It has been a truly staggering, mind-bending week in British politics. Reports of Conservative MPs being physically pulled into the voting lobbies, forcing them to approve fracking. The resignation of Britain’s shortest-serving prime minister (famously outlasted by a lettuce). The possible return of Boris Johnson, who himself resigned after a string of scandals just 45 days ago. This week I want to spend a little time reflecting on that. Because everything in me wants to distance myself from it all. I want to laugh disdainfully at grown adults humiliating themselves before the world. I want to express my disgust at their blatant power grabbing. I want to throw my arms in the air, shouting ‘how the hell did this happen?’ Sometimes I want to pretend it doesn’t matter at all, because the world of politics is so out of touch, even though I know it does, deeply.
But none of these emotional reactions really get to the heart of what’s going on. Because in my shock and disgust and incomprehension, I fail to see the inevitably of what is going on. And by that I mean, the patterns and connections, which ultimately robs me of the capacity to have a sense of where this might be headed and what might be done about it. The current meltdown of British politics is not a fluke. Is not the result of some extremely bad luck in our run of MPs. And, unfortunately, I really do not believe that we have hit rock bottom yet. It is not a coincidence that one of the oldest political systems in the world, and one that has most imposed itself on the rest of the world as the once largest empire in history, is now melting down. And our capacity to draw from and understand how this larger arc of history is at play is vital because in understanding how we got here, we stand a greater chance of discerning how we might meaningfully move forward from here.
I just attended an intensive training week learning about grief rituals and ceremonies from around the world. In my culture, as a white, Western woman, grief is only really publicly acknowledged as something that happens when someone dies. We have a funeral, we tie up any lose ends of the ones we have lost, and we attend to legal matters. That’s about it. As a child and teenager, I experienced a multitude of bereavements. Some with just months in between, others that were long, drawn out, and deeply painful affairs, and some that had lasting, devastating impacts on my relationship to the rest of my family. But the loss I experienced was not just the loss of the ones I loved. It was also the loss of the happiness of those around me, the loss of one of my favourite places in the world when it was sold for inheritance, the loss of my innocence and sense of security, the loss of feeling that my friends and I had our most important life experiences in common. And so much more besides. Because there is so much more to grief than the loss of a loved one. We might experience grief at the loss of health for example, the loss of a job, pet or a home, when a child leaves home, a neighbour moves away or a friend marries. Even when we marry or we finally get our dream job; there is always loss alongside any changes in our lives, even a wonderful one. In this culture I live in, there are so few opportunities to acknowledge the complexity and longevity and relentlessness of how grief to comes us. There are so many different facets to grief. Francis Weller, in his beautiful book The Wild Edge of Sorrow speaks of at least five gates to grief; Everything we love, we will lose The places that have not known love The sorrow of the world What we expected and did not receive Ancestral grief If you follow my work, chances are you are familiar with ecological grief, for example. The loss of species, of habitats, of flourishing nature spaces. We might think of those as that third gate to grief, the sorrow of the world. If we are blessed to have a real sense of connection to and love of nature, then chances are we also now live with a real sense of its wounding. That is the current cost of loving this beautiful planet that is now so struggling to breathe, to regenerate, to uphold human and other-than-human life as a result of human activity.
This is just one of the many reasons why grieving is so important; we cannot love fully without opening ourselves up to the certainty of grief. As Francis Weller says, everything we love we will lose. And so, in turn, to close ourselves to grief, is to also close ourselves to love. That’s why I spent this week learning about grief rituals from around the world. Because it seems that my culture is so woefully underequipped in metabolising its grief, in tending to it, and allowing it to reconnect us with love and meaning rather than leaving us permanently reeling, numbed or depressed. Me and my family were so much in need of more when bereavement came to us on such an enormous scale. We still pay the price for that and I know that we are by no means alone.
And what, you might ask, does all of this have to do with the possible return of Boris Johnson as prime minister? Well, in my humble opinion, everything. But to understand that, we need to go back to Brexit. The moment in which the invisible unraveling of British politics that had been happening for some time, became visible. I’m not talking about the decision to stay or leave the EU, I’m talking about how those discussions about Britain’s place in the world unfolded. The fracturing effect of the questions that the possibility of Brexit brought up, such as what does it mean to be Britain in the world? What does it mean to have power and influence? And is it even important any more? The once largest empire in the world is struggling to find its place. It isn’t sure anymore who its allies and enemies are. What it’s entitled to or should expect from its treatment from the rest of the world. Britain, as a collective, is now obviously struggling to know what it even means to be British anymore. This is part of the shadow that our colonial history still casts over us, now forming as an identity crisis. Yet without the social infrastructure to air those questions in a healthy way (I think we can all agree the political debate around Brexit was some of the worst we’ve seen), turmoil is surely almost inevitable? As global crises mount such as climate change and increased global political tensions, these only add to the rich soup of thorny, painful, and deeply personal and collective unanswered questions. Which is another motivator for my interest in collective grieving. To learn, for example, how we might hold, as a collective, what is wounded, uncertain, or scary, without it fracturing us. How we might come together to debate what matters to us most without it dividing us further. How we might practice care of self that does not come at the cost of care for the collective, and visa versa.
