TSP #5: What comes in 2025-6 as both parties & Whitehall fail? What can be done?

Mimesis failing; preference falsification/cascades and elite fragmentation

We’ve been fundamentally overestimating the extent to which even very high IQ people actually have beliefs… The level of just outright trend following dominates everything.

Overheard Washington/DOGE/Silicon Valley discussion

So little trouble do men take in the search after truth, so readily do they accept whatever comes first to hand.

Thucydides 1.20

Yes, all the papers say the same thing, that’s true. So much the same that they are just like frogs before a storm! You can’t hear anything for their croaking.

The old prince, Anna Karenina

The nature of the breakdown of civilisations can be summed up in three points: a failure of creative power in the minority, an answering withdrawal of mimesis (imitation) on the part of the majority, and a consequent loss of social unity in the society as a whole.

Toynbee

Bureaucracy is a bad European system of government, created by the use of permanent public officials, a system that does not, should not, and cannot exist in England.

Palmerston to Queen Victoria, 1837

Below are some thoughts on the dynamics of British politics and what should be done to change the trajectory as the majority sees the failure of SW1’s creative power and withdraws mimesis from the Hollow Men. It’s an attempt to bring together a lot of things to help situational awareness of the UK’s dire state.

Big forces have destroyed all the main pillars of Insider conventional wisdom:

1. Brexit.

2. The old parties’ decay.

3. Collapse of UK state capacity. The starkest aspect is how the delusional and deceitful story of ‘mass immigration is a success, integration is working’ is dramatically collapsing in rape gangs, riots, arson, vigilantes, and spreading discussion of mass conflict — while Westminster focuses not on the problems but on keeping the coverups hidden and changing the subject from 30 years of self-sabotage. But Whitehall’s pathological vandalism is accelerating the disintegration of capacity on all fronts (police, armed forces and the punchiest parts of the deep state, R&D, schools and universities, NHS etc). Meanwhile the courts are using the ECHR/HRA to destroy border control and make us an international laughing stock: this week they simply declared that Gazans can come here because ‘human rights’ and a child not liking chicken nuggets interferes with ‘right to family life’ so criminals can stay. The Court of Appeal declared recently that it doesn’t matter how horrific a crime they will never deport criminals to some countries. The ECHR system we set up to stop Europe sliding to totalitarianism is now being used — thanks to cross-party consensus — by sex criminals and terrorists to force us to prioritise them in ever more grotesque ways. Much of SW1 is clear they’ll suck up the courts effectively banning deportations and making explicit that their top priority is helping the very worst people on earth, and will label as ‘fascist’ those who oppose the madness.

4. MAGA + Silicon Valley network + DOGE is an attempt at US regime change, a government that controls the government replacing the broken old system that’s driving up debt by $1 trillion every 100 days. The Overton Window is blown open. Ideas that were ‘extreme’ even six months ago are happening. The demonstration that ‘you can just do things very fast’ is inevitably causing pure panic in SW1 where a foundational principle for decades has been that the basic idea of war and business ‘does not, should not and must not apply to government’. Central to understanding modern SW1 is appreciating how both parties fought to maintain this principle as a cross-party foundation even during a once-a-century pandemic and the worst land war in Europe since Hitler. And they succeeded. In 2019 we campaigned against this principle. In 2020 we started dismantling it. Boris-Carrie surrendered and reinstated it. Every important system accelerated its decline 2021-4. Labour and Lib Dems attacked all attempts to move fast as proto-fascism. Across the West, the old parties converged on defending the old system’s 2020 collapse and did not seek political advantage by suggesting the government change the old system to stop killing people in droves and destroying vast value. The Valley-comes-to-DC story is therefore an existential menace to the old regime across the West as it explicitly challenges the protected status of the permanent administrative state to which politicians have handed power since 1945. Cf. This by Joe Lonsdale on DOGE, technical teams and ‘root access’ to understand some of why it’s hard for the regime media to cover this story. If you ask Cabinet Office officials ‘how many people work here’ they can’t answer. If you ask ‘how many people do you pay’ they can’t answer. Part of what the PM’s data science team we set up in 2020 was doing was what Lonsdale describes here for DOGE which is partly why McSweeney stopped the Cabinet Office closing it after he was tipped off by some good officials. And see this piece on Ron Conway, a Valley legend: ‘AM ON IT’ is the exact spiritual opposite of SW1 and will be a superpower in DC where DOGE deploys people to work all night in government buildings largely ‘WFH’. Hence the Democrats trying to use the courts to declare the combination of root access and AM ON IT unlawful: speed and technical competence are the enemy of the old regime and the courts their most reliable weapon. As in Britain, lawyers and judicial review are the core defence of the permanent regime against the voters’ demands for change.

