Goodbye to all that: 2024 in review

There seemed to be a lot happening in this year, and it can't all be attributed to the quadrennial extra day; these are merely some of my own reflections on 2024

For auld lang syne

The year draws to a close and it is time to try to make sense of it in my own head, which is easiest by ordering it on the virtual page for you fortunate readers. If you visit this blog to read about politics etc and have no interest in my own peregrinations through the year—which, don’t get me wrong, is a perfectly valid and defensible position—then you can skim past as you wish. I’ve always assumed that readers (and there are 700 of you who subscribe, which is very flattering) will dip in and out rather than treating this blog as appointment reading, so to speak; and, after all, to be interested in each and every essay would mean you were virtually, well, me. And nobody wants that.

Having laid down that disclaimer, I will observe generally that it has been a year to which I will not be sorry to bid farewell. That is not to say nothing good has happened, because there have been high points, and I am always sparing with New Year resolutions and plans, so I cannot say that there is a slew of disappointments or unfulfilled objectives. Nevertheless, it feels like it has been a grey and heavy year, one with very little metaphorical sunshine. I know some friends share that feeling, though not all do and I don’t suggest it’s in any way universal or objectively true. For me, though, it’s important to reflect on why it hasn’t been more enjoyable, and to understand how much is within my control. We should, to misquote Alec Baldwin’s character in Glengarry Glen Ross, always be learning.

Politics: bad

Politically it has been a rather bleak year, from my point of view. Yes, this is (of course) subjective, and I don’t pretend it can or should be anything else; I have friends who lean further to the left than I do for whom it has brought some encouragement and excitement, though some—this I know—are already feeling unsettled and anxious if not outright disappointed by the government on which they had placed some hope and faith.

Let’s be quite clear here because I think sometimes people misunderstand how I approach the question. Did I want the Conservative Party to win the general election? Yes. Did I think that was the likely outcome? No. Do I think the last government, under its five successive prime ministers, had performed well? Certainly not universally, no, and I freely accept—indeed, I said often enough in print—that its last few years were poor, in terms of competence, propriety and policy direction. Did they deserve to win the election? I don’t have an answer to that because I don’t think it’s the right question.

When I step into the voting booth, I don’t have some impartial measure of success or failure, some judgement of worthiness, against which I can assess political parties. All I can do is vote for the candidate whose party best represents my view of the world and my opinions on public policy, and at the moment, as has consistently been the case since I first voted in May 1997, that is the Conservative Party with all its many faults. I fundamentally disagree with the basic tenets of Sir Keir Starmer’s version of Labour, so I am never going to vote for it. I could abstain, but my own view, while I accept other people feel differently, is that the ability to vote in a free and fair election has been hard won and is still a privilege many people around the world do not enjoy. I feel it’s incumbent on me to use that privilege, and I think there is a danger that abstention can become sheer disengagement from the whole political system, which weakens us all and leaves it in the hands of the committed, irrespective of competence or ideology.

As a Conservative, it was a grim year but not an unexpected one. Still, it stung, perhaps more than it should have done, but is also a reminder of the nature of our politics that, at 47, the general election in July was only the second time in my life that Labour have replaced the Conservatives in office: the first, of course, was in May 1997, and the Labour Party’s victory was of a similar magnitude in parliamentary terms. There were some Tories who left the House of Commons voluntarily or at the decision of the electors whose departures I regret: any list of course is invidious for those it fails to include but Nigel Evans, Michael Gove, Adam Holloway, Sir Bob Neill, Guy Opperman, Bob Seely, Bob Stewart, Sir Charles Walker and Sir Ben Wallace will all be missed for one reason or another, either personally or because they were effective or made a particular contribution (and, no, I’m not going to get into an argument about any individual names).

Mostly I am deeply sorry that Penny Mordaunt narrowly lost her seat in Portsmouth North. She is a friend and someone I hold in very high esteem, and unquestionably she has been notable by her absence from the front line in the Conservative Party’s attempt to steady the ship in the months since July. Had she still been in the House of Commons, and had she put herself forward, she would have been a strong candidate for the leadership. But she wasn’t, so she couldn’t, and she wasn’t. I don’t think her career in front line electoral politics is by any means at an end, but I make no apology for saying I think her absence is a loss to the party.

