Leading article

Last year’s Conservative party conference was a difficult one. Reform UK was leading the polls; the local election results had been as painful as the general election the year before; and the story at conference was not Kemi Badenoch’s successes, but speculation over Robert Jenrick’s attempts to replace her. Adversity, however, proved her friend. The past year has seen Badenoch’s leadership blossom, with confident public appearances, a by-election victory in Aberdeen and Jenrick’s fortuitous exit to Reform. This week, she stood up in Birmingham as a leader truly in command of her party – and with a plausible route back into government. There are still a great many obstacles to overcome.

When the Social Democratic Party was launched in 1981, its prospectus was dismissed witheringly by the liberal thinker Ralf Dahrendorf as a plan for ‘a better yesterday’. Andy Burnham has gone one better. He plans to rerun Labour’s last term in office. But this time with feeling. The Prime Minister’s address to his party conference was many things – fluent, passionate, moving, politically effective. But one thing it was not: forward-looking. The quality of the delivery invited comparison with Tony Blair but, unlike Blair, our current PM was not promising modernisation. He was instead seeking to revisit the Blair years and pursue the road not taken by Labour in 1997 – the long march left.

On Tuesday, the Foreign Secretary, Ed Miliband, noted that the government is devoting an extra £250 million this year to enhance the security of Britain’s Jewish community. He did so in the context of a statement about British foreign policy and efforts to advance a two-state solution in Israel/Palestine. Mr Miliband is many things, but he is not stupid. He knew what his government was doing. And he knew why the two things were connected. The decision by the British government to sanction anyone associated with what they term ‘illegal settlements’ in the West Bank has heartened every anti-Semite in the world.

Mark Carney never much liked Brexit. As the Bank of England’s governor during the 2016 referendum, Carney was limited in how political he could be but he still managed to brand a Leave vote the ‘biggest domestic risk to financial stability’ Britain faced, one that would leave us relying on the ‘kindness of strangers’. Since returning to Canada as its Prime Minister, he has not become more complimentary. The referendum, he said in May, had been a ‘dangerous bluff’; the UK was still trying to undo what people didn’t think they were voting for, but which they ended up having. Yet for someone so antipathetic, Carney is performing a remarkable Brexiteer tribute act.

Nigel Farage’s victory in the Clacton by-election is a hollow one. The major parties boycotted the contest: of the Reform leader’s 33 opponents, the most prominent was a screenwriter with a bin on his head. This by-election was not forced on Farage by the parliamentary investigation into undeclared donations – this can resume as soon as he returns to the Commons – but called as an attempt to regain momentum after a difficult patch for Reform. That gambit has failed. In August last year, Reform was riding high. Opposing an unpopular Labour government and a Conservative party in disarray, Farage capitalised on historic victories in the local elections and deep public anger at ‘uniparty’ failures over small boats and living standards.

‘Space: the final frontier.’ Six decades since Captain James T. Kirk first uttered those words, American enthusiasm for star-trekking is stronger than ever. Artemis II’s voyage presages future Nasa trips to the Moon, Mars and beyond; SpaceX’s successful initial public offering and Starship rocket launches confirm continuing enthusiasm for Elon Musk’s interplanetary initiatives. But, on this side of the Atlantic, our ambitions are far less stellar; rather than reach for the heavens, we fiddle with the price of bus tickets. The potential closure of the Jodrell Bank Observatory – home to the UK’s largest telescope for almost 70 years – for lack of funding is a tragedy. Its annual operational cost is £2.

We currently know more about what Count Binface would do in power than Andy Burnham. The joke candidate in the Clacton by-election has published a manifesto that goes into considerably greater detail about what the government’s priorities should be than anything we have yet heard from the man who becomes our prime minister on Monday. Those preparing for a new administration, including the Parliamentary Labour Party and the Civil Service, have had to rely on speculation and briefings to the press. There is no better guide to what we might expect than the analysis of our own political editor, Tim Shipman, in his article. He reports that the incoming premier has a high opinion of the Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood. That reflects well on him.

Andy Burnham is a lucky politician. And Nigel Farage has just given him another piece of surprising good fortune. The Reform leader’s decision to call a by-election so his voters can express their preference for him over a comedian in a dustbin is more than just a narcissistic farce: it is a blessing for Project Burnham. Just as attention should be focused on a man with neither a mandate nor a manifesto for running the nation, Westminster’s gaze is directed once more to the dreary beachfronts of Jaywick and Frinton. Burnham’s unscrutinised, unelected, unready administration moves closer to power while Reform achieves a feat hitherto thought impossible: becoming even more of a vehicle for the ego of its leader.

Welcome to the cabaret, Andy Burnham. Last year, the editor of this magazine wrote about ‘Weimar Britain’: the fear that political instability, economic turmoil and rising anti-Semitism was making our country as decadent and dangerous as inter-war Germany. As our sixth prime minister of the post-Brexit decade departs, and our seventh looms into view, we have developed a national addiction to perma-crisis, seemingly trapped in a game of ‘Topple the PM’. We are far from a January 1933 moment. But the joke isn’t funny any more. This turbulence is not inescapable, though. What is needed is a premier able to stay the course, to set out how they want to change Britain and to discover the drive and charisma to bring their party and the country with them.

Few critiques of British mythmaking have been more astute than that of Correlli Barnett. He argued that 18th-century statesmen were hardheaded industrialists and merchants who understood the basis of military power. Then a new culture emerged, created by Victorian educationalists, one that had a ‘high-minded emphasis on religion and the classics’. By the end of the 19th century, Britain’s elites no longer understood the nation’s military-industrial base. They had become little more than a complacent establishment, rather than men of action. Hampered by inefficiencies and ill-prepared for conflict, Britain emerged from the second world war shrunken, uncompetitive and condemned to further decline.