Because when we can feel our feelings, when we can acknowledge them and how they are impacting the way we are turning up in the world, we stand a chance. I experienced some of that during this week training, and it gives me deep hope for the world. I am so incredibly grateful to those from cultures around the world who have been willing to share these teachings despite all that has already been taken by Western culture. I am especially grateful to Malidoma and Subonfu Somé whose teachings informed a great part of the training I received. And so, at this particularly uncomfortable moment in history, I invite those of us with the privilege to do so, to choose to sit with this discomfort rather than turn away. To allow ourselves to feel the unravelling that is happening in the world, as it happens within ourselves also. To know that the chaos ‘out there’ is somehow also a reflection of the chaos that is in ‘in here’ and that in tending to one we tend to the other. Let us get back in touch with the ways and means of tending to that unravelling within ourselves as a vital part of tending to the unravelling that is happening around us. Whatever helps you feel your pain, discomfort and grief without it overcoming you, whatever helps you tend to it, heal it, hold it, that is exactly what the world needs right now. In here, out there, everywhere.
The brief and calamitous premiership of Liz Truss broke all sorts of political records. It was the shortest by far in British history – just 49 days, though oddly in those seven weeks she became the first prime minister since Churchill to serve under two monarchs. Her approval rating before she resigned – 9% – was the worst yet recorded by any modern UK party leader. The botched emergency budget she introduced with her chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, saw the pound fall to its lowest ever level against the dollar ($1.03). But perhaps the most salient fact about Truss’s time in office is that when it ended, she became the youngest ex-PM since William Pitt the Younger at the start of the 19th century. She was 47 when she quit Downing Street. Half a political lifetime still lay ahead of her if she could find some way to fill it. Truss is now 48, the same age as John Profumo when his seemingly glittering career ended in scandal and disgrace in 1963. Profumo was also relatively young in political terms. Yet he knew there was no way back after he had not only destroyed his own reputation but likely wrecked the electoral prospects of the Conservative party. He chose to leave the Commons immediately and went to work at Toynbee Hall, a charitable institution in the East End of London, where 40 years of fundraising earned him a CBE. Kwarteng has likewise decided to step down as an MP, though it seems likely he will spend his time in the City of London rather than the East End. But stepping back from the fray is not the Liz Truss way. Instead, she seems to be modelling herself on another public figure who crashed and burned shortly after reaching the pinnacle of his profession. The 45 days between Truss arriving in Downing Street and announcing her resignation were just one more than the 44 disastrous days Brian Clough spent as manager of Leeds United in 1974. Clough had inherited the reigning English First Division champions, widely considered one of the best teams in Europe. But he decided they were overrated, their trophies won by playing football the wrong way. He was determined to put that right and started by telling his new squad they were cheats. It didn’t work: Clough alienated the players, club staff and directors, who soon decided enough was enough and sacked him. His precipitate failure was a humiliation for such a strident and self-confident man. What saved him was that it was over so quickly. He was able to say, as he did in a notorious TV interview with his predecessor, Don Revie, on the night of his departure, that he hadn’t been given enough time to tackle the deep-seated problems he had inherited. That the people who fired him were cowards, and he was the victim of vested interests who never wanted him to succeed in the first place. Being kicked out after barely a month was evidence that he never stood a chance. He needed to start again by finding a new outfit he could properly mould in his own image – which he eventually did when he became manager of Nottingham Forest. Truss also appears to believe that lasting little more than a month in a job she had aspired to all her adult life is evidence not of her profound incompetence but of her virtue. The dark forces arrayed against her – what she once dubbed the “anti-growth coalition” and now calls, depending on her audience, the “quangocracy” or “communists” – were determined that she wouldn’t succeed. The problems she inherited were so entrenched – and her enemies so attached to a status quo on which their own status depended – that she was unable to make headway against them. She got the job because enough people understood change was desperately needed. She lost it because not enough of the ones who count had either the courage or the incentive to see serious reform through. They chickened out before she stood a chance. Like Clough, Truss is now in search of a new outfit to mould in her own image. She knows this is unlikely to be the parliamentary Conservative party, which will take a long time to get over the trauma she put it through. So she has hitched her wagon to a newly launched organisation called Popular Conservatism – or PopCon for short. It seeks to champion a low-tax, small-state, libertarian brand of rightwing politics. What makes it distinctive, however, is its all-comprehending view of the forces lined up against it. These include the Conservative party in Westminster, the law courts, the civil service and the media, which have all been infected with a stifling economic conformism. The official opposition to the current government barely gets a look-in when it comes to the PopCon demonology because the problem is not winning elections. The problem is being able to govern even when the official opposition has been routed, as happened in 2019. Getting into power is no longer sufficient. The real job is to dismantle the embedded, unelected power structures of the British state. The PopCon mission statement makes the scale of the challenge