Are we all One Nation Tories now?

Sherelle Jacobs puts an ex-No10 staffer’s blueprint for a new conservatism to the test

IREMAKING ONE NATION by Nick Timothy 224pp, Polity, £20, ebook £24

f One Nation Toryism has won, its new manifesto, written by former aide Nick Timothy, is a coolly confident victory dance. But on whose political corpse?

Metropolitan elitism? In part, certainly. There is serene power in Timothy’s controlled detonation of this crumbling ideology – from its awe of unfettered globalisation, to its zeal for undemocratic legalism. Sitting atop the grave of this Blairite dystopia – with its low productivity, high immigration and supranational overreach – Timothy warms our souls with gentle folk tales of a new Johnsonian world: an efficient, affectionate new British Shangri-La with fast trains, northern tech clusters, and parks run by local sports clubs.

Is the far Left also Timothy’s target? Slightly. Timothy argues that mobbish, anti-pluralist Labour’s fate is a warning against populism, which on both the Left and Right, is “the mirror image of liberal democracy”. That is to say that in its rampant pursuit of “unmediated democracy”, it

“risks killing off the institutions and rights that make democracy meaningful”.

And yet one can’t shake the feeling that the primary aim of Remaking One Nation is to crush the hollering ribcage of its outspoken rival, Thatcherism.

This is not, in itself, objectionable. Eighties libertarianism has been left sulking on the margins of conservative policymaking for important reasons, and Timothy is ruthless in pointing out its deficiencies: its reputation for selfish individualism (reading Ayn Rand, Timothy tells us, left him “cold”); its reluctance to countenance the limited reach of the free markets in world that demands organised responses to national challenges, from our ageing society to Asia’s destabilising rise. And his indirect challenges to Thatcherism cut just as deep. Where Remaking One Nation rejects simplistic libertarian dogma, it is impressive on detail, exploring everything from tax reform to community-run high streets and modern guilds.

So far, so fair, in the author’s quest to “overthrow the excesses of ideological ultra-liberalism”. And yet, under the soft gurglings of Burkean pragmatism, one glimpses a bedrock strikingly similar to that of Blairism. Timothy’s communitarianism – his belief in the “relational essence of humanity” – was also the jumping-off point of the trendy thinkers who bewitched the Clintons, like Charles Taylor and Michael Sandel. It propelled Tony Blair’s semi-mystical fascination with the 19th-century temperance reformer, T H Green.

The fact that this existential desperation to define the individual as part of something greater gave rise to the dangerous myth of a self-stabilising, global system, along with ever more bloated and dysfunctional Western welfare states, is missing from Timothy’s analysis. So is any account of why One Nation Toryism, with its commitment to wealth taxes and reinvigorated multilateral organisations, will prove any different.

Timothy distracts from this by trying to fuse the Thatcherite and Blairite bogeymen, denigrating both as “ultra-liberalism”. It is an odd reading of history, ignoring the savage 40-year loathing between the Thatcherite grassroots and metropolitan London. Puzzlingly, individualism rather than ravages of modernity or the welfare state run amok, is blamed for society’s “atomisation”. His thesis makes for an even more curious reading of Western philosophy.

In an attempt to deny its cultural authenticity, Timothy ventures that individualism has shallow historical roots. The Stoics, who prioritised inner tranquillity over public peace, or St Augustine, who made the case for divine-granted free will, might have disagreed.

One also wonders whether, in his determination to define the one, true conservatism, Timothy has set himself a trap. His family policies – which include extending statutory maternity pay and front-loaded child benefits – are a case in point. Are we supposed to believe that this proposed slew of ultra-liberal benefits is the definition of modern conservatism?

Eloquent, stimulating and wide-reaching as it is, Remaking One Nation inevitably reads like the start of a debate, rather than the settling of an old argument. Incidentally, this is exactly what makes it a galvanising read, whether you be a Thatcherite or a Burkean.

‘Do you ever feel like the music you’re hearing is explaining your life to you?” asks pop critic and broadcaster Pete Paphides early on in his perceptive coming-of-age memoir. He goes on to do just that, explaining his Seventies and early Eighties childhood through the music of the period – and he writes so beautifully about it that you keep having to listen to it afresh yourself. Facing a series of childhood crises, he is rescued by Abba, the Bee Gees and most profoundly by Dexys Midnight Runners, who “rode into my interior world like the cavalry”.

Paphides’ parents moved from Cyprus to Acocks Green, Birmingham, in 1963 in the hope of building a better life, not realising that it would be a permanent move. Their struggles took a psychological toll on the family: for almost four years the young

Paphides – self-conscious of a lisp and in shock at returning to Birmingham after a summer in Cyprus – was mute, unable to talk.

His story is one of assimilation: of his Greek family into Britain and of a confused child into a frightening adult world. In Martha and the Muffins’ new wave hit Echo Beach he finds confirmation that “adulthood was disappointing”. It’s also about a second-generation immigrant who defined his identity by the culture of the country in which he grew up, rather than the one his parents came from. The music he hears accentuates the guilt he feels at his lack of fidelity to Greek culture. Each play of an album by the Wombles “added to the distance between Cyprus and England”; he hears in its grooves “wet parks in October, empty playgrounds through rain-flecked classroom windows”.

Critics have tended to regard records by the likes of the

Wombles as too ephemeral to be worthy of attention, but Paphides’ appraisals of such pop moments are among the many joys of Broken Greek. The Floral Dance by the Brighouse and Rastrick Brass Band, for example, is “a collective rapture powered by the spirit and sinew of people simply trying their best”. At 12 he creates his own magazine, Pop Scene, with fish-and-chip paper from his parents’ shop. In it he affects the “sniffy, supercilious tone I deemed essential to all rock criticism”. But that tone is entirely absent from Paphides’ generousspirited book.

Many lives were changed by seeing David Bowie on Top of the Pops, but Paphides’ “prepubescent Starman moment” was Brotherhood of Man’s 1976 Eurovision winner Save Your Kisses for Me. It was the start

of a pattern: “All the music I liked was performed by people who might feasibly step in and take care of me if something happened to my parents.” His ability to describe the way he responded to the world as a child is remarkable. He searches Abba records “for clues” to decipher the relationship of his real-life mother and father. In the video for The Winner Takes It All he sees in Agnetha’s “hollowed-out” face “the same look as the one on my mum’s face whenever she’d had a row with my dad”. Money, Money Money, he says, is “an immigrant lament” that “sounded tense and threatening to me”.

He fantasises about “kind, compassionate Sting” replacing his schoolteacher and taking a class about the latest Police hit Message in a Bottle. But if Paphides had written an SOS “it would have probably said that I didn’t feel very Greek at all. That all the things I seemed to love… were British.” He

has a brilliant antenna for the Britishness of certain records. Food for Thought, the debut single by Birmingham’s UB40, showed

“what happened to reggae when you deprived it of sunshine. It sounded damp and subterranean.”

Paphides paints an extraordinarily vivid and affectionate picture of the period: calls to Dial-a-Disc in the hope of hearing the Rubettes; gazing in awe at Woolworth’s floor-to-ceiling display of chart singles; and the “state-approved fun” of Noel Edmonds’ Multi-Coloured Swap Shop. If, like Paphides, you felt “a profound sense of well-being” in a record shop in the Seventies and early Eighties, then Broken Greek will transport you back there.

You’ll recall how central pop records were, and you’ll be enthralled by Paphides’ funny, warm and sometimes heartbreaking account of how life-affirming music can be.

GALVANISING Nick Timothy