A new book by an adviser to Theresa May lays out an ambitious blueprint for post-Brexit Britain.
A new book by an adviser to Theresa May lays out an ambitious blueprint for post-Brexit Britain.
F rom leafy Windsor to the former mining town of Bolsover, British prime minister Boris Johnson has achieved what Theresa May could not: a Conservative majority that spans the country’s traditional class divides. But May’s failure was not for want of trying. In June 2017, she held an ill-fated snap election to attempt to wrest back control of Parliament. The aim was to charm working-class Labour heartlands, particularly in the north. It failed. And as the clock struck 10 p.m. on polling day, she panicked and called her joint chief of staff, Nick Timothy.
“She was sobbing,” writes Timothy in his new book, Remaking One Nation: Conservatism in an Age of Crisis. “I remember thinking she sounded like a child who wanted to be told everything was just fine.”
It was not going to be fine. Least of all for him, the co-author of the party’s campaign manifesto. By the week’s end, he would have no choice but to resign.
Much has been made of the political adviser in recent times — whether it’s “The Great Manipulator,” Steve Bannon, or the Brexit firebrand and “brooding puppet master,” Dominic Cummings. For his part, Timothy was dubbed the “Sage of Birmingham” by The Economist, with a “Rasputin beard” to boot. In the weeks that followed the campaign, he was pilloried in the press as the ruthless tyrant who had smuggled ruinous policies into the Tory agenda. The “red lines” on leaving the European Union. The so-called “Dementia Tax” to fund senior care. And even the “hostile environment” strategy to root out illegal immigration.
It is little wonder, then, that this erstwhile aide — now clean-shaven — is eager to set the record straight with a retelling of his time at Number 10. Or rather, certain parts of it. Readers may be surprised to find that only the tiniest sliver of Timothy’s 224-page book, the introduction, is actually about himself.
“Advisers, like Victorian children,” he says, “should be seen but not heard.” And true to form, the rest of Remaking One Nation reads less like a tell-all memoir than it does an ambitious blueprint for post-Brexit Britain. Of course, Timothy cannot resist landing a few punches. In his opening salvo, he takes aim at Aussie campaign strategist Lynton Crosby “and the consultants,” as well as several recently departed or demoted cabinet ministers, who either muddied the Tories’ message or failed to get fully on board with the party’s program.
More pointedly, perhaps, Timothy’s reluctance to divulge further details is suggestive of his desire to make a political comeback. In November, he put in an unsuccessful bid to run as a Conservative candidate for Meriden in the recent election; had he won, he would likely now be a sitting member of Parliament.
The title of the work gives a hint as to the cherished conservative ideal that he hopes to resurrect (what he calls a “communitarian correction”). It hearkens back to the “one nation” conservatism of 19th-century prime minister Benjamin Disraeli, who expanded the franchise and sought to appeal to the masses with a mix of patriotism and social reform.
Indeed, the book’s epigraph is lifted from the pages of Disraeli’s novel Sybil (1845):
Two nations [of rich and poor]; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones . . . are not governed by the same laws.
Although a somewhat worn trope, much like “the New Deal coalition,” this term finds a new lease on life at the end of Timothy’s pen, particularly as it comes as a stunning rebuke of Thatcherism.
Born to a working-class family in Birmingham, Timothy had a steelworker father and a mother who found employment as a school assistant. With this background, he writes, he “could never have been an ideological liberal or libertarian.”
When the young Brummie got his start at the Conservative Research Department in the early 2000s, he chafed at the attempted indoctrination of his fertile mind with the political philosophy of Ayn Rand, whose “selfish individualism left [him] cold.” Similarly, the legend that Margaret Thatcher would often pull Friedrich von Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty from her handbag and declare “this is what we believe” had him shaking his head.
In fact, Timothy would probably have found as many, if not more, agreeable elements in Mario Cuomo’s “A Tale of Two Cities” speech at the 1984 Democratic National Convention as he would in Thatcher’s “This Lady’s Not for Turning” address three years prior.
At the heart of this book is the claim that liberalism has gone too far — on both the left and the right. But Timothy draws important distinctions between what he calls “essential,” “elite,” and “ultra” liberalism.
Essential liberalism is defined as the necessary laws and institutions that underpin free societies, in addition to norms of behavior, such as a willingness to compromise and restraint in the exercise of power. (Although this is not explicitly drawn out, Timothy’s ideas seem akin to Rawls’s theory of overlapping consensus — the notion that all citizens can endorse a core set of laws despite having differing ideas about justice.) The usual suspects are all there: Edmund Burke, John Stuart Mill, and Isaiah Berlin, to name a few. Yet their ideas are footnoted rather than explored in depth.
