Fourteen years of British self-harm

July 4 is my second favourite US public holiday after Thanksgiving. This year, however, I will be primed to celebrate Independence Day with un-English abandon. Since it coincides with the British general election, that will be the day when my compatriots will award the Order of the Boot to the least competent UK government in my life — indeed, the worst since Lord North blundered his way into the American Revolution. Some Swampians might protest that the worst-British-government-in-history award should go to Neville Chamberlain. But war with Nazi Germany was coming anyway, and Chamberlain’s infamous Munich bargain at least brought some breathing space to rearm before the gathering storm. With Brexit, however, David Cameron blithely sauntered into a gargantuan unforced error — promptly renamed British “Independence Day” by Boris Johnson. Thankfully Johnson’s suggestion did not take.

I would be willing to wager that on June 23 Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives will make no mention of the fact that the day will mark the eighth anniversary of his party’s act of national self-harm. Remember, Johnson’s Conservatives won a thumping election victory in 2019 on the promise that they would “Get Brexit done”. Now, amid a national poverty crisis, the longest National Health Service waiting list in memory, a country with more food banks than McDonald’s restaurants, and a national economy that is once again the “sick man of Europe”, the party that delivered this hare-brained plan is pretending it didn’t happen. The British people have had time to repent at leisure — “regrexit”, as it is sometimes called. Forgive my language but I will always recall the past 14 years as an omnishambolic clusterfuck.

It is not as if the likely incoming Labour government will be able to reverse the bulk of the damage — or at least not in its first term. Sir Keir Starmer, Labour’s leader, has made a point of being studiously dull. Labour’s platform is so content-free that he has left almost nothing for Sunak’s Tories to aim at. As The Guardian’s unerringly funny Marina Hyde points out, Starmer is equally unexciting on the stump: “I’m not saying that if you wanted to hide the nuclear codes, inside a Keir Starmer speech would be the best place to do it,” she writes. “But it wouldn’t be the worst.” I would love to match Hyde’s wit in describing Sunak’s manic attempts to find a last-minute idea that could change the British electorate’s mind. But my attempt would be futile. “The prime minister seems so palpably convinced he can’t win that he’s at the stage of promising any old mad thing,” writes Hyde. “It’s like that scene at the end of Of Mice and Men [spoiler alert, kids], where Rishi Sunak knows the Conservative party has accidentally killed something. (Curley’s wife? The economy? Dignity in politics?) And he is now sitting down next to the Conservative party, and is telling it a lovely story about all the lovely things they are going to do, right before he shoots it in the head like a good pal.”

My colleague Robert Shrimsley has an excellent, more Financial Times-esque, diagnosis of “Sunak’s spaghetti strategy” — the hope that if you throw everything at the wall something will stick. Robert is politely sceptical that any of it will shift Sunak’s bleak numbers. Either way, change is coming to Britain. It will doubtless seem unexciting within a few weeks of it happening. But I, for one, will be grateful to see my homeland revert to dullness after all the fun that Johnson and then Liz Truss have laid on. For those who have forgotten, Truss was Britain’s shortest-serving prime minister — lasting just 49 days, or almost five Scaramuccis. She kissed the hand of Queen Elizabeth just two days before Britain’s longest-serving monarch passed away (coincidence?). Truss’s latest book is titled Ten Years to Save the West. Britain deserves a decade in which it can repair some of the damage that she and her party have wrought.

Rather than turn to a compatriot, I could think of none better to respond to this than James Carville, the legendary Democratic strategist and architect of Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign victory. James, you coined the phrase, “It’s the economy, stupid.” What would the updated version be for today? And is there anything America can learn from Britain’s self-administered debacle?

Recommended reading and listening

• I also wrote about the political implications of last night’s historic and unanimous Donald Trump guilty verdict: “The Republican candidate’s court of appeal will be the US electorate”.

• For a reminder of the direction in which British politics could have gone, do watch this year’s Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies commencement address by David Miliband — the former UK foreign secretary, now New York-based head of the International Rescue Committee. He warns of the “flammable world” full of interconnected timber into which students are graduating. We need more fire fighters.  

• Talking of flammability, my column this week points out that the Trump train is still on track. “Notoriety beats obscurity,” I write. “If swing voters still do not know — or care — about Trump’s plans for US democracy, they will get the government they deserve.”

• My colleague Gideon Rachman generated a lot of interest with his argument that the west should downplay its support of the rules-based order in favour of defence of freedom. I’m not sure that I agree with Gideon but it’s a provocative trigger for discussion.

• I hugely enjoyed being on James Carville and Al Hunt’s Politics War Room podcast this week. Nobody engages quite like them.

James Carville responds

Ed, one is always tempted to draw parallels between British politics and politics in the United States. The real truth is that the situation in America is significantly better than it is now in Britain. That’s for the simple reason that you are supposed to throw the grenade after pulling the pin; Brexit was one of the most catastrophic decisions a western democracy has made in living memory. You guys basically committed suicide. I don’t think that a huge Labour victory bodes anything good or bad for Democrats in American politics. The circumstances are too different.

It’s still economic concerns that are driving the US election and that is borne out by the fact that Biden is doing worse with young voters than old because economic circumstances drastically favour older voters. What I think the Trump New York guilty verdict does is give a gigantic opening for Democrats to talk about raising the minimum wage and expanding healthcare. It presents a real opportunity for Biden to talk about bread and butter issues, while Trump is ranting and raving. Biden’s got a big hole and he should drive a truck through it. He should be the person who talks about people’s lives. Trump’s legal story has sufficient oxygen and doesn’t need another log on the fire.