5. The consensus reality of the mass media age has passed into history. We’re into a world that in some ways resembles 1815 (no consensus reality) more than 1980 (powerful consensus reality). Technology changes will push this for a while (though may end up driving centralisation again). Elites are fragmenting fast. Political elites and regime media have lost control of, and even much understanding about, how stories are generated and spread. Across every part of society, the realisation is spreading for the first time in over a century: I can rationally just not care what the old political media says, it won’t harm my life, my family, my business.

6. Rapid realisation in UK outside SW1 that the old system is broken and something radically new is urgently needed. This is particularly fast and important among the young generally and a tech-savvy subset of the young. But also older richer people are shifting towards: ‘the old system I sort of trusted is done, what happens to my kids, can it be turned around or should they leave’. The immediate flat spin of Starmer blew up the widespread SW1 meme that Whitehall was fundamentally sound and just needed to expel the Tories: the constant farce has continued in exactly the same ways and it’s so stark Labour MPs are shocked.

7. A network of political/deep state/technical/investor people are planning for a world in which models are expert human-level in many domains in 1-3 years and we have another, highly compressed, Industrial Revolution. SW1 is full of people laughing at the idea X will happen in Y years time but if you talk to people working on the frontier you know X is already happening today. And the US v PRC race is on: massive budgets, bulldozers digging holes, data centres built, underground bunkers built, black projects proliferating, very aggressive espionage at scale, massive projects on military drones and autonomy, rapid planning in both countries on ‘how do open standards evolve globally, how does this affect alliances and militaries and intel agencies’, cf. DeepSeek CEO interview and Zuckerberg interview recently on open standards for AI. I’ve followed the AI debate since reading Bill Joy’s essay in 2000. The big lesson from 25 years is: those most optimistic about progress were ignored by the mainstream then constantly ridiculed yet (amazingly) consistently proved the most accurate, but the mainstream is programmed to not update to this lesson. My assumption talking to those building the future in the labs is this will continue for at least another 2-3 years. (When I had my first meeting with Sunak December 2022 to discuss my terms for helping him, top of my list was continuing what we started in 2020 to get UK capabilities to the frontier. Again Tories preferred failure and paralysis to leadership and growth. Again a tragic story of British science and engineering betrayed by British politicians, a core post-1945 story.)

8. The EU has kneecapped itself and is failing in all important areas: productivity, debt, public order, immigration, defence, technology, political extremism. Brussels chose self-sabotage on advanced technology. Unlike Britain which at least has DeepMind here, the EU has none of the leading labs. As the Commission said, we will be leaders not in AI but ‘trust in AI’! Mission semi-accomplished comrades! Brussels can kneecap itself and other countries that choose to follow its regulations but it will not compete with US and PRC or shape the global struggle over AI. Valley companies have already made clear they will simply not release models in the EU rather than follow EU regs. Taliban today can download new models now blocked for Brussels elites. Those who think AI will be like aspects of post-war car regulation are wrong. AI is ultimately about power and Great Powers will not let Brussels set the rules. I’ve watched SW1 repeat soundbites from the EU for 25 years on ‘strategic autonomy’ and ‘now we’re going to get serious on technology’. They’ve always been hollow. I said in 2022-4 that covid predicted that not even wanting to prevail in Ukraine would force either the MoD or Brussels to stop the delusions. They babbled and watched. They left defence industry and procurement a farce. They encouraged deindustrialisation and sabotaged industrial production while babbling about net zero. Thanks to Brexit and the work we did in 2020 with the secret part of the Integrated review exposing the disaster zone of the MoD and agreeing a plan for radical change, we could have sorted ourselves out. Instead, 2021-4 the Tories worked with the worst parts of the MoD to continue the lies and delusions and followed the EU into escalating a dumb war which could have been avoided. The latest defence review is a disaster and the UK and EU will be humiliated month after month.

9. The SW1 system is more delusional about itself and the world than even 2016 and 2019-20. Further, the Elon/DOGE re-orientation to MAGA has made SW1 even more crazy on technology as well as politics. But SW1 is also polarising and cracking. The bulk is in a last ditch reality-distortion field but elements are quietly realising the game is up and change will come to SW1, the question is how fast and how aggressive. As in America, there will be rapid preference falsification cascades. At the heart of it all is the rot of elite culture, elite values and elite education over decades — we’re experiencing the same process described in classics about dead cultures and we’re facing the same intense difficulty others have faced in trying to reverse deep multi-decade trends.

10. #7, #8 and #9 reinforce #6 in a feedback loop.

What to do?

Summary: shove out Kemi ASAP, take over Tories, get Trump/Elon to facilitate a merger with Reform, tip in a Third Force of elite talent and mass energy so voters see an essentially new political force whose essence is a decisive break with 1992-2024 (remember voters keep voting for change but the old parties keep refusing), break the coalition supporting Starmer, take over No10, do regime change. Immediate action: vote Reform in all local elections and help start the avalanche to remove KB: push what’s falling.

