BLOODY OPPOSITION c fully protected by an invincible parliamen- tary majority and undented moral self-righteousness, what might the Labour government look and feel like? Let us imagine its tenor through those it might honour.

Take the senior policeman, whose many other virtues notwithstanding, “also plays a central role in delivering the Police Race Action Plan to ensure there is more diverse leadership across the service”.

Or the doyen of university admissions who “is committed to helping students from diverse backgrounds [and] supports previously marginalised student groups, care leavers, LGBTQ+ individuals, those with disabilities, and others facing mental health challenges”.

Or the future City of London bureaucrat, who “has influenced quoted companies to embrace NetZero targets and the wider ESG agenda and under her leadership, the LSE is now the leading provider of green and transition finance.

She is a pioneer for women and the LGBTQ+ community in financial services, fostering diversity and inclusion in finance and championing initiatives to create more inclusive work environments.”

, , . It’s from this June’s King’s Birthday Honours list at the culmination of 14 years of Conservative government. The expansive prose used has broken free from the opaque, undemonstrative language formerly employed in offi cial communications issued on the Crown’s behalf.

Here, in its place, are the assumptions and aspirations of Britain’s civil service, nodded through by Tory ministers. This is what is good, these are the principles that guide us. Sir Keir Starmer will not change this; he will embody it.

It is entirely wrong to characterise Starmer’s Labour as being “progressive illiberalism”, for Starmer is liberalism pure and simple, shorn entirely of socialism and the concerns of labour. There won’t be the money to try socialism; they’re not proposing to; but they will continue the dreadful work of the government they have defeated.

back to power in the British political system, all the windy talk is about how the winners have “accepted” the best policies of those they’ve defeated. That Thatcher’s “greatest achievement” was Blair’s New Labour, that the Tory modernisers of Cameron, Osborne and Gove were the

(true) “heirs to Blair”.

Of course they must have been, for how else would they have won, save by sensibly tacking back to the centre they must have abandoned in order to lose power?

Or so runs the smug assumption. But this time the truth is stark and undeniable: far from being converted to the beliefs of Rishi Sunak’s Tories (and thus making themselves fit and moderate for offi ce), the opposition party winning back power in 2024 simply realigns the politics of the country’s nominal masters with those of its actual rulers. And those are the judges.

its worst prime minister, John Major. As his government dissolved in sleaze, and as pure short-term expedience tried to dodge one more shabby scandal, Major turned to the cranky Catholic jurist Michael Nolan, who presided over a committee of the bland and prejudiced to establish the “Nolan principles” for public life. These are now the DNA of the modern British state.

They reach their absurdity in such nonsense as another learned KC, this time an Oxbridge head of house to boot, muttering to himself in book-length form such madnesses as — and how we wish we were making this up — Boris Johnson failing to appoint someone the blob wanted to chair a quango was “probably unlawful” (not least because this excellent chap “had an impressive CV and good background”).

This is the framework the 14 years of Conservative government entirely failed to challenge. Not least as basic patronage: Ken Clarke, Michael Gove and Liz Truss, different as they are, all had in common their complete inability as Tory justice secretaries to appoint judges that liberals might dislike.

is such self-serving civil service presump- tion as the cabinet manual (the product of Britain’s worst cabinet secretary, bar the current incumbent). It unilaterally purports to codify that which is merely conventional, all prior to inevitably placing Mandarin fantasies at the service of interventionist judges.

They make up what they would like to be true, without any of the inconvenience of publicly legislating it as a fact, then wait for the courts to make it so.

None of this will be changed by Starmer. Why would it be? This is the system for which he honestly and sincerely stands.

But how did this come to pass? What want of Tory honesty and sincerity made it so? It has been because Cameron, Osborne, Gove, Sunak, and, yes, Johnson and so many others wanted it so.

Toryism has not happened for the last 14 years because it was impossible or because it was defeated, but because the people leading the Tory party did not want to do it. They might mouth its platitudes, not least at election time, but the Conservative Party has been led by orthodox and bigoted liberals every bit as much as the Labour Party now is.

Primarily this has been the fault of Tory modernisers, whose failure in Rishi Sunak is now total, if not terminal. It failed as a campaigning technique to secure an outright majority against Gordon Brown in 2010 and proved unsustainable without Brexit thereafter.

Its infamous chumocracy selection of candidates has left a retardataire cohort of MPs picked for (unsuccessful) marketing purposes, demonstrably incapable of providing a slate of even moderately competent ministers.

THE CRITIC 2 JULY 2024