Unless you were on the new honours list, the parent of a recipient or a member of the wound-licking circle of Cameron and Osborne allies, it’s a fair bet that the surge of resignation gongs unleashed a knowing sigh of exasperation at the spectacle of an in-crowd patting itself on the back after a major defeat at the hands of the electorate.
Prime ministers have long rewarded supporters when they leave office. But the self-indulgence of this bunch is unsurpassed since the court of Titipu in The Mikado. It mattered not if people had been in jobs for a brief period of time or whether communications and presentational skills were deemed en masse to be worthy of state-sanctioned grandeur. Efforts that would more properly be rewarded with a farewell dinner and a yearly Christmas card ended up as decorations from the Queen.
Underlying this is a trait of modern elites – a tone deafness to the way they are perceived, even by tolerant sorts. The historian Antony Beevor introduced me to the game of Tumbrilism, in which each person in the group had to recall a comment they had heard that was most likely to spark feelings of revolution in otherwise moderate folk. The winning contender was a duke who remarked: “I dislike the Sun – and I won’t have it in any of my houses.”
A new candidate when we next play is the quote from Olivia Bloomfield, who, I’m sure you need no reminding, has been an asset to the constitution as a fundraiser for the Conservatives. Asked about her role by the Telegraph, she once replied: “Really, I don’t talk to the press. That’s it. I am not newsworthy at all.” The fake modesty of the truly entitled in full force.
Even when this summer annoyance fades, it leaves a residue that reminds us of how far many established power bases have moved from the rest of the demos, without appreciating what has happened or having much serious intention of addressing it. There are many reasons why the political centrism is struggling across much of Europe and the United States, but they do have common threads.
In Britain, the horror that committed Remainers feel at the Leave vote is in direct proportion to how isolated they had become from what many people feel and think. Not since Coriolanus berated the “many headed hydra” or the smelly citizens of Rome “whose breath I hate as reek o’ the rotten fens” have we heard as much dissing of the ability of ordinary folk to cast a vote and mean it.
So in the Lords (where else?), Oona King tables a motion that asserts that if the public had more “facts” it would surely unwind Brexit. But instincts and emotions matter just as much as facts, slippery creatures in referendums at the best of times. That is the difference between democracy and oligarchy. Much needs to be done to take the damaging edge off the Leave vote, but telling the public it did not know what it is was doing is a poor place to start.
Other dangers are close at hand. From the rank rhetoric of Trump, France’s Marine Le Pen or Germany’s AfD and Pergida to the simplistic protectionism of Spain’s Podemos or Greece’s Syriza, protest against external force majeure is feted, while the job of getting on with government, structuring solutions to long-term indebtedness and tussling with the impact on economies of globalisation and automation are ignored.
The new left cannot be bothered with the slog of reform. It seeks to build a future purely on saving selected institutions – the welfare state, the BBC, the NHS – rather than acknowledging that even these civilising entities need to change to sustain themselves and offer better services and outcomes under new pressures. Its estranged cousin, the rebellious right, also wants a retreat from realities. The emphasis on borders and totemic focus on immigration is really another way of saying that countries should be modern fortresses, a Sir Lancelot land in which we define ourselves and our hopes by whom we manage to keep out.
Instability is built into this ragged new politics of spasms and twitches. “How cross are you?” is an easy question to pose. “What do you propose doing about it?” much harder. Where is the great Corbynite thinktank, pumping out big ideas? Where is the commanding Ukip series of papers on the post-Brexit economy?
Witness the trajectory of the Donald. Only a week ago, the conventional wisdom about the master of braggadocio was that he had so far broken every rule and convention and no rule of political discourse applied to him.
A previously untested law of rhetorical physics has since kicked in. Annoyed that a Muslim family whose son had been killed in action in Iraq had appeared at the Democratic convention to denounce his proposed ban on Muslims entering America, Trump lashed out at the Khan parents – and reaped distaste even from many who had been prepared to side with or at least tolerate him to regain the White House.
Ratings have looked poor since. The pollster Nate Silver reckons the odds on Trump in the White House have shifted to 80% against. And even allowing for the many reasons this might be wrong – it is August, not eve of November poll – the faux pas is haunting his campaign. Crucially, Trump has been forced into what the New York Times dubbed a “hatchet-burying trifecta”: endorsing three major Republicans he had previously picked fights with. Strip away the flamboyance and ready-to-go provocations and the Trumpite tilt to “big tent politics” and a readiness to “disagree as friends” is the concession of a man whose strategists have decreed he cannot win as a lone ranger.
Many things are distinctive – bolder, noisier or plain worse – about Trump’s populism. But protest politics elsewhere has a similar tendency to look invincible one minute and shatter like cheap glass the next. The more loudly something is proclaimed as a popular movement, the more fissiparous it is likely to be in practice.
So Syriza lost faith with its firebrand finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, worried that this engaging stormy petrel would annoy Brussels and Berlin so much that it would affect bailouts, even the ones it deems stingy. Germany’s Die Linke rode a wave of post-unification discomfort for years and now shed voters to the far right in the old East.
At home, Corbynism has ensured that there are two Labour parties, uneasily sharing a house with either a split or a civil war ahead. Ukip, post-referendum and post-Farage, is an empty shell of hubris and warring types in velvet collared coats. Insurgent movements are rarely any good at adapting to the aftermath of a triumph.
But neither does the story conform to the lazier end of the moderates’ view – that populism, once unleashed, is a demon and thus it is better not to ask the oiks their views in the first place and fudge difficult arguments in the hope that they will go away.
Talking to a cast of characters from inside the camps of the Brexit debate for a BBC documentary, the biggest surprise is how many of those involved were astonished to find that immigration came to dominate the vote. The more obvious an uncomfortable fact has become, the greater is the hope that it will evaporate of its own accord.
The paradox of our times is that the new politics is so fluid and so changeable – and yet the results, when reduced to who governs which countries, remain sorely predictable. The persistent losers are social democratic parties, from the eclipse of Pasok in Greece and Spain’s struggling socialists to Germany’s once-mighty Social Democrats, reduced to a supporting act to Christian Democrat supremacy. Even Hillary Clinton, most likely to buck this trend, can do so only if she wins back Bernie Sanders voters at the price of policy compromises leftwards.
Such eruptions are often tinged with danger, economic and social, but they do represent strands in society elites forget at their peril. Ukip’s demand for an EU referendum will have had more impact on Britain than all the well-intentioned initiatives by people celebrated in that Cameron honours list. Moderates might bemoan it, crave old certainties or disdainfully parcel out blame for decisions they deem distasteful or plain stupid. But centre-ground liberalism is feeling the pinch so widely that it needs to heed the message and get a lot better and bolder at what it does and the means it proposes. The alternative is to cede ground to those who, when the shouting is done, will do it far worse.
Anne McElvoy is senior editor at the Economist.