The government that takes No10 in 2029 should not be ‘Conservative’ or ‘Reform’ or simply a merger. The Tories are dead in every way — talent, money, ideas, organisation, reputation — and their performance 2021-4 has left them strategically shattered. Reform-2024 version was almost entirely Farage, as he has said it had no real organisation, it has almost no infrastructure and isn’t an alternative government (but could try to become one, see below).

A significant fraction of talented people in Britain have to get involved in order to turn around our appalling politics. This will probably only happen by 2029 if those two parties combine and a significant Third Force from the country joins and improves them then persuades people to defect from Labour. The public can only force the radical change of direction they want by a combination of a) a subset of SW1 elites defecting from the old system, b) a subset of non-SW1 elites deciding to get involved in politics, and c) the energy and legitimacy of a large fraction of the masses. The critical element here is (b): their actions can motivate and change (a) and (c). This usually happens historically in times of crisis, cf. DOGE.

This is what’s needed if you define the goal as *maximising the probability of winning the 2029 election then doing regime change, not another normal government*.

Many will think this plan a desperate and unnecessary gamble with little chance of happening.

But it is not necessary to hope to persevere, optimism of the will… Most people in politics achieve little-to-nothing and part of the reason is they’re terrified of looking silly to the ‘mainstream’ while they try to climb its hierarchies. People who change big things see bits of the future already here and redefine the mainstream by taking risks, not worrying about looking silly to people who just talk and copy each other all day. It’s impossible to know how these complex dynamics will pan out so people should just try to build as much of what’s needed as possible and see how the cards fall. SW1 is always super-mimetic when crises come so work on building things that seed the memes.

Conventional wisdom in 1999 was ‘joining the euro is inevitable’, in 2004 it was ‘Blair has a massive lead in the polls on regional assemblies’, in 2015 it was ‘there’s almost no chance of Leave winning’, in 2019 it was ‘there’s no way through the impasse’, in 2020 it was ‘covid vaccines are practically impossible’, and in 2021 it was ‘no chance you push out Boris’. Pushing out Starmer with some new force doesn’t feel more improbable than those examples did at the time.

Beating Starmer in an election is the easiest part. The hardest part is unifying a force on the Right that voters prefer given that much of ‘the right’ in SW1 would rather stay failing, stay fighting each other as they’ve been trained to by culture and incentives, and leave Starmer in office and see the country taken over by the IMF rather than do what’s needed to win and turn the country around. Often in history people cannot be saved, only ‘retired’. It’s possible the Tories can only be buried as quickly as possible but this can’t yet be known, it depends on how the cards fall. And if that does prove necessary, this means little chance of a serious government before ~2032 by which time many problems will be profound and serious violence harder to avoid.** We should try the easier path first.

If you want British politics to have a better chance of escaping its farce, then probably the main thing you can do is help the ‘third force’ do what Monnet called ‘preparing the future’. There are some specific projects sketched below.

There’s a lot of great people self-organising. The obvious Idiocracy and grim prospects for fixing it are pushing some young people to America but are also generating creativity. But almost all this is happening far from Tories (dead) or Labour (nearly dead). Lawrence Newport and others have started just building things. I urge you to help them.

The suggested way forward can only be Straussian until crisis comes — i.e all parties should publicly deny sympathy with the concept regardless of private discussions. It can probably only happen in the circumstances of crisis that creates new possibilities. But it’s worth sketching openly some sort of map for Live Players to ponder. The ‘iron filings’ have to align…

(P.S It won’t stop the usual media chatter but for clarity: I can help people build some of what’s needed but my hope is, as it was in No10, to encourage and help very able people to get involved in politics, not to play a leading role myself. I strongly dislike SW1, do not want to return to it, and the feeling is mutual. I strongly advise you to ignore regime media stories about me and what I’m doing. E.g recently the FT and other papers suggested I’m ‘writing Elon’s tweets’. This is totally false. The stories they told about how we were reorganising No10 in 2020 were all fake news but like a lot of fake news — cf. Russiagate hoax — the regime media and pundit complex herds to believe the lies they create. Ironically Labour realises this best and it’s Labour spads/MPs and No10 officials who are most interested in the truth of the systems we started building 2020 because they realise they need to reinvent it if they are to have any hope, hence e.g why McSweeney intervened to block the Cabinet Office and partially save things we created and the Cabinet Office tried to close.)

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I’ll set up another page like the Q&A page for thoughts on the TSP project so they’re all in one place and I can update easily.

Below I sketch some thoughts on:

• Some context. Why Starmer’s failing and won’t change Whitehall. Why I don’t think McSweeney will get what he wants and is trapped in a similar situation to us in 2020. The failure of the Establishment’s Kemi project.

• How should people think about the ends to aim for? What are the crucial elements for regime change at an abstract level that people need to build?

• How could SW1 events play out? Do the Cameroons shuffle in Cleverley and sink themselves for good? Prospects for a Tory-Reform deal? What can others do to influence SW1 dynamics?

