Nick Cohen

Labour has announced whether its sitting MPs will step down or fight again at the next election in nearly every single constituency. By a weird coincidence, it stays silent about the one constituency Labour party members and the wider public are most interested in: Jeremy Corbyn’s Islington North. Sir Keir Starmer withdrew the whip from Corbyn because of the ex-leader’s response to the Equality and Human Rights Commission report on anti-Jewish racism in the Labour party. Rather than, for example, apologising for prejudice on his watch, Corbyn insisted that antisemitism had been ‘dramatically overstated for political reasons’ by his opponents. They’re not frightened of Jeremy Corbyn the man.

Labour’s leaders do not rate Rishi Sunak. I don’t mean by this that they think his policies range from the wrongheaded to the disastrous – we can take these opposition criticisms as a given. I mean that as professional politicians they look at the Prime Minister and see a rank amateur. 'He’s rubbish,' a member of the shadow cabinet told me. 'I mean' he continued bursting into derisory laughter during his speech yesterday, 'what the hell was that maths thing about?' In case you missed it, from the morning papers through to lunchtime on Wednesday, the PM’s New Year message was that he wanted children to study maths until they were 18.

Last night, Labour politicians wondered how to respond to the challenges the Chancellor was sending their way. Do you accept the Conservatives’ real-term spending cuts and tax rises? How would you revive the economy? The best answer came from a shadow minister who told me ‘We should just say “imagine how good this country could be if we had a government that didn’t do mad stuff”.’ We Won’t Do Mad Stuff is not the most inspiring of electoral slogans. For years voters across the West have moved towards Trump-style politicians who promised to do precisely that. Where is the vision in not doing mad stuff? Where is the hope that we can take back control and make Britain great again if we leave the mad stuff alone?

The moorings that tie the rulers to the ruled are breaking in the UK. You can hear them snapping during the Prime Minister’s silences. On Sunday morning, the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg asked Liz Truss a question any democratic leader should be able to answer. Truss and her Chancellor’s folly had sent yields on ten-year guilts up to 4.3 per cent. It had forced the Bank of England to announce an emergency £65 billion bond-buying programme. It had threatened pensions and the finances of mortgage holders. ‘How many people voted for your plan?’ asked Kuenssberg. Silence. A silence long enough for viewers to believe that concerns of democratic legitimacy had not bothered the Prime Minister in the slightest until that moment.

As I reported this summer, Liz Truss’s favourite historian is Rick Perlstein, the great chronicler of the rise of the new right in its Nixonian and Reaganite forms between 1960 and 1980. She told journalists that she read ‘anything’ he wrote. Interviewers noticed Perlstein’s books on her shelves. In a strange compliment to the American historian, Truss or sources close to her briefed The Spectator's Katy Balls with precise (if unacknowledged) quotes from his account of the rise of Ronald Reagan. I sent Perlstein my piece and asked for his thoughts. Let me put it like this: he may be her favourite historian, but she is not his favourite politician. Not even close. Not even in the top 1,000. ‘Liz. Can’t. Read.

For a politician who only a few days ago was bravely mocking Vladimir Putin as a ‘sabre-rattling’ loudmouth ‘desperately trying to justify his catastrophic failures,’ Liz Truss has turned out to be the greatest coward ever to be prime minister. At least Putin feels the need to justify the catastrophe he has inflicted. Truss and her Chancellor believe they can hide away like children putting pillows over their heads to escape a bad dream, and say nothing at all. The public may not understand the full ramifications of the crisis the Conservatives have unleashed in a moment of ideological delirium.

What ridiculous figures we republicans must seem on the eve of Elizabeth II’s funeral. We sound like desiccated rationalists who cannot understand that emotion, not reason, makes people identify with their country. Instead of joining in shared celebrations and mourning, we ask carping questions about the transparency of royal finances or the basic failure of our head of state and her advisers to stop Boris Johnson’s unlawful proroguing of parliament. We think we know our history and sociology. We say we understand that nations are ‘imagined communities’, which unite strangers with common symbols and emotions. Yet when faced with the power of monarchy to hold the United Kingdom together, we complain about feudalism and our Ruritanian love of pointless display.

The ejection of Boris Johnson from Downing Street today proves that the UK has not gone the way of Donald Trump’s United States, Viktor Orbán’s Hungary or Narendra Modi’s India. For all our faults, the strongman model of leader ends in farce rather than fascism here. Liberal critics ought to be big enough to concede that Conservative MPs – more than any opposition party, movement or institution – saved us from populist authoritarianism. No doubt they did so for impure and self-interested reasons, but this is politics and it is deeds – not motives – that matter most. Johnson’s failure to impose his will on his parliamentary party was his greatest mistake.

Readers must understand how the jargon of political chicanery has corrupted journalism if they are to make sense of the coming Truss premiership. Unless you grasp the slippery, new meaning of ‘pivot,’ media coverage will leave you clueless. To give you a taste of what is to come try this sentence from the Politico website. Liz Truss may have to ‘pivot away once the battle for members’ hearts has been won’. Pivot? Is our next prime minister a machine part that will bend the body politic with the prevailing wind? Or try this from the Independent: ‘Therein lies the truth about the coming pivot... The only question is how skilfully she makes the transition.’ Euphemism exists to spare the embarrassment telling the truth brings.

Suppose Vladimir Putin drops dead tomorrow – he has to drop dead one day, after all. Will a chastened Russian elite and public decide to abandon dreams of empire and vow never again to fall for the lure of the autocratic strongman? Putin will leave a sick country that ought to be yearning for change. The myth that Russia is a military superpower, which did so much to intimidate its neighbours, lies broken amid the burned-out ammunition dumps. Putin’s unprovoked attack on Ukraine provoked Finland and Sweden to join Nato. His aggression has reinvigorated the West and pushed it into supplying Ukraine with advanced weaponry.

Like the winter of discontent, the summer of 2022 is a season that will burn itself into the national consciousness. Predictions of a dark (in all senses of the word) future are daily occurrences. All but the wealthy wonder how they will cope with the hard times that are almost on us. The sense we’re in a runaway crisis is everywhere. Everywhere, that is, except among the leaders of our self-indulgent government. It has shirked its duty to lead the country and preferred to take a long, lazy holiday instead. For Boris Johnson, a redundant prime minister serving out his notice period, his life consists of Mediterranean jaunts.

No one thinks of the careful, polite Keir Starmer as a populist hero. But his intervention in the fuel crisis is a classic example of a barnstorming populist intervention that pushes aside complexity and forces a complacent elite to think again. The fuel cap must be frozen at today’s level until March 2023, Labour says. Everyone’s fuel cap, that is, without exception. No clever pointy-headed schemes to target help at this group of energy consumers but not at that. Just a big, bold, simple policy that Labour politicians can explain in a sentence. Biff, Bash, Boff, the Starmster gets it sorted. Labour believes Liz Truss has walked into a trap of her own making.