Elite liberalism, he says, is borne of the social and economic revolutions of the 1960s and 1980s, respectively. Political elites place such a great emphasis on individualism that they care little for the communal and relational nature of societies, which leads to the masquerading of certain policies — high levels of immigration, limited support for the family, and the marketization of public services — as supposedly centrist positions.
These elites are the “citizens of nowhere” that he famously ridiculed through May’s keynote speech at the 2016 Tory party conference:
Today, too many people in positions of power behave as though they have more in common with international elites than with the people down the road, the people they employ, the people they pass in the street.
This is Timothy at his most insightful: Combining some free-market reforms with a smattering of socially liberal policies is doomed to failure in the U.K. because, in reality, mainstream public opinion is more to the left on the economy and more to the right on cultural issues. Previous Labour and Tory prime ministers Tony Blair and David Cameron were of this ilk, he argues, and their assumptions led to blind spots in how they each dealt with the rising social anxiety within the country.
Furthermore, Timothy’s view that citizenship is something relational instead of transactional also holds much merit. There is indeed an “impatiently universalistic” liberal school of thought, which sees citizenship as a laundry list of rights to be granted anywhere and everywhere, rather than as a set of rights that spring from our communal obligations, civic engagement, and shared traditions. But his ideas about citizenship lead to some awkward conclusions that surface in his discussion of ultra-liberalism (including a proposal for mandatory courses in British culture for foreign nationals on work visas of less than a year).
Ultra-liberalism, Timothy says, is the marching advancement of liberal policies on opposite ends of the political spectrum, from “market fundamentalists” to the proponents of “militant identity politics,” which come at the expense of the communitarian ideal. This term is used to describe “beliefs that are not shared between the mainstream parties, but which still drive ideological liberalism onward.”
It must be said that these passages lack evenhandedness. Repeatedly, he refers to how left ultra-liberals “sacralize their policy objectives.” The paradoxical conclusion, therefore, is that their liberalism is, as he says, “a teleological fallacy.” That view invariably attributes some measure of bad faith to those who hold such beliefs, and one begins to wonder whether Timothy’s framework is a suitable interpretive tool to understand them.
A much thornier issue, however, is the author’s half-baked appeal for “a cohesive society, based on an inclusive but still distinctly British culture.” There is a strong case to be made against identity politics in this regard, though a persuasive argument ought not to fixate so heavily on the plight of the “white working class,” which he subsequently mentions no less than 31 times. Few converts will be won with clumsily worded tracts calling on minorities to “respect and understand the ethnic and cultural identities of white Britons, and the long story, spanning hundreds of generations, of our national life.”
There is an inkling from Timothy that this “British identity” naturally extends to migrants from Commonwealth countries, but again, he decries the idea that there is any such thing as a unique set of British values, so the question of identity at once becomes uncomfortably cultural in its dimensions.
These arguments warrant a more comprehensive treatment than Timothy gives them, one that takes pains to parse out “Britishness” and set some standards for integration of immigrants (whether that is full assimilation or a more accommodating model). Without that, it remains to be seen whether his vision is really a reclaiming of Britishness or whether it is a nostalgic throwback to some idealized state; my guess is that it falls somewhere in between.
The confusion is not helped by Timothy’s own muddled views. By his own admission, Britishness is about “countless things,” which he then enumerates as if he were a speechwriter for Hugh Grant’s character in the film Love Actually: pale ale, Monty Python, the Oxford-Cambridge boat race, Dunkirk — and the list goes on.
Remaking One Nation’s “looseness” in this regard is more of a handicap than a strength, as it paints Timothy’s brand of conservatism as managerial and ad hoc, rather than principled and systematic. The act of “trimming” — what Timothy calls seeking balance by weakening the stronger side of a novel idea, rather than making the case for it outright — seems a little rudderless and reactionary. What use is it to retain some vague cultural memory of the church or the traditional family, for instance, if, as he admits, these things carry significantly less import today?
Nevertheless, this is a book for its time. Somewhat ironically, Timothy’s policy proposals on everything from China to Europe, immigration to inequality, and public spending to civic capitalism could yet come to fruition under a Johnson premiership. Imagine that. Timothy writes that it is no coincidence that the Second World War, a time of great national solidarity and a strong state, ushered in a spate of bold new policies. In the throes of a pandemic, it may be that a similar opportunity beckons in the not too distant future.