• Questions and problems

This is a version of what I’m saying privately to people with different backgrounds all desperate for change and rapidly realising there’s no easy answers when the political system becomes cancerous.

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I’ve almost finished the blog on Metternich, Pitt and the Napoleonic Wars, only the final conclusion needs tweaking. As our system melts it’s been fascinating to read about how Whitehall under Pitt 225 years ago was more like SpaceX 2025 than Whitehall today is like SpaceX 2025.

I added a summary to the long blog on the CIA, Angleton, counter-intelligence, fundamental problems with intelligence services etc. Some of this is global news again as Trump seems to be sticking to his promise to publish the remaining CIA files on Oswald. I guarantee you will be shocked by revelations about the Zapruder film being taken to the CIA’s classified photo lab, NPIC, the weekend after the assassination. The truth is so extraordinary it would struggle to get past Hollywood scriptwriters.

Child protection was put into the Department for Children, Schools and Families by Brown when he gave Ed Balls his own department. I therefore worked on this from 2007-14, in the renamed DfE 2011-14. We tried to push through a big change towards an assumption of publishing and openness for mistakes on child protection. Much of the system repeatedly tried to coverup bureaucratic incompetence using the ECHR/HRA. I had many meetings on the institutionalised Whitehall conspiracies to suppress the truth on child abuse which I witnessed. I will be doing something on this shortly. SW1 is full of people saying ‘Elon is spreading disinformation that there was a national coverup’. Wrong again, Elon is right. There were attempts at national coverups. I saw them. The coverup culture was so profound officials planned to incinerate documents en masse to prevent publication. The SW1 cliché is that ‘it’s always a cockup not a conspiracy’. But on child abuse my experience in government is that it’s much more accurate to assume conspiracy.

Another truly disgraceful — treacherous and disgusting — affair is the way that Whitehall has generated a rolling campaign to investigate and ruin the lives of special forces soldiers. It’s happened over Ireland. It’s happened over Afghanistan and Iraq. It’s happened on other operations. Tories and Labour have allowed the most disgusting axis of Whitehall officials, lawyers, and Britain’s enemies to use our own laws and legal system to persecute heroes who risked their lives to keep us safe. They were told to do operations by politicians including Thatcher, Blair etc. And told after the operation ‘you did a brilliant job’. Now the ECHR and Human Rights Act are being used to attack them and defend our enemies. We can’t deport convicted child rapists because of their human rights and the same rules are used to attack our soldiers. Apart from the moral disgrace, it’s also extending Whitehall’s vandalism to critical capabilities. Why should such soldiers conduct similar operations knowing Whitehall is controlled by people who will ruin their lives as soon as human rights lawyers are hired by our enemies in our own courts?

This is easily soluble — it is not in the category of things like NHS waiting lists which is complex and hard. Like the ludicrous ‘small boats’, I went into it in detail in 2020. But officials throughout the system, including in the corrupt cesspit of MoD, prioritise terrorists and lawyers and the Guardian and staying in the ECHR. If you grab a minister dealing with this you usually grab slime. But the ministers who ordered the operations do NOT get dragged into the legal cases, only the soldiers. Solders in their 70s have their lives ruined but ministers like Tom King who authorised operations and generals who said ‘do it’ are left to die in peace. People who see special forces as more of an enemy ‘to the rule of law’ than terrorists now effectively control the AG office and the Cabinet Office legal service. We have an AG, Hermer, who not only supported a revolting character who invented war crimes against UK special forces but continued to support him after his lies were revealed. This cancer in Whitehall and the courts (cf. judges like the grotesque Humphrys) must be burnt out one way or another. (There should be a simple Bill passed through Parliament that a) cancels all so-called legacy investigations into special forces (Ireland, Afghanistan etc) and commands all entities in the UK to cease and desist such investigations and explicitly makes clear no court anywhere has any power to revive any of them — with ‘notwithstanding’ clauses everywhere to make totally clear to the courts that the ECHR/HRA are 100% nuked, and b) explicitly states that British forces are not subject to the ECHR or the HRA or the Strasbourg court. Investigation of possible war crimes needs a new process from which ECHR/HRA/Strasbourg jurisdiction are entirely excluded.)

The coverups over child abuse and the persecution of special forces are probably the two most disgusting things I’ve witnessed in 25 years of SW1 involvement. It is not coincidental that the ECHR/HRA and the handover of political control to lawyers and the very worst elements in Whitehall are central to both. After 14 years of presiding over this, the Tories put in a new leader who still supports the ECHR/HRA. It’s also not coincidental that J Powell — central to the surrender by the British state to the IRA — worked with lawyers to push through a ‘deal’ involving us giving £350 million per week to bribe Mauritius to take Chagos from us — all because a bunch of Starmer’s lawyer friends worked with a Chinese judge (!!) to babble about ‘human rights’! Whitehall now is often effectively working for our enemies, as was some of Whitehall on Brexit.