Of the new government I need say little because I’ve said enough in publication already: I don’t share its vision of the world, I disagree with many of its policies and attitudes, and it is becoming apparent that it hasn’t even the saving grace of competence or diligence in administration. At the beginning of the month, Sir Keir Starmer’s personal popularity continued to plumb astonishing depths, with 61 per cent of those surveyed dissatisfied with his performance and only 27 per cent—barely more than one in four—satisfied, a score of -34, while the government as a whole was marginally even less popular. For a Prime Minister leading an administration which won a landslide victory less than six months ago, albeit on a modest share of the vote, this is astounding unpopularity.

I am concerned but cautious about the continuing rise of Reform UK. I neither like nor admire Nigel Farage, but I acknowledge his campaigning skills and his ability to speak to a part of the electorate which is not at all negligible. The party did not win the dozens of seats some predicted at the general election; I was always dubious of that prospect and five would have been within my expected range. But there is no diminishing the fact Reform UK won nearly 15 per cent of the vote, comfortably outperforming the Liberal Democrats, and in terms of membership and opinion polling it has maintained momentum beyond the election. I remain doubtful that it will become the Official Opposition in 2028 or 2029, and the idea that Nigel Farage will succeed Sir Keir Starmer as Prime Minister at that point is for the birds, but they have, for the moment, found a connection with enough voters to remain relevant.

The presidential election in the United States was never likely to produce much cause for celebration. Donald Trump is an unmoored, self-absorbed narcissist of the highest order, whose political views are painted in the crudest brushstrokes and I think it is reasonable to regard him as someone who could do real and lasting harm to the political system. I cannot recall a single judgement or outcome which has gone against him in any context which he has not dismissed or sought to delegitimise, and he surrounds himself with ideological cranks, oddballs, criminals and slavishly obedient ciphers.

Yet the plain truth remains that the Democrats responded to this challenge first by pretending long past any point of credibility that an obviously declining and less capable incumbent President was at the top of his game; when that strategy finally fell apart, they were forced to substitute his Vice-President, an odd, flimsy figure with little obvious rapport whose own bid for her party’s candidacy in 2019 had collapsed in chaos and who had been chosen as Joe Biden’s running mate explicitly because he had, willingly or under duress, pledged to choose a black woman, irrespective of ability or appeal.

In 2020, I thought that the Democrats had picked a weak candidate in Biden who stumbled to a victory Donald Trump had thrown away rather than anything else. In 2024, admittedly under very different circumstances, they did even worse. They chose a weak candidate, ran a bad campaign, consistently misjudged the electorate and failed accurately to assess their opponents strengths and weaknesses. So here we are.

Writing: good but always room for improvement

This has been, I suppose, the first calendar year in which I have spent most of my time writing commercially. I have perhaps become slightly obsessive, which has good and bad aspects, but one thing I’ve realised is that writing, whether for other publications or just for myself here, is currently a healthy and productive form of catharsis. Rather than simply rolling thoughts, theories and arguments around in my head or haranguing friends with them, though I still do a lot of that, I have instead framed them in written words. This has been a satisfying way of venting, of course, but it has also allowed me to think more clearly and more systematically: notions that may have ragged edges in your head have to take on a more regular and organised shape on the (virtual) page if they are to be comprehensible to everyone.

Although I come from an almost entirely Scots family, there is enough of the English temperament in me to find awkwardness in advertising what I’ve written (though I am getting over it). I take the view that if you’ve come this far then you have tacitly extended me a degree of latitude, so I will put modesty away for now. Given that I’ve written over 300 articles, reviews and essays this calendar year, I thought it was worth revisiting them with the benefit of hindsight and distance as we approach the end of the year.

To be honest, I am pleased with the majority of my output: there are some signs of writing to a deadline, or having to commit to print while events were still unfolding, and on the political side I will be the first to admit I did not foresee the scale of the Conservative Party’s defeat at July’s general election (though I thought the path to victory was extremely narrow). Nevertheless I don’t think I made any predictions which were wrong on the Rory Stewart scale, so I don’t have too much to walk away from, whistling innocently. (You have to go a long way, however, to beat this display of misplaced confidence by Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon on the night of the 2015 general election.)

