Endgame

On the stillbirth of 'progressive realism'

With exceptions so rare they are regarded as miracles of nature, successful democratic politicians are insecure and intimidated men.

-Walter Lippmann

There is a vivid quality that sometimes comes to the evening light in January. A hint of optimism in the dusk that rumours of warmth in the far distance. That light was in the air tonight. It felt as though change was coming.

The country is at an inflection point. Leaving aside the bewildered clingers-on, the old-age-pensioners in the room, the Rory Stewarts and James O’Briens and Emily Maitlisses of the world, we can all I think sense that something is dying, and that something unknown is in the process of being born. This Parliament has the feeling of an entire political framework teetering on a precipice - not just in the sense that we have a government comprising people who are manifestly ill-equipped to govern in every conceivable way, but in the sense that an entire regime is about to be upended.

Harvey Mansfield describes a ‘regime’ as an order within which a certain ‘some’ rule over the ‘many’. This ‘some’ imbue the constitutional framework with its values and preferences, and this then informs how the ‘many’ will find themselves governed. In order for a regime to endure, the values of the ‘some’ and the ‘many’ have to be roughly aligned - or, failing that, at the very least the ‘some’ must have a plausible account as to why their rule is indispensable, so that the ‘many’ will accept them out of fear of the alternative.

We have for the last several decades been living in an age of misalignment of values. But for a long time the regime has been able to sustain itself through the ‘some’ portraying themselves as possessing the necessary competence to be indispensable. We are now reaching a point at which this is no longer possible. This is partly a problem of sheer appearances - it is difficult to portray oneself as an efficient technocrat when one is patently ineffectual at everything one does. But it is chiefly because the gap between what government says can be achieved, and what is actually happening, is yawning so wide that it is becoming impossible to ignore.

A recent illustration of this phenomenon went unremarked-on towards the end of last week when the Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, stood up to deliver a speech in the Locarno Suite at the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, in which he attempted to lay out ‘the future of the UK’s foreign policy’.

Lammy is a strange and, at times, oddly sympathetic figure - a man who it is difficult to pigeonhole. Unusually for a Labour politician in the modern era he is willing to stick up for traditional family values - the importance of fathers and even the usefulness of corporal punishment - and, more unusually still, to speak with open admiration about Margaret Thatcher (which he, incidentally, did again in this Locarno Suite speech). He is in some ways the classic example of a man of immigrant background who is considerably more socially conservative than the modal voter. This gives him a slightly eccentric and surprising streak that, for all that he has a tendency towards ill-advised outbursts, at least makes him seem like a three-dimensional human being - a rarity in Labour circles.

But he is no intellectual titan, and his speech singularly fails to do what it sets out to do, which is to lay out a ‘strategy’. The strategy it purports to realise is the stuff of daft fantasy. It postulates a world which does not exist. It is a wheeze that is designed to impress the people whose opinions Lammy takes seriously - namely, other progressives. And its contents only serve to strengthen the fin de siècle mood that is lying across the land like a blanket.