If you have any influence, please exercise it to pressure senior people in the MoD and armed forces and Parliament to mobilise against Whitehall waging a campaign against British heroes. And we need a network inside the deep state to push the AG out of office by any means necessary. I guarantee that there will be scandals galore to dig up. Let’s find them and get him fired. Spread this meme around MI5, MI6, and GCHQ where many will agree. I think senior parts of the No10 spad team will ‘push what’s falling’ and join in as many in No10 realise he is a disgrace and another sign of Starmer’s abysmal judgement (see below).

The response to the Southport stabbings from Whitehall was: coverup over Al Qaeda angles, scream ‘disinformation’, jail people for social media posts, then blame online shopping for selling knives. Then they moved on to the rising tide of violence and announced — a ban of kitchen knives with pointy ends. And regime media pundits go along with the madness.

PS. Having avoided the speaking circuit I’m now doing paid talks to raise money for a) Maths Circles (a nonprofit network giving primary children elite maths education) and b) the TSP project. Fees depend on who/what you are and how rich you are. I do some free (e.g schools), some discounted, some expensive…

The below is a mix of things written over the past two months.

It should be edited and compressed. But I don’t have time. So I’ll just post it then over the next few weeks do some shorter things on some of the themes. This is a blog, not finished essays! Hopefully it’s useful for different people grappling with these issues…

Some context

To bring together energy, talent, and resources to try to change the trajectory of British politics, it’s useful to consider some context for what’s gone wrong and why the old regime seems stuck in a gravity-well. Much of this section will be familiar to long-time readers, skip on down if you want! What I wrote about elite shifts and the regime media in the Trump blog is also obviously context to the UK scene I won’t repeat here.

After the Tory collapse, the ‘serious’ people in SW1 were united: Starmer as PM meant ‘serious’ ministers, the ‘super-impressive’ Sue Gray would show everyone how to grip a newly respected Whitehall, the ‘grownups’ were taking back control.

Starmer promptly collapsed on contact with the rotten edifice of Whitehall which also collapsed. SW1 is hilariously stunned. The voters — always ahead of SW1 — are not. Usually voters vote for change with some hope. In 2024 they voted for change thinking it was already doomed. Unprecedented in modern elections, they en masse skipped the hope phase and voted already in the disillusioned phase, purely to remove the hated Tories. Both leaders reflect both parties: hollow and hated. Hollow speeches, hollow ideas, hollow organisations. Hollow, failing and lost. These leaders and parties — like Wormald for Whitehall — represent decades of the talent collapse and talent filter that has lowered the ability of people in public life and narrowed the personality types of those who go into politics and government.

Everything vibrant is outside SW1. When you interact with SW1, it stinks like death. A whole new politics is bubbling up fast across the country, and across the wider West, and the last place to see it is the place whose job it is to see these things first: Westminster. The government is mentally in San Francisco politics (not technology!) 2020-21 thinking ‘this is the future’ hence, partly, why every week is a string of embarrassing disasters and civil servants describe dealing with No10 as ‘very weird, it feels like the end of a ten year cycle, the end of a regime with no ideas or energy, but they haven’t been there ten months’.

In December I went to America to talk to some of those working on the DOGE-White House project and those working in the top labs on AI models (some of them working on both!) After hearing about DOGE plans and widespread assumptions across the top labs about the models’ abilities in many domains relevant to governments and security and regime stability within two years, I flew home and talked to people who live in SW1-world. In 25 years I’ve never experienced such a stark contrast between discussions inside and outside SW1. Not even during Brexit or covid.

Most of SW1 has ‘dropped out of the light cone’ of serious discussions elsewhere, trapped in its own simulacrum of narrative whiplash while ideas and events are accelerating away from SW1 discussion. Each year, it feels like they’ve slipped another year backwards relative to discussions with people at the frontier, it feels harder and harder to imagine it catching up. It’s a general problem but particularly striking on DOGE and AI. The NPCs who police acceptable opinions jabber about how ‘AI is a fraud’ and ‘the models are far from doing X’ while the models are literally being used to do X now. I watch NPCs say ‘no sign they’ll have much economic impact any time soon’ the same day I speak to a top engineer on $500k+ in a top lab who tells me how their own job has radically transformed in the past year by using the models and they are actively changing their lives and career plans on the assumption that ~99% of their job will be transformed within a year or two because of what they’re using now and can see in the lab — not because of distant speculations. The models are now almost ‘NPC-complete’, i.e able to generate ‘expert political commentary’. The models can already do some research jobs better than ~99% of SW1 pundits and researchers. Don’t believe me, just download OIA’s Deep Research, try it out and consider what the version of that which already exists but hasn’t been released yet can do, never mind what they will do in 2 years. They’ll soon have to be retarded rather than enhanced to mimic political people.