It is both a function of and a challenge for the commentator’s art that there is often little time for reflection on events. Your role is to react immediately, to give an analysis based on instinct, judgement and your store of wisdom and experience. But this is important; as I explained earlier in the month when I wrote about political columnists, they (we) are not responsible for history or some kind of definitive record of events, but for capturing something of the spirit of the time—all right, I’ll say it, zeitgeist—creating a kind of time capsule of how events seemed to contemporaries.

Having looked back at my writing since the beginning of 2024, then, I have picked out ten articles (not The Ten Articles) which I am content to have written, which have aged well enough so far and which addressed an important issue or articulated a significant point of view.

1. “Political parties should be broad churches, not sects”, The Critic, 17 January

2. “The tip of the American spear? How the United Kingdom could pursue military specialization”, War on the Rocks, 2 February

3. “George H.W. Bush at 100: the last WASP president”, The Hill, 12 June

4. “Who will bang the drum for free enterprise?”, City A.M., 17 June

5. “What next for the Conservatives?”, City A.M., 5 July

6. “There’s no excuse for this thuggery”, The Spectator, 4 August

7. “Bond unbound: Reassessing Ian Fleming 60 years on”, CulturAll, 21 August

8. “Britain’s economy can’t run on industrial nostalgia”, City A.M., 7 October

9. “Meet the new leader of the UK Conservative Party”, The Hill, 6 November

10. “If we ‘rewire’ the state, how much should government do?”, City A.M., 16 December

I owe immeasurable thanks, as ever, to those who have the task of editing my work, and who at least simulate unfailing good humour about the responsibility: at City A.M., Alys Denby; at The Spectator, Tom Goodenough, John Connolly and Lisa Haseldine; at CapX, Marc Sidwell and Joseph Dinnage; at The i Paper, Rupert Hawksley and Pravina Rudra; at The Hill, Aryeh Cohen-Wade; at The Critic, Ben Sixsmith; at The Daily Telegraph, Michael Mosbacher; at The Daily Express, Asa Bennett; at Spear’s, Edwin Smith; and with patience beyond measure, Alex Matchett at our own CulturAll.

Reading: must try harder

I justify spending an inordinate amount of time on social media and reading the news because being up to date is an essential part of what I do. If I write about current events, I need to be familiar with them, obviously, and analysis is better if it is more widely informed and placed in context. There are often useful lessons to be drawn by making connections that others may not make, or, as I would argue as an historian, by being able to link the present and the past.

(It is a bugbear of mine that millennials and Gen-Zers, which I accept is the equivalent of my saying “young people today”, sometimes have a blinkered “Year Zero” attitude which exhibits almost defiant ignorance of anything which happened before their conscious experience. This is frustrating in itself but when it comes to current events it robs people of perspective and encourages catastrophisation: “this is the worst thing that has ever happened”, and so on. It almost certainly isn’t. It’s reflected in the excessive use and abuse of the word “unprecedented”, deployed by the lazy to mean “I’m not aware of this every happening”, but really, in politics as in life, very little is genuinely unprecedented, and that makes it all the more significant when something is. For example, whatever you think of the outcome, when the Supreme Court ruled in September 2019 that Boris Johnson’s advice to the Queen that Parliament should be prorogued was unlawful, it really was an unprecedented constitutional situation.)

A lot of people, friends included, maintain that their attention spans have been shorter since the terrible year of 2020, with the Covid-19 pandemic, lockdown and all the associated disruption. I don’t know why this should be so, but I certainly remember adjusting to lockdown regulations, thinking the advantage of being so limited was that I would get a lot of reading done and then… not. Of course there is more to distract us with every passing day, and while I’m not quite a passenger on the Jonathan Haidt-driven bus which regards social media as a dreadful curse, it is clearly a factor in distracting us, making us crave immediacy and novelty and diminishing our ability without effort of concentrate for long periods of time.

All of this is an apologia for the fact that I have read far less than I would have liked this year, that I have a growing to-read pile as my satisfaction at buying new books and the promiscuity of my interests combine to outstrip the rate at which I read and absorb, and that I would like to Do Better in 2025 but am aware of the hubris of New Year resolutions. Still, as Alexander Pope said, hope springs eternal in the human breast, and I will report back in a year’s time on my success or otherwise.

