There is, it turns out, one phrase that perfectly captures modern Britain. When economist Duncan Weldon wrote a history of the country’s finances two years ago, it was called Two Hundred Years of Muddling Through. When, 23 years before that, politician and historian Peter Hennessy published a collection of his writing on politics in postwar Britain, it was titled Muddling Through. No racing ahead, please, we’re British.
There is, it turns out, one phrase that perfectly captures modern Britain. When economist Duncan Weldon wrote a history of the country’s finances two years ago, it was called Two Hundred Years of Muddling Through. When, 23 years before that, politician and historian Peter Hennessy published a collection of his writing on politics in postwar Britain, it was titled Muddling Through. No racing ahead, please, we’re British.
Turning Points: Crisis and Change in Modern Britain, from 1945 to Truss, Steve Richards, Macmillan UK, 400 pp., $28.99, January 2024
In Steve Richards’s latest book, Turning Points: Crisis and Change in Modern Britain, From 1945 to Truss, the British journalist tries to identify the tidal shifts of the past eight decades in U.K. politics. Still, even he admits in his conclusion that “on the whole, turning points are reached, passed and the UK muddles on with the old familiar patterns still in place.”
He should know: Now mostly a TV presenter and columnist, Richards first became a political journalist in 1990. Since then, he has worked for several newspapers, radio stations, and TV stations, and was, for a time, political editor of left-leaning magazine the New Statesman. He’s not quite seen it all, but he has certainly witnessed a lot of it.
Frustratingly, he never quite takes his thesis to its logical conclusion. That Britain keeps failing to turn is a worthwhile observation, but why is entropy stronger there than elsewhere? The clues are strewn across the book, but he never quite picks up on them. Instead, he looks to the usual explanations: short institutional memories and the conservative nature of the political class.
Yet, page after page, Richards mentions the all-powerful British press, menacingly glaring at the political class from Fleet Street. In the book, prime ministers often do not do things because they fear the Daily Mail’s ire, and ministers are pushed to do things they’d rather avoid because they want to keep the Sun on their side.
British newspapers are especially ideological and more likely to stick to their political guns—low taxes, less regulation, social conservatism, Euroscepticism—than politicians themselves. Couldn’t this explain why things never quite change, and why Britain forever remains a small “c” conservative country? It’s the theory Richards accidentally puts forward, without ever reaching it himself.
Margaret Thatcher, on her first day as Britain’s prime minister, is seen on Downing Street in London on May 5, 1979.Bettmann/via Getty Images
Even today, former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher still looms large in Westminster. All of Richards’s chapter titles are descriptive, but the one about Thatcher’s years in power is simply named “1979.” Everyone knows what happened then. She took a postwar consensus that favored or tolerated a strong union movement, reasonably high taxes, nationalized industries, and a healthy welfare state, and she tore it to pieces. She wasn’t afraid of unemployment or the occasionally cruel hand of the markets. She went to war against Argentina, and she won. She took on the miners, and she won. She fought three elections, and she won, and won, and won.
Thatcher’s real victory came years after her premiership. Once asked about her greatest achievement, she named “Tony Blair and New Labour”—the government that came into power in 1997, after 18 years of electoral failure. “We forced our opponents to change their minds,” she said. She was right: In order to win, Blair had to give up on many of Labour’s once-flagship policies. He embraced privatization and the promise of lower taxes, because the rules of the game had been changed for good.
As Richards points out, these rules are still in place. When current Prime Minister Rishi Sunak gave his first speech to the Conservatives’ annual conference last year, he praised the “party of the grocer’s daughter and the pharmacist’s son.” Sunak’s mother was a pharmacist. There are no prizes for guessing who was raised by a grocer.
None of this feels especially revelatory. Anyone with a passing knowledge of British history could tell you that Thatcher was influential. They could probably also tell you, as Richards does, that the Suez Crisis and the Iraq War were disquieting to the British psyche, as they revealed that the country never quite knew where it stood in the postwar world. A medium-sized power with grand ambitions and an illustrious past, always uncomfortably stuck between Europe and America, yadda yadda. We all followed the Brexit vote and the chaos it unleashed. We’re aware.
Still, Turning Points doesn’t merely identify those watershed moments. It also seeks to understand why Britain may turn, and why it often doesn’t. This is where things get interesting, but perhaps not in the way Richards intended.
Thatcher stands behind British Prime Minister Tony Blair at a wreath-laying ceremony in London on Nov. 12, 2005. Odd Andersen/AFP via Getty Images
Take Thatcher, again. As Richards points out, much of her success cannot solely be attributed to her political genius. The Social Democratic Party (SDP) was formed in 1981 and, for two elections after that, split the center and left vote. In both 1983 and 1987, “more voters in total backed Labour and the SDP/Liberal Alliance … than Thatcher’s Conservative party.”
Why, then, was Thatcher allowed to cement such a legacy? Richards offers some clues: “With much of the media fully on board with the Thatcher revolution…”; “In the Conservative newspapers, the constant demand was for more tax cuts to be financed by spending cuts”; “Much of the media and quite a lot of voters were by then with the change-maker.”
It doesn’t stop there. Why did Blair so successfully manage to reshape the image of the Labour Party? “The media broadly accepted Tony Blair’s narrative that he led ‘New Labour’”; “He managed to persuade many columnists who might be otherwise sceptical that New Labour’s break with the past was an act of breathtaking radicalism in itself.”