I wrote a few years ago that politics would become more and more weird as consensus reality collapses for fragmenting elites. This process ripped harder in November. All their September-October mockery of Trump/Elon didn’t lead to any updating after their humiliation. Much of SW1’s NPC class turned further inwards ranting to each other that they’d been even more right, the voters are dupes for ‘disinformation’, AI IS A FAD pushed by idiot Nazis, WHY CAN’T DUMB BILLIONAIRES SEE WHAT WE PUNDITS SEE?!

It’s going to be even more painful for the old political Insiders. They’ll tell themselves that it’s a fever dream, that somewhere is a new Blair or Clinton who can ‘bring back normal politics’, by which they mean the halcyon days between the fall of the Wall and the fall of the Towers. But the old consensus reality based on the growth of mass media from the mid-19th Century is part of history: like the pre-1789 ancien regime for those gathered in Vienna in 1815, or the pre-1914 world for those gathered in Paris in 1918, people could remember it, they could love it and hate it, they could invoke it, but they could not restore it — it had become history though it lived on in living memory for decades.

The world of the Today program, ABC News, Cronkite etc is similar. Someone from Newsnight texted me this week asking if I’d go on: I thought it closed down two years ago. It just became irrelevant. That prompted another thought. For the first 20 years of involvement in politics, I was irritated by people jabbering about the Today program. In No10 we banned ministers from appearing on it and feeding SW1’s cycle of self-delusional nonsense. It caused trouble because it still mattered. But I suddenly noticed this week — nobody ever mentions it to me now, it also sank sometime in the last few years. It isn’t even a source of clips for WhatsApp groups. It’s a message board for a closed failing social network cut off from the reality of voters, the reality of issues, the reality of technology, and the reality of power as power moves to other networks.

The Insider world of Westminster closed itself off many years ago. You could see it in 2004 when we won the North East referendum by turning it into a referendum on whether you trusted and respected Westminster. They closed their eyes and ears to an 80-20 verdict and kept them closed through expenses scandals, the worst financial crisis since 1929, Brexit, covid, Ukraine and Trump the sequel. It’s logical that after the humiliation of November, so many self-cancelled by fleeing to rant into the BlueSky void about how everyone supporting regime change is Hitler.

This Insider world is going to get wrecked the same way Insider world always gets wrecked when history’s remorseless cycle of regime change takes aim.

This cycle is spinning fast in America. The MAGA+Valley project is trying to do what we started in 2019: be a government that controls the government, rather than a front for the permanent bureaucracy with its fake meritocracy and fake responsibility and constant, morally and financially bankrupting disasters. Young elite talent uploads software patches into Treasury payments systems and just does things, things that seemed inconceivable to ‘the mainstream’ even 3 months ago. Elon is doing to the civil service what he did with the Twitter files — throw all the lies of the old system on the internet and let the public see what the old system really is, while that system and its media defenders shriek in horror at scrutiny, demand ‘restore your trust in us!’, and call everyone who doesn’t trust them ‘Hitler’ or ‘dupes of disinformation’. The playbook is stale. Voters have had enough. It won’t stop DOGE rolling on. Only Trump can stop DOGE though it’s very much not in his interests to flinch.

Let it roll on — like the Mississippi in full flood, to broader lands and better days! Hopefully it will wash away the financial/debt Ponzi, the student loan Ponzi, the immigration Ponzi, the welfare Ponzi and the government procurement Ponzi that have supported the ‘mainstream’ across the west for 30 years.

The long perspective of historical regime change puts the immediate failure of Starmer and Kemi in context

The UK system is caught up in the long-term cycle of western regime change you see stretching back centuries.

We see repeatedly:

• both a) the dominant ideas of those nominally in charge of political institutions and

• b) the capacity of those institutions to face and adapt to reality

• become increasingly out of whack with reality,

• elites don’t face this gap and are strongly incentivised to believe a fake world rather than try to force the old system to face reality,

• inevitable sudden crisis knocks the walls out (debt crash, war, natural disaster etc), mimesis collapses, preference falsification cascades very fast,

• the old regime collapses,

• a new elite with new ideas allies with a subset of the people who supply the energy and legitimacy,

• a new regime is born…

After some decades of regime stability, political elites can’t remember a different world, they all got promoted in this system, the world they’ve grown up in seems like it must be permanent. As this world crumbles it is extremely disconcerting, often scary. Crises knock over the old players that couldn’t adapt. Leaders pop up who realise the old system is broken. Suddenly live players just do things that seemed inconceivable just six months ago. The regime change cycle turns.

SLOW ROT, ELITE BLINDNESS, SUDDEN CRISIS, FAST COLLAPSE, REGIME CHANGE…

In Russia, Germany, France etc, the process has been recurrently violent.

In Britain and America the institutions have hit crises but managed to adapt without serious violence.

The MAGA-DOGE-Valley-comes-to-DC process is the latest example of the Anglo-American system trying to adapt to the mismatch between ideas and institutions out of whack with reality.

