One damned thing after another: Britain’s crisis-ridden century so far

Asked about the greatest challenges he faced as prime minister, Harold Macmillan is said to have replied: ‘Events, dear boy, events.’ The first quarter of this century has seen no shortage of events that have blown prime ministers off course. There was Tony Blair by 9/11 and the resulting war in Iraq; Gordon Brown by the financial crisis of 2007-8; David Cameron and Theresa May by Brexit; and Boris Johnson by Covid. With the exception of May, none of these people had any inkling, on taking office, of the bolts from the blue that would ultimately define their premierships.

Andrew Hindmoor, a professor of politics at the University of Sheffield, has produced a magisterial account of our life and times in this fraught century so far. His range is vast, his judgments balanced, his prose elegant and his sources impeccable. Haywire is a weighty tome, divided into 36 easily digestible chapters.

The banking crisis was a pivotal moment, says the author. ‘New Labour bet the bank on a conviction that globalisation was not only unavoidable but could be reconciled with its version of social justice.’ The resulting crash was ‘the moment at which New Labour’s centrism was discredited; the boom went bust and everything started to go wrong at an accelerating rate’.

George Osborne and his cult of austerity was another key determinant. One of the (few) weaknesses of this book is that it does not adequately document the cynicism with which David Cameron and Osborne, who had been hitherto pledged to match Labour’s spending on the main public services ‘pound for pound’, set about trying to pretend that the financial crisis, which as everyone knows began in the American mortgage market, was really the result of Labour profligacy.