Michael Gove

There’s a difference between climate and weather. Both change, but at very different tempos. Variations in the weather are seasonal and ephemeral. Alterations in the climate are longer-term shifts – epochal transformations – as we move from ages of warming to cooling to warming again.  I’m writing the day before the country goes to the polls to pass a midterm verdict on the Labour government. I can’t predict with precision exactly what will happen in every Scottish parliament constituency or London borough. The electoral weather will vary from region to region. But I can tell you that our broader political climate has already changed and these elections, in aggregate, will confirm it. Britain is becoming daily colder. For the enterprising. For the young.

Labour MPs who want Wes Streeting to be their leader have, apparently, one great fear. If their man triggers a contest, they are terrified it will lead to Ed Miliband entering the race to stop the Health Secretary – and coming out top. A Miliband premiership would, they worry, be the death of Labour. I’ve got news for them: we are already governed by Ed Miliband. This is now his administration. And they, and the rest of us, had better get used to it. Keir Starmer is no longer really in charge of this government – if he ever really was. He is Prime Minister in name only. His foreign policy, at this time of war, is Ed Miliband’s. His economic policy, Ed Miliband’s. His Chancellor, his political positioning, his very quest for meaning. All. Ed. Miliband.

When Britain handed Hong Kong over to China in 1997, Tony Blair was in melancholic mood. The newly elected prime minister turned to his aides Alastair Campbell and Jonathan Powell and mused: ‘We shouldn’t lose any more territory. Britain needs to be big. Look at a map. Britain is so small.’ Nearly 30 years later, Britain is shrinking further. Blair may offer advice to his successors in private – Campbell does so in public – but the only one of the trio exercising real power now is Jonathan Powell. He is the Starmer government’s national security adviser – the single most influential actor in British foreign policy. And he’s the architect of the debacle which has come to symbolise everything wrong about that policy: our surrender of the Chagos Islands.

For David Cameron, there were two types of politician. Team players. Or tossers. Although he preferred a slightly saltier description for the latter type. For a year I was the member of his team whose principal job was tosser-hunter. As government chief whip between 2014 and 2015 I was responsible for maintaining parliamentary discipline, unity and cohesion. I wasn’t a roaring success. I was in a swimming pool on holiday in France when the news broke that our Clacton MP Douglas Carswell had defected to Nigel Farage’s Ukip. Far from proving a George Smiley whose formidable intelligence skills had smoked out a double agent, I was proving to be more of a Mr Barrowclough from Porridge, the prison warder easily outwitted by the lags I was supposed to be supervising.

The Ancient Greeks believed the past was in front of us and the future behind. Man could look history in the face and learn from it, while the future was unknowable, hidden, the wind whistling at our back. It is in history, its patterns, and what it reveals about human nature, that we have the best guide to our times and how they might develop. The government may wish us to focus on innovation this week – new nuclear reactors, AI data centres, OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang at the state banquet – but if we really want to understand the convulsions gripping our society it is to the past we should look for signs.

As a minister I lived by mantras: simple principles that summed up how I believed you got things done. Faced with a PowerPoint presentation as means of influencing policy, I’d sling it back in the box with the injunction ‘Think in ink’ – in other words, make a proper sustained argument on paper instead of trying to advance shonky argument with a series of unevidenced assertions, a dodgy graph and the words ‘levelling up’ on every page in bold. Told that the prospect of a judicial review should mean shelving a policy, I’d write on the submission: ‘If the legal advice says no, get a better lawyer.

Keir Starmer looked blank. The shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, seemed confused. Only the old Stalinist Seumas Milne seemed really to understand. It was 2019. Labour’s front bench team, and their leader Jeremy Corbyn’s close advisers, were being upbraided – from the left. Why were they putting the interests of international capital ahead of our workers? Why were they abandoning the chance to implement a meaningful industrial policy? Why were they giving up on the chance to save British steel, to give all support necessary to our manufacturing sector, to make a stand against neo-liberalism? The person in the room making the challenge, over ginger beer and sandwiches, was not Owen Jones, James O’Brien or Mick Lynch. It was me.

Clement Attlee, in the words of Winston Churchill, was a modest man with much to be modest about. Labour’s postwar premier has been invoked as a role model by Keir Starmer recently, in the context of Attlee’s support for Nato and robustness on defence. Starmer’s allies also argue that, like Attlee, he is an unshowy middle-England moderate who prefers quiet efficiency to ideological flamboyance. His biographer, the always perceptive Tom Baldwin, has declared: ‘There is no such thing as Starmerism.’ Nor, we are told, will there ever be. Which is exactly how, why and where this government is going wrong. A Tory government benefits from a sense of purpose; a Labour one cannot survive without one Movements – and Labour is nothing if not a movement – need direction.

Sir Roger Scruton may not be the Prime Minister’s favourite author. Apparently Keir Starmer prefers Victoria Hislop. But as he prepares to travel to Washington next week, the PM could scarcely spend his time more wisely than burying his nose in The Uses of Pessimism – and the Dangers of False Hope, one of Scruton’s most powerful works. ‘Hope untempered by the evidence of history is a dangerous asset,’ says Scruton. ‘And one that threatens not only those who embrace it, but all those within range of their illusions.’ That is the correct, pessimistic, cast of mind with which to approach not just the war in Ukraine, and America’s ongoing commitment to Europe, but to international affairs overall.

Morgan McSweeney, the Prime Minister’s Chief of Staff, does not immediately display the demeanour of a disruptor. He speaks softly, picks his phrases with care, and cultivates an unassuming image. But underneath the sober blue suit are the scars of a streetfighter. As a young man, McSweeney came to political maturity fighting the hard left in Lambeth and the far right in Dagenham, winning back working-class voters to a Labour party that had forgotten its roots. He went on to secure last year’s landslide, gifting Keir Starmer a majority large enough to remake Britain. His style as an insurgent owes something to his background. He grew up in Ireland with parents who were activists in Fine Gael, the party that venerates the IRA mastermind Michael Collins as its founder.

It will probably only damn me further in the eyes of many, but when I was a government minister I often used to ask Labour predecessors for advice. Tony Blair especially. He may have felt it was a forlorn exercise ever offering me his wisdom, especially when I went on to back Brexit, support parliament’s prorogation under Boris and defend Dominic Cummings against all comers, but I always appreciated his insights, even when we disagreed. No position is so strong, no policy so perfect, that it cannot benefit from being tested by critics. If those critics have experience of office, know its powers and limitations, so much the better. And few know office better than Blair.

Twin studies are one of the most useful exercises in scientific inquiry. Take two biologically identical children who are brought up in different environments, and study their progress through life. Pioneered by Francis Galton in the late 19th century, they can demonstrate how much of our destiny is dictated by nature or nurture. This government is precise in seeking to destroy the policies that have given children the best education possible Over the past two decades we have been conducting a twin study on an epic scale across these islands. Children in England have been educated in accordance with one set of principles. Children in Wales and Scotland have been in schools following a very different route.