All cycles of regime change retire a set of the old regime and create a new alliance between a subset of elites, providing ideas and organisation, and the people, providing energy and legitimacy. Brexit and MAGA give Britain and America a chance of peaceful regime change that will be violent in most places.

Brexit and 2019-24

Brexit and the Vote Leave project in No10 was our attempt to get us ahead of these trends. The bureaucratic centralism of the EU’s constitutional order was fundamentally hostile to the UK’s historical institutional error-correction — e.g the common law — that improves adaptation and lessens the chances of system-overwhelming crises. We had to get out before it destroyed us. In all important ways, the EU has evolved as we predicted in 2015-16 — a disaster on productivity, technology, debt, immigration and political extremism. The Single Market is now being used to kneecap European technology, as we said would happen in 2016. Silicon Valley has updated on the EU much faster than EU and SW1 political Insiders have.

What’s happening and will happen in DC now was much advanced here in 2020. There’s a lot of ‘we need a British DOGE’. This was happening in 2020. Teams were building. Elite talent — from business, from armed forces, from bits of public services — arrived in No10. ‘10ds’ was built and for the first time in modern history the PM’s office — rather then HMT or the Cabinet Office — started getting the best information on what was actually going on in government, much better than the Treasury which doesn’t do analysis, data or computers as you can see in the official Inquiry (cf. this from a DOGE-er in DC re the model of ‘10ds’ for DOGE). Project SPEED ran in the Cabinet Room, while the old system watched PMQs at Wednesday lunchtime, to slash projects from >25 years to <5 years. Planning, procurement, defence, tax, R&D, technology, education and skills, mass de-regulation — all main areas (except welfare) were starting the shift from the broken old path to a new path.

And on the most important issues of all the Cabinet Secretary surrendered after the old system collapsed: appointments, Northcote-Trevelyan’s fake civil service meritocracy and fake ministerial responsibility, and the performance management of Permanent Secretaries by the PM’s office. Who fires whom? Does the government control the government or is No10 theatre for hacks while the permanent administrative class promotes itself to run the government in its own interests, like a cancer feeding on the voters and taxpayers?

But then, disaster. The Trolley rejected the surrender. All changes to the core system were stopped. The PM made clear he did not want the government to control the government. So inevitably all the policy changes also tumbled like dominoes. And he made clear in 2021 that the 2019 manifesto, political strategy, electoral coalition and plan for government begun in 2020 were all abandoned and No10 was returning to its normal post-Thatcher role: Media Entertainment Service.

And Tory MPs cheered. Phew! We can all go back to pretending we can return to the glorious time between the fall of the Wall and the fall of the Towers, ‘normal politics’, as they tweeted to each other. They voted to break the tax guarantee because of a phantom ‘social care plan’ that was pure Media Entertainment. More cheering as they blew their own feet off. ‘Very smart’ croaked the pundits ‘like frogs before a storm’, Boris will be in power for a decade!

The chance to get ahead of the political dynamics now swamping SW1 was rejected and the old Tory system left to its own devices immediately collapsed in chaos just as they did 2016-19 in the absence of any creative force. But — and this is very important — many/most of them prefer the collapse and rout than the branching history in which we finished what we started in 2019. This is crucial concerning what happens next.

The stories about 2019-20 you read in the old media are junk — the stories about the policy and the stories about the reorganisations. Ironically, parts of Labour now grasp this better than Tories hence Labour MPs and spads now asking for documents from Project SPEED.

Opinions are shifting fast outside SW1 and events will soon move fast inside SW1

Now Britain is even deeper into the rot with very fragile and obviously failing institutions and is very vulnerable to fast crises. Young talent is heading for California and Austin, those that remain are desperate. Financial experts are discussing a debt interest spiral and an IMF crisis. Elite talent outside SW1 is discussing the timelines for AI models and their implications for the new White House and US-Russia-PRC relations while SW1 Insiders encode themselves in the models’ training data as clowns, yabbering ‘fad, scam, chatbot’ at each other.

Political types are sketching scenarios and plotting. Kemi is another abysmal Tory Establishment project that’s already falling apart. She’s a gonner, it’s just a question of how fast and it’ll probably be faster than the mainstream expects. The next Tory leadership contest has already started, groups are tentatively feeling each other out, plans are forming over new WhatsApp groups. The Cameroons and Carrie-spad complex surrounding Kemi are already preparing a new host for their virus when she blows: shuffle in, without a membership vote, NPC-minister extraordinaire, James ‘Chagos’ Cleverley: we thought we had the Black Thatcher, she turned out to be the Black Truss, but now we got the Black Boris! It’s a logical choice for the stupid party and could send the rotten Tory ship to the bottom.

Entrepreneurs are more desperate than at any time since entrepreneurs talked real coups with soldiers in 1970s Mayfair. Some are calculating where to shove cash and move families. And we’ve barely had yet the coming shocks of DOGE and the White House plans (much more extensive than SW1 grasped), tariffs, the attempt to end the West’s latest disastrous war in Ukraine, a Middle East deal with MBS and Israel normalising relations (mostly already agreed), a search for a US-PRC deal, and the shocking advances coming on AI. (NB. Elon’s team and S Miller’s team have been working far more intensely than is realised. And the media looks at the headline picks for jobs but not the very capable business people who have volunteered, such as Steve Feinberg going to the Pentagon. Turns out I was wrong three years ago when I said such people would not come back for a sequel. You would never know it from the old media but the calibre of talent involved is unparalleled in over half a century.)

All these things will hit a UK Government that is mentally with the Democrat/US media ‘mainstream’ in 2020-22.

Starmer and Whitehall: who fires whom?

Starmer is in a flat spin and is too bad at politics ever to look like someone who can competently execute a plan the voters think matches their priorities. Starmer and his team couldn’t handle his suits and specs expenses. Starmer mistook Heywood’s HR fixer for someone who could ‘run Whitehall’. I said she was the wrong person and showed Starmer didn’t know what he was doing. The ‘grownups’ said she was a ‘grownup’ who would restore ‘seriousness’.

It was recently reported that when, in No10, Starmer realised there was no plan, then Gray got the blame. But the actual story isn’t the obvious — Gray was hopeless, the ‘serious’ people keep turning out to be jokers — it’s that the PM went in to No10 without realising he did not have a plan — that’s how engaged he is! No wonder McSweeney et al are briefing that Starmer is like a ‘HR manager’ disengaged from the project carried out in his name!

No10 won’t handle the immense challenges of the times and the multiple disasters inflicted for decades by MPs and Whitehall.

I think McSweeney understands some of the things needed but Starmer will not let him do them, hire the team to do them, fire the people blocking doing them etc. People who talk to McSweeney already describe how he ‘surprisingly doesn’t seem to have much agency, talks like his ability to change things is very limited’. Which I think is true. And recent reports suggest Labour spads are having similar discussions in the same rooms in No10 as we had after the 2019 election: this PM is just fundamentally not remotely up to it and it’s extremely hard to do big things when the PM doesn’t get what you’re talking about yet insists on imposing his rubbish judgements, arghhh, there’s only so much we can do…!

After promising change, they’ve continued what nobody but some SW1 characters want — a continuation of the Osborne-Hammond-Sunak death spiral of more tax, more regulation and vandalising productivity and crucial capabilities. The budget just tipped more money and power into the broken system without even pretending to have a plan to change anything important. HMT told everyone they’d pulled off a ‘great balancing act’. But businesses saw the total lack of even a pretence at a new path and despaired.

The two big things Labour chose to do which hit public consciousness are winter fuel payments and farmers’ inheritance tax. What do they have in common? Neither of them were Labour priorities, both were Treasury priorities! As a few officials have observed to me recently who watched meetings with Sunak’s team then Starmer’s team: the ministers have changed but the meetings see literally the same scripts read out, and the Chairman’s notes summarising the meetings are the same ones they used with Sunak!

One of the most telling SW1 discussions I had last year was with an official involved in the transition talks. At one point last year, the Starmer team was asked — OK, we now need to know your secret plans, all the things you’ve worked out that won’t be in the manifesto, we need to prepare for them. And the answer was — there are no secret plans, we’re looking forward to seeing your plans for how to fix the Tories’ mess that they wouldn’t do. And some officials left the room and clutched their heads and said — oh my god, they really think the civil service has The Plans!

Starmer, like Sunak, doesn’t understand the job. He’s said to his spads that he wants the No10 machine to ‘bring me consensus, I don’t want to be settling disputes between the Cabinet’. Who will explain to him that this is one of the top three parts of his job?! Sunak was similar. He liked going through numbers with officials and improving official documents then the officials would leave and say ‘who will tell him he’s doing a great job as PPS but he’s not doing the PM’s job?’

Everywhere people are starting to realise that the ‘Starmer project’ was a project for beating the post-Vote Leave Tories in the election but was not a project for a government that controls the government and attacking our long term problems.

And Whitehall has been exposed as an insane asylum to another party’s MPs.

The Whitehall of 1800 greatly valued operational brilliance and technical skill — see blog on Pitt and Whitehall organising against Napoleon. Today’s Whitehall makes hollow babble about ‘strategy’ high status and operational brilliance and technical skill low status. Labour MPs are now presiding over a constant string of operational disasters and realising they can’t just blame it all on ‘evil stupid Tories / Brexit’.

Labour ministers and MPs can already see that ministerial power and responsibility are now almost totally fake and Whitehall is structurally programmed to fail. The officials run almost everything and the MPs job is to stand up in Parliament to take the blame for things they have no meaningful control over — see Palmerston’s comment at the top, so apposite today. Ministers’ power to improve things is close to zero without a dynamic No10, hence the relentlessly centralising history of Whitehall for decades.

As the rot has deepened over decades, the power of anybody other than the PM to do anything has shrunