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Something for Theresa May to think about

John Barrell: The Bow Street Runners, 7 June 2012

The First English Detectives: The Bow Street Runners and the Policing of London, 1750-1840 
by J.M. Beattie.
Oxford, 272 pp., £65, February 2012, 978 0 19 969516 4
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... by ‘sheer criminality’. The word ‘sheer’ did most of the work: the cause of criminality, Theresa May was arguing, was criminality itself. Boris Johnson was quick to agree. When did it become a test of ideological purity to be able to say with a straight face that poverty and unemployment have nothing to do with the causes of crime? Who was the ...

The New Deal

Tom Crewe, 17 August 2017

... fake news for decades. ‘BLUE MURDER’ was the Sun’s headline on 19 April, the morning after Theresa May dropped her ‘election bombshell’: ‘PM’s snap poll will kill off Labour.’ The Daily Mail cheered May’s ‘stunning move’ as finally providing an opportunity to ‘CRUSH THE SABOTEURS’. The ...

Steely Women in a World of Wobbly Men

David Runciman: The Myth of the Strong Leader, 20 June 2019

... would have liked to remake the Conservative Party in his own image, as she remade it in hers. Theresa May simply wanted to be as formidable as Thatcher had been, a steely woman in a world of wobbly men. Even Gordon Brown, with his ceaseless personal ambition, believed that politicians only get a few chances to make a lasting difference and he longed ...

England prepares to leave the world

Neal Ascherson, 17 November 2016

... never finally cast off the cross-Channel hawser mooring her to Europe. This revival is different. Theresa May says she’s bound for the ocean, and she means it. Or rather, she means it because she doesn’t mean it. Nothing in British history resembles this spectacle of men and women ramming through policies everyone knows they don’t believe in. Never ...

On Loathing Rees-Mogg

Nicholas Spice, 21 February 2019

... this makes sense and can only be good. But for me the UK Border is a threat not a reassurance. Theresa May presumably felt a deep affinity with the Border Force when she was home secretary. She’s someone who likes things to be well defined. She has her red lines. She’s the exception to the adage ‘Nomen est omen’: she should have been called ...

Untouchable?

David Runciman: The Tory State?, 8 September 2016

... replacing it, yet no one else seems capable of replacing Labour as the main party of opposition. Theresa May commands the battlefield and her enemies have scattered. But is this really what a one-party state looks like? This isn’t Turkey. There have been no mass demonstrations in support of the regime; no culls of public institutions or collective ...

Diary

Matt Foot: Children of the Spied-On, 29 June 2023

... In​ 2015 Theresa May, who was then home secretary, announced that there would be an inquiry into undercover policing and the operation of the Metropolitan Police’s Special Demonstration Squad (SDS). This secret unit, whose purpose was to infiltrate subversive groups, was set up in 1968 as part of Special Branch in response to protests against the Vietnam War ...

We Are Many

Tom Crewe: In the Corbyn Camp, 11 August 2016

... nominations from his fellow MPs (which he would have been unable to do), and three days after Theresa May had become prime minister. When I arrived at Broadcasting House for the start of the march, a few hundred people were gathered around a speaker from the UK wing of Black Lives Matter, orating into a megaphone. There were people selling the papers ...

Do your homework

David Runciman: What’s Wrong with Theresa May, 16 March 2017

Theresa MayThe Enigmatic Prime Minister 
by Rosa Prince.
Biteback, 402 pp., £20, February 2017, 978 1 78590 145 4
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... a dry and dutiful book which reads like a ghost story. The person being haunted is David Cameron. Theresa May grew up in a Cotswolds village called Church Enstone, where her father was vicar for much of the 1960s. The vicarage is within five miles of what became Cameron’s constituency home when he was MP for Witney and is roughly the same distance from ...

Snobs v. Herbivores

Colin Kidd: Non-Vanilla One-Nation Conservatism, 7 May 2020

Remaking One Nation: The Future of Conservatism 
by Nick Timothy.
Polity, 275 pp., £20, March 2020, 978 1 5095 3917 8
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... But for a late and largely undetected Labour surge in the run-up to the 2017 general election, Theresa May might now be steering us through the Covid-19 crisis: trusted, sensible and reliable, however costively unimaginative and incapable of the nimble feats of very un-Conservative gymnastics so far performed by Boris Johnson’s chancellor, Rishi ...

Confidence and Supply

Stephen Sedley: Confidence and Supply, 14 December 2017

... Without the support of the Northern Irish Democratic Unionist Party, which won ten seats, Theresa May would have been unable to form a government. Hence the Agreement between the Conservative and Unionist Party and the Democratic Unionist Party on Support for the Government in Parliament. It is undated but is intended to last, subject to possible ...

Brexitism

Alan Finlayson, 18 May 2017

... forced to become cosmopolitan citizens of the world (and therefore ‘citizens of nowhere’ as Theresa May would say); a theological fear that the children of God are becoming lost in the secular void (as Theresa May might say). It’s also a political intuition worth taking seriously. A people has to know ...

What Is Great about Ourselves

Pankaj Mishra: Closing Time, 21 September 2017

The Retreat of Western Liberalism 
by Edward Luce.
Little, Brown, 240 pp., £16.99, May 2017, 978 1 4087 1041 8
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The Fate of the West: Battle to Save the World’s Most Successful Political Idea 
by Bill Emmott.
Economist, 257 pp., £22, May 2017, 978 1 61039 780 3
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The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics 
by David Goodhart.
Hurst, 256 pp., £20, March 2017, 978 1 84904 799 9
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The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics 
by Mark Lilla.
Harper, 143 pp., £20, August 2017, 978 0 06 269743 1
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The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam 
by Douglas Murray.
Bloomsbury, 343 pp., £18.99, May 2017, 978 1 4729 4224 1
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... editor of Prospect, told the New York Times just before the general election that he believed Theresa May could dominate British politics for a generation. Mark Lilla, a professor at Columbia and a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, wants the Democratic Party, which under Bill Clinton captured ‘Americans’ imaginations about our ...

Short Cuts

Francis FitzGibbon: Raab’s British Rights, 7 October 2021

... proposals by an independent commission for improving the quality of publicly funded advocacy, but Theresa May sacked him before he could put them into practice. Liz Truss showed barely any interest in the job. David Lidington came and went without a trace in just seven months. David Gauke, a relative fixture with a term of eighteen months, had to ...

Short Cuts

Peter Geoghegan: Brexit and the SNP, 3 November 2016

... party membership quadrupled to 100,000, heralding victory in the 2015 general election and this May’s Scottish elections. The SNP won a third term in office on a manifesto that pledged to revisit independence if there was a ‘material change’ in Scotland’s circumstances. The following month, 62 per cent of Scots voted to stay in the European ...

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