Tim Stanley

I’m meant to maintain some air of objectivity at Trump’s selection of JD Vance for vice president, but I can’t be bothered. It’s just excellent. By appointing him, Trump guarantees that the Republican party will never go back to being neo-con warmongers run by Wall Street. To channel Kamala Harris, I believe Vance shows us what the Republican party could be, unburdened by what it has been. The biography is well versed – white trash made good, author of Hillbilly Elegy, convert to Trump – but the philosophy is under-appreciated. The first thing to know is that he has a philosophy. How rare is that?!

The West’s military posture has moved from ‘thick’ to ‘suicidal’. The recent speech of General Sir Patrick Sanders, the head of the British Army, in which he suggested that Britain needs a ‘citizens army’ to see off Russia, has forced the Government to deny that it wishes to introduce conscription – in advance of a great power conflict that Grant Shapps says is perhaps five years away. The media is casually debating ‘would Britons refuse to serve?’, on the basis that Gen Z is too neurotic to fight. The better question is ‘should we serve?’, on the grounds that our generation of leadership is so staggeringly dumb. What did Phil Ochs sing?

Assuming this is the Conservative party’s last conference in power, I decided to investigate what kind of country they leave behind. Thirteen years on, are we richer, poor, happier or sadder? I started by asking MPs to name their biggest achievement. No one said ‘the economy’; Ukraine and Brexit were popular. Two replied: ‘Kept Labour out’, which, considering Ed Miliband and Jeremy Corbyn ran the opposition, is low hanging bananas. Nevertheless, ‘winning’ is what the Tories have done best. They slipped into office via a coalition, won a majority, then a minority, and finally a historic victory built on Red Wall seats that had backed Labour since the Norman Conquest. Despite this, it’s tricky to say what they stood for.

It’s always useful to be told what we’re allowed to think. The news from the Kate Forbes leadership campaign is that you can’t make it in politics unless you swallow sex changes and celebrate same-sex marriage.  Fascinating. Especially since the former is actually very controversial – hence the backlash against the SNP’s gender ID reform – and the latter has only been the law since 2014. Even more interesting is that Forbes’ insistence that she wouldn’t try to reverse equal marriage isn’t enough. She is being pilloried not for her politics – which, in the sense of wishing to separate faith from existing legislation, is quite liberal – but for her incorrect values.  No, it is not enough to tolerate equal marriage.

The mood at the Tory conference is grim to funereal, and for good reason. They know they're beat. There's a sense that something has changed in British politics and we ain't going back. Labour is revived; the Tories are divided and unpopular. But it's about more than just a 45p tax cut, which was a bad idea, or the U-turn, which was suicidal (if a centre-Right government can't pass a tax cut with an 80-seat majority, it's dead in the water). The reality is that Britain doesn't want what the Conservative party is now selling. Their economic message is actually sound; it's infuriating that they can't seem to articulate it. In short, the west is in decline. We're not productive or innovative enough; too many people are now chasing too few products, most notably energy, causing inflation.

Labour can win the next election. The winds that blew apart their electoral coalition in 2019 can change in their favour; Brexit has destroyed old certainties but also made anything possible. The party needs first to analyse honestly what went wrong and then conjure up a new, yet old-fashioned progressivism to fix it. The most popular narrative is that Labour was undone by a mix of Jeremy Corbyn and Brexit: Corbyn was too radical and inept; Brexit drove the patriotic working-class into the arms of BoJo and the populist Right.  At this week’s conference, this story will be endorsed by several factions.

Walter Mondale, who has died aged 93, is destined to be a trivia question: 'which die-hard liberal did Reagan beat by a landslide in 1984?’ That’s unfair. He had brains, looks and a presidential temperament. He was just out of time. Here’s my Mondale anecdote. I interviewed him for my PhD in 2005 at his office in Minneapolis. He offered me a coffee; I said yes, and was then stunned when he got up from his desk and made it himself. This is unheard of in US politics. 'I can’t wait to tell the folks back home that a vice president of the United States made me coffee,’ I said. Mondale sighed. 'Nowadays,’ he replied, 'it’s nice just to have something to do.’ He had a great sense of humor; the problem was it was deadpan and it paled in comparison to Reagan’s.