Crossing the Rubicon

This week: the less obvious reason the Reform surge is so horrifying. Also, some nicknames for English monarchs; and some maps of London’s changing class structures.

Any society requires a bunch of unspoken rules to function: codes of behaviour which aren’t laws and which aren’t enforced through anything more than other people’s judgement, but which are nonetheless understood to be Not The Done Thing. You don’t push in front of queues. You do let people out at junctions. Some of the frustrating moments in life happen when someone breaches these rules, in large part because there’s no greater sanction available than some light tutting: witness the recent fury about people who play music on buses without headphones. It is, apart from the anti-social act in itself, deeply irritating when someone doesn’t follow the rules.

But it can also be a lot more than that. It can, when the matter at issue is voting behaviour, rather than ordering a round of cocktails at a crowded bar, border on the apocalyptic.

So: last year’s presidential election was, from one perspective, entirely predictable and normal. The US economy may have been booming, in a way every other western leader would kill for. But both Covid and geopolitical instability meant that inflation had topped 5% for much of the previous term, and when prices go up incumbent parties tend to lose. All else being equal, you’d have expected the challenger to win.

All else, many of us assumed, was not equal. The challenger was not a “normal” Republican, but Donald Trump, a man who’d bragged about assaulting women and tried to overturn the results of the last election through street violence, and who, even if he hadn’t done any of those things, had presided over an Extremely Online version of totalitarianism in which you simply couldn’t switch off from politics no matter how much you wanted to. All of those things, some thought, made him verboten.

But as it turned out, a lot of voters either didn’t know that, or just didn’t care. What they did care about was that life in the four years after 2020 had felt a lot harder than those in the four years before it. So in 2024, Donald Trump managed to do what he’d failed to do in either 2016 or 2020, and won the popular vote – because a critical mass of Americans didn't know they were supposed to be more bothered by the attempts to overthrow democracy than they were by the price of eggs. They didn’t know the rules.

What happened in last week’s English local elections – see, I got there eventually – is essentially the same. The argument, briefed by Labour, that new governments always do badly in their first set of local elections, is not actually true: Labour did fine in 1998, even if the Tories recovered somewhat; in 2011, the Tories held steady, and the punishment beating was instead doled out to their coalition partners, the LibDems. But neither had as poor an inheritance as the current government, and both did a much better job of giving the impression that they actually had a plan. I said last week that I thought predictions that Labour would hold steady looked optimistic, and so it turned out – they lost 186 councillors. This was not good; it was also not surprising.¹

The Tories, though, were never going to feel the benefit: they were defending seats they’d won in the unusually strong performance of 2021; no one has forgiven them for the mess they left the country in; and the only reason Kemi Badenoch is still leader when nobody thinks she’ll survive to the next election is the widespread assumption that no one else would be doing any better.

All of which meant there were a lot of votes that weren’t going to go to either Labour or the Tories, in a lot of rural and right-leaning council areas that were unlikely to go either LibDem or Green. Ah.

That Reform UK cleaned up is shocking for a number of reasons. Because of the brand of populist nationalism it stands for. Because it means that some of the hysterical commentary imagining Nigel Farage on the steps of Downing Street might not actually be wrong. Because it suggests that the Conservative party of Thatcher, Churchill and Disraeli, one of the oldest and most successful political parties in the world, might genuinely be in its death throes, something I always thought I’d enjoy a lot more than it turned out I’m doing.

But – if all you knew was that these were council elections in places like Lincolnshire and Kent, that the two main parties were both struggling but that there was a challenger party on the right, then you’d expect them to clean up. Of course people wanted – the lack of capital here is deliberate – reform. Who, given the state of the country, wouldn’t?

If we’re freaked out, it’s in large part because we know it would be insane to give a populist protest party run by Nigel Farage the power to ever actually run anything. The problem is, it turns out that a lot of voters don’t share that assumption: they don’t know the rules. As with those who voted for Trump because they were angry about the cost of groceries, they can’t see the invisible line they just crossed – or why it’s so terrifying.

Book, book, book (like a chicken)

You can currently buy A History of the World in 47 Borders for 99p on Kindle or (because it price matches the bad site) Kobo. I don’t really understand how this works for me? But I’d like people to read it, so if you’ve been holding out on me then knock yourselves out.

Some monarchical nicknames (English edition)

Everything is awful, so I’m returning to my comfort zone of learning about terrible things done by the leaders of centuries ago, rather than the ones that are still moving about. Having explored the nicknames of monarchs in both Russia and the Byzantine Empire, I figured it was time I did the same for my native land, because a) I’ve been wondering about some of the more colourful Anglo Saxon ones for decades², and b) some of them are great.

That last word is a joke. Look:

A statue of Alfred the Great in Southwark. Image: Svitapeneela/public domain.