Why, once elected, did Blair manage to instigate peace in Northern Ireland, something all his predecessors had failed to do? “Although highly complex … the process was safe in the sense that this was not an area where The Sun newspaper would erupt.” How did he, a few years later, successfully bring more investment into the national health service? “[E]ven the Daily Mail had started campaigning for higher pay for nurses.”
As for the Iraq War, what made Blair decide to side with the United States? “Blair wanted at some point to win a referendum on the euro so it was important as far as he was concerned to show that he was pro-American in order to build up credit with Rupert Murdoch and his newspapers.”
On and on it goes, all the way to Brexit, which was backed by a majority of newspapers, and to Liz Truss’s disastrous 44-day premiership, which nevertheless found many cheerleaders in the British press.
Amazingly, these newspapers do not feature in the book’s conclusion. They are mentioned at every juncture, in every chapter, yet their presence and influence are never meaningfully acknowledged. The media may well be a natural phenomenon like the weather, present but only ever in the background.
An assortment of U.K. daily newspapers reporting on Brexit, photographed on Feb. 1, 2020.Tolga Akmen/AFP via Getty Images
It isn’t really Richards’s fault: He has, after all, been a journalist in Britain for more than three decades. You could hardly give a fish a voice and complain that it doesn’t end up mentioning the water.
The British press campaigns for and against things and revels in its own power, bragging about turning certain politicians into rising stars and condemning others to obscurity. Most famous is perhaps “It’s The Sun Wot Won It,” the headline on the front page of the Sun after the Conservatives’ shock election victory in 1992.
These newspapers’ owners are, for the most part, Conservative and conservative. The Daily Mirror, a left-wing tabloid, was influential for a while, but it stood alone. Among the broadsheet newspapers, political opinions have always been somewhat more balanced, with the Independent and the Guardian respectively representing the center and the left, but their readership figures could never quite compete with the remarkably popular “red tops.”
As journalist Adrian Addison writes in Mail Men, the Daily Mail’s voice “does carry far beyond its loyal readers; it howls through Westminster corridors befuddling politicians … before whistling on through the nation’s newsrooms to help define the media agenda for the day.” In Stick It Up Your Punter!, journalists Chris Horrie and Peter Chippindale note that “the Sun had made Rupert Murdoch a political power in Britain,” and that it “was widely believed that Murdoch had an effective veto on any policy that might negatively affect his business empire.”
News Corp. chief Rupert Murdoch holds up a copy of the Sun on Sunday as he leaves his London home on Feb. 26, 2012. Carl Court/AFP via Getty Images
This isn’t hyperbole: In Where Power Lies, Lance Price described the way Blair and his senior advisor Alastair Campbell had to work with the media magnate. “If Murdoch were left to pursue his business interests in peace he would give Labour a fair wind,” he writes. The deal was never committed to paper, but it was there, and honored by both parties.
By merely noting newspapers’ influence instead of delving into how they became so influential, Richards never quite gets to the crux of the issue: Why did those big bad hacks manage to get away with it for so long?
Again, hints can be found in Turning Points. When discussing the energy crisis sparked by the war in Ukraine, Richards notes that “[c]ontingency planning was not part of the UK’s political culture with its focus on the short term and in its wariness of planning ahead.”
Some decades earlier, Richards explains, Thatcher’s drastic reforms could happen because “there was no grown-up conversation in the UK … about whether a modern state might have an important role to play and what form it should take.” Elsewhere, he laments the fact that Britons keep stubbornly refusing to learn from political events.
This is, or ought to be, the real thesis of Turning Points: Britain keeps muddling through, largely unchanged, because it cannot escape from the vicious circle governing it. The political class isn’t especially interested in the past and the lessons it can hold. It finds the idea of thinking deeply and precisely about the future to be a waste of time. Anything that happens today might just about be of interest, though it will probably be forgotten tomorrow.
The press, on the other hand, is opinionated and has a fierce memory. It doesn’t forgive or forget, and it is clear in its aims. More than inform its readers, it seeks to reshape the country in their image. Speaking of former Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre, journalist Peter Oborne once said that “he articulates the dreams, fears and hopes of socially insecure members of the suburban middle class.” In practice, this can look like support for “traditional” families, an inherent suspicion of local authorities, mistrusting anything that feels “foreign,” sneering at feminists, stoking anti-immigration sentiment, and fighting for good, honest, British values, whatever they are. These days, hatred of anything deemed “woke” is likely to feature in tabloid pages.
It’s a marriage made in heaven: Media owners and editors can—often rightly—feel like they are making the weather, and politicians get to absolve themselves of real responsibility.
But the landscape is beginning to change. British people do not read newspapers like they once did. Even the tabloids, once feared by all, are now shadows of their former selves. Richards’s argument is that the shape of the country’s political class has prevented it from ever being too swayed by events. His real conclusion, hiding in plain sight, is that the political class spent just under a century shackled to a press that distrusted any and all change, Thatcherism aside. The shackles are now coming loose. In the coming decades, Westminster will have to realize that it no longer needs to look behind its shoulder to check that Fleet Street is on board.
If Richards’s headline thesis is right, little will change. Memories will remain short, and lessons will remain unlearnt. Britain will keep muddling through. But if the press is indeed the culprit, Britain may finally be entering an era in which politicians no longer operate inside the unhelpful feedback loop they have been stuck in for a lifetime. Might some real turning points be just around the corner?
Books are independently selected by FP editors. FP earns an affiliate commission on anything purchased through links to Amazon.com on this page.
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