clear. It declares: “Successive Conservative leaders and governments have discovered that a majority in the House of Commons is no longer enough to turn us away from the path of Blairite declinism. The institutions of Britain – from the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) to the Supreme Court to the Climate Change Committee – now also stand in the way of meaningful reform.” Popular Conservatism exists to give voice to the policy preferences of the millions of voters who keep winning elections, then find that nothing has changed. They are the real victims here. “We want to ensure that those who share the values of taking back control see the policies they support enacted.” These lines come from a tatty, one-page leaflet handed out at Popular Conservatism’s official launch, in a church hall in Westminster in early February. It attracted a sizeable if motley crowd. I was there, along with various other rubberneckers from the press. The disgraced historian David Starkey sat a few seats away. Nigel Farage toured the back of the room, flitting from one TV camera to another, looking impossibly sleek and glowing with malice. But the bulk of the audience seemed made up of PopCon’s natural constituency: the eager beaver young men (and the occasional woman) who work at the rightwing thinktanks that populate Tufton Street, just down the road. Here is where any sporting analogies break down: I have never been among such unhealthy-looking people. It wasn’t just the pallid complexions (this was also, unsurprisingly, an extremely white audience). Quite a few were overweight, their three-piece suits and tightly buttoned shirts straining to contain them. The room also had a distinct and increasingly unfamiliar odour: stale cigarette smoke. As no smoking was allowed here, they must have brought it in with them, from wherever they would normally gather to exercise their freedom to resist the dead hand of the nanny state. These people, it was clear, were out of shape on principle. At the launch of Popular Conservatism in February. Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images Truss was the star turn, and she spoke last. The warm-up acts included Mark Littlewood, former director general of the Institute for Economic Affairs (55 Tufton Street), now director of Popular Conservatism (which he mistakenly referred to as “Popular Conservativism” throughout). Littlewood began with a few housekeeping remarks, which meant gleefully pointing out that by having so many people crammed into an inadequate space, they were in breach of the building’s health and safety regulations. He was followed by Jacob Rees-Mogg, Lee Anderson (then still a Tory MP, before his recent defection to Reform UK, though he was already showing clear signs of strain) and Mhairi Fraser, the prospective Conservative candidate for Epsom and Ewell, who railed against Covid lockdowns, smoking bans and the dark threat of restrictions on an Englishman’s right to buy two packets of biscuits. I think the idea was to make Truss look statesmanlike. In a way, it worked. When she spoke, she had an intensity the others lacked. In part it was because she still carries such an aura of spectacular failure that any public appearance looks like a triumph of will. But it was also because she had the broader vision. Rees-Mogg simply rehearsed some tired lines about the continuing hold of EU law on post-Brexit Britain. Anderson moaned about the petty irritations of net zero targets. But Truss went further, looking to join the dots to explain why Britain has hit the buffers. It turns out the country is in the grip of a debilitating form of groupthink, all the more pernicious for being a combination of ideology and lifestyle choice. The ideology is what she calls communism – by which she seems to mean state interference in the free market coupled with weaponised identity politics. The lifestyle is Islington dinner party chic – lefty whingeing over the Ottolenghi sharing platters along with more identity politics. This ideology and lifestyle between them have infiltrated all the commanding heights of the media-legal-bureaucratic complex that runs the country. As she says it, she sounds as if she believes it, which presumably she has to, or else she wouldn’t be here but would instead be serving out her penance in a soup kitchen somewhere. As I listened to her banging on, her eyes oddly glassy as though looking for something just over the horizon, she strongly reminded me of someone but I couldn’t put my finger on who it was. Then it came to me. In her mix of utter conviction and utter obliviousness to how she might come across to anyone who doesn’t see the world the way she does, the politician she most resembles is Jeremy Corbyn. Like him, Truss is convinced the policies she advocates are popular with a majority of the public. For Corbyn it was nationalisation of the utilities, more money for the NHS and cheaper housing, all of which poll extremely well. For Truss it is secure borders, lower taxes and an end to burdensome environmental restrictions. In both cases, the explanation for why the things the public want never come to pass is the same: the system is stacked against the preferences of ordinary people. The difference is that, in Truss’s case, she did become prime minister, being forced to quit only when the markets turned against her. Had Corbyn’s policy programme during his first weeks in office produced a run on the pound, he might well have felt it was all of a piece: the unaccountable power of the City of London features high in his demonology of the forces arrayed against him. But Truss believes in the wisdom of the markets. It is the unaccountable power of quangos, civil servants and law courts she fundamentally mistrusts. So what caused the banks and the currency exchanges to turn against her? Are they communists, too? She had no answer to this question at the launch of PopCon, not least because she did not take any questions. But in front of a very different audience at the Institute for Government (IfG) last September, she tackled what had gone wrong head on. She told a roomful of financial journalists and policy wonks that her economic plans had been scuppered by the failure of key institutions to support her. The Bank of England had cavilled at her proposals at a time when monetary policy was tightening
