartlepool by election, I set out some of these. Not all of that post has stood the test of time [3], but the central point holds: in very brief, the need to calibrate to representing Labour’s actual (potential) electoral coalition rather than that which historically existed. In that post, and elsewhere (£), I pointed out that part of the barrier to this is one of political psychology, whereby the party is heavily invested in the idea that male manual workers in manufacturing industry are the template for working-class authenticity. Since then, I’ve become increasingly convinced that this is actually a manifestation of precisely the same nostalgia which is now so evident as a driver for the political right and Brexitism.
Labour’s terrible answers
As mentioned in my most recent post, there seemed to be a possibility that the ‘defenestration’ of Morgan McSweeney might mark an end to this kind of ‘Blue Labourism’ (though its grip on Labour goes deeper than McSweeney or his mentor Maurice Glasman). I finished that post by saying it was doubtful whether Starmer could rise to the challenge. There is now really no longer any room for doubt.
Starmer responded to the Greens’ by-election victory by making precisely the same accusation of “sectarianism” that Farage had levelled and, by linking this to the endorsement given to the Greens by the odious George Galloway, implicitly mirrored Reform’s claims about Islamification having played a decisive role. It was repellent in itself and, like so much else that Starmer does, politically maladroit, not least in ignoring what no doubt will have been the agonizing choice for some habitual Labour voters to support the Greens as the best chance of defeating Reform. That, as with his infamous ‘island of strangers’ speech, he later distanced himself from what he has said only underscores the maladroitness
At the same time, Shabana Mahmood announced that she intends to press ahead with her hard-line anti-immigration reforms. These include, most shamefully, retrospectively increasing the amount of time before existing immigrants can apply for indefinite leave to remain and making asylum awards temporary. Again, this is politically maladroit, just at the basic level of garnering electoral support: it won’t satisfy those minded to vote Reform and it will repel those minded to desert Labour to vote Green etc. And if, as may well happen, internal Labour opposition leads to it being abandoned then it will be chalked up not as a return to principle but yet another U-turn.
It is also maladroit in a more general sense. Labour’s most compelling pitch at the last election was that it would offer competence, but this policy is woefully incompetent in the context of now rapidly declining immigration and the economic need for more, and not less, immigration. It thus directly contradicts the government’s central policy of boosting economic growth as well as exacerbating its fiscal constraints. It is even incompetent in terms of any policy aim of integration, since making it harder to qualify for permanent residence makes it less likely that immigrants will integrate.
The competence issue matters because what is at stake here is not, as many commentators claim and, no doubt, some political activists and voters hope, that Labour need to respond to the by-election defeat with a ‘lurch to the left’. Setting an immigration policy which is fair, rational, and consonant with economic and demographic needs is not, in itself, ‘left-wing’. Operating an efficient and humane asylum process is not, in itself, ‘left-wing’. Making a clear distinction between immigration and asylum policies is not, in itself, ‘left-wing’. To think otherwise is to cede the idea that these are somehow ‘extreme’ propositions and that the policies of virtually zero immigration, mass deportation, and the near-total rejection of asylum seekers advocated by Reform and others are the ‘norm’ or ‘moderate’.
Yet this is what the Labour government has accepted, and it is the most glaring way in which it has accepted Brexitism. Of course it is also this which has always lain at the heart of the timidity of the Brexit ‘reset’ with the EU, a reset which even in its own limited terms was denounced this week (£) by the Commons foreign affairs committee as “suffering from a lack of direction, definition and drive”. If there was not so much other news, I would have more to say about that, including about Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ claim that she wants to go further in breaking down trade barriers with the EU. Since there is no evidence, and surely no possibility, that this presages a break with Labour’s ‘red lines’, for now all that needs to be said is that the dishonesty and delusions of Brexit and Brexitism continue unabated.
Small comforts
It’s hard to feel anything other than pessimism at the moment. However this war develops, as always with war it will be ordinary, blameless people who simply want to lead ordinary, peaceful lives who suffer most. Something similar could be said of those being relentlessly attacked in the domestic culture wars.
There is only a small, though not entirely negligible, comfort in being spared the spectacle of Matt Goodwin pontificating on these matters in the House of Commons. But perhaps a slightly greater one in what that may betoken about the British electorate.
Notes
[1] The way this question was asked in the survey linked to does not really disclose what the public think about the subtle but important distinction between the use of UK bases for the attack on Iran (which the government did not grant) and their use to launch defensive operations against Iranian counter-attacks which may imperil British subjects and assets (which the government approved). If it did, I suspect that the public would support the government’s decisions in both respects. That seems to be borne out by other survey data about what the UK’s military response to the war should be.
[2] There’s a whole post that could be written about that fact that somewhere in that skein is Dubai. Lauded by Richard Tice as an exemplar of safety, it has become a magnet for right-wing British
[3] The most egregious failing is that I assumed, not unreasonably, but as it has out turned mistakenly, that Boris Johnson had re-made the Conservatives as an electorally successful populist party and seen off the challenge of Farage.
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