I was asked to name three titles I had enjoyed for CapX’s “Books of 2024”, and picked Annie Jacobsen’s Nuclear War: A Scenario, Sam Freedman’s Broken State: Why Nothing Works and How We Fix It and Intermezzo, the fourth novel from Sally Rooney. All were brilliant in their different ways and I highly recommend them. Other books I enjoyed a great deal this year (by no means all published this year):

• The Gift of a Radio: My Childhood and other Train Wrecks, Justin Webb

• British Rail: The Making and Breaking of Our Trains, Christian Wolmar

• Crisis? What Crisis? Britain in the 1970s, Alwyn Turner

• Blue Murder: The Rise and Fall of the Conservative Government 2010-2024, Ben Riley-Smith

• Stargazer, Laurie Petrou

• The Rich Pay Late, Simon Raven

• The Cloisters, Katy Hays

• Diplomacy and Diamonds: My Wars from the Ballroom to the Battlefield, Joanne King Herring

• Life Moves Pretty Fast: The Lessons We Learned from Eighties Movies (and Why We Don’t Learn Them from Movies Any More), Hadley Freeman

• Ministers and Mandarins: Inside the Whitehall Village, Jock Bruce-Gardyne

What this selection says about me, I will leave to others to judge. Among the books I didn’t read were Boris Johnson’s memoirs, Unleashed, because everything I’ve seen and heard tells me they are exactly what one would expect, which is often-entertaining, breezy, self-exculpatory tales with only a passing resemblance to fact; Downfall by Nadine Dorries, which by all accounts is Johnson’s alternative facts but without the laughs; Baroness Warsi’s Muslims Don’t Matter, because I’m not especially interested in the relentless celebration and promotion of Baroness Warsi, which seems to be her main occupation these days; and Nexus by Yuval Noah Harari, on the grounds that his reputation seems to have peaked and now begun to tarnish before I’d fully got to grips with him so I may have been saved a task.

One reason I’ve read fewer books than I’d have liked is that I’ve waded into Substack much more deeply this year as it continues to blossom. No doubt there will come a time when it loses its quirky charm and still-present sense of collegiality and community—all social media does—and there are already users who are lamenting the loss of innocence and effectively saying they preferred its early work. I still find it fascinating, informative and surprising, as well as civilised, but it is easy to tumble down rabbit holes. If you are interested in some of the same things that I am, and if you crave new horizons, here are a few blogs I enjoy enormously:

• Phillips’s Newsletter, by Phillips O’Brien

• Comment is Freed, by Sir Lawrence and Sam Freedman

• Thomas P.M. Barnett’s Global Throughlines, by Thomas Barnett

• Luke Honey’s Weekend Flicks, by Luke Honey

• Zeitgeist, by Katja Hoyer

• Futura Doctrina, by Mick Ryan

• The Newsletter of (Not Quite) Everything, by Jonn Elledge

• Wallenstein’s Camp, by Stephen Webb

• Human Risk, by Christian Hunt

• The Shit, by Hannah Betts

• Wrong Side of History, by Ed West

• Drinking Culture, by Henry Jeffreys

• Britain’s World, by the Council on Geostrategy

• Londonist: Time Machine, by Londonist

• Niall Ferguson’s Time Machine, by Sir Niall Ferguson

If I say I’m being very selective in offering those 15 recommendations, you will see how easily hours, mornings and afternoons can be swallowed up by Substack’s gaping maw; yet I come back to my adaptation from David Mamet—always be learning.

Friends and family

One of the side effects of working, if I may say so, pretty bloody hard this year is that I have been more reclusive than I would like, and too much so. For the self-employed and those who work primarily from home, it is very easy to abjure the outside world, but I think it is safe to regard finding achievement in going to supermarket as a sign that one should get out more. So that has been a thing.

Age and status also play a part. This departing year saw me turn 47, which is “just a number”, yes, but it’s a reasonably high one, and one which somewhere in my head is still off in the distance and the preserve of “grown-ups”. Yet here I am. When my sister, who is 12 years younger than me, is complaining about young people (and also is efficiently and competently raising a child), then it is a reminder of the inexorable passage of time. By the same token, friends are getting older—weirdly, at what seems to be the same rate; who’d have thought it?—so are marrying, having children, “settling down” (whatever that means) and, in one case, becoming 52nd Clerk of the House of Commons and Under-Clerk of the Parliaments, and we all have more moving parts in our lives to accommodate.

Which is a long-winded way of saying I have, largely through my own inattention or unavailability, seen less of people than I would have liked this year. My friends remain an extraordinary source of strength, love, interest and inspiration to me and I wouldn’t want anyone to underestimate that. It’s invidious etc but, without casting shade on anyone I don’t mention, Emma, Adrian, Madelaine, Charles, Allie, Michelle, Alex and Mariana, Mike, Mark, Christian, Laura, Neil, Mary and Andrew are all brilliant people about whom films should be made—perhaps in a variety of genres—and I rely as much as I ever did on Pete, who has brutally moved to New Zealand and, to add insult to injury, found both professional and personal fulfilment there, the bastard.

Equally my family are the pile foundations on whom the rackety construction of my rests and I am forever grateful for it and for them. I wrote in October on what would have been my mother’s 75th birthday about my experience of absence, and my parents remain and will always remain much on my mind and influential on the better parts of my conduct. Between them, in a way vaguely reminiscent of St Thomas More’s The Supplication of Souls, they form a community of the living and the dead without which everything would be harder, quieter and colder.

As I look ahead I am filled with foreboding…

That’s not entirely true. For all that it is a time stained with cliché, false promise and inevitable disappointment, the beginning of a new year remains, however faintly, tinged with hope and light, not so much because it is a rational conclusion but because it is a necessary motivating condition. If I ever was, I am not now someone who believes that “things must get better”, partly because I see no evidence for it but also because I find it an unhelpfully self-hectoring attitude to have. But I also firmly believe that things might get better and that we all have some agency, some hand on the tiller of our destiny, and if we can do nothing else, then we can concentrate on that and make the best of whatever is presented to us by unfolding events.

Predictions can wait for an other opportunity or outlet, and resolutions grow in hazard the more elaborate and ambitious they are, but I will continue to write, and read, and think, and, where I can and where it is wanted or needed, advise. In professional and political terms, it is an important time for everyone, but certainly for conservatives. The way ahead is uncertain, or, as the Peter O’Toole’s titular hero tells Alec Guinness’s Prince Faisal in Lawrence of Arabia, “Nothing is written”. I fired my first shot in City A.M. on the day after the general election in July, and have come back to the theme of rebuilding the right repeatedly since then. It is a huge task, with no guarantee of success, and it will take a great deal of time, but there is a frisson of excitement too, the thrill of boundless possibility. As the incorrigible Alan Clark often remarked, anything can happen at backgammon.

I will try to do all the usual things: be more organised, healthier, more attentive, more disciplined. I will probably not go to a gym or get married, but I may eventually read Clausewitz and do some public speaking. The one who was most influential on me used occasionally to make lists of “things to know more about”, which always struck me as a (characteristically) sensible and wise approach, and in that spirit I will endeavour to know more about:

• The Kurds;

• Urban development and design;

• Counter-insurgency doctrine;

• Edith Wharton;

• Systems theory;

• Australian politics;

• Keith Joseph;

• Henry Fairlie;

• The Russian Civil War;

• Gaullism.

No doubt new enthusiasms will mug me in the darkened alleyways of my intellectual life, but that is how the brain works and I’m grateful for it. I’ll say this for the uneven and unpredictable crackles along my neural pathways, I’m very rarely bored.

And you, dear readers: there are now, theoretically and potentially, 726 of you, which may not be troubling the giants of social media, but is more than the number of Spartans at Thermopylae. We may not have to defend the Hot Gates against the Persian invaders—in fairness, Leonidas and his men failed at that task on the grounds that they all got killed—but it is a number which continues pleasantly to take me by surprise and allows me to think I’m not simply speaking into the ether. And remember, if each of you were to get just one other person to subscribe, and they were to do likewise… well, then it would be a pyramid scheme.

I wish you all the best for this coming year. Be your best selves, the right thing as often as you can, be engaged, listen and debate, and be kind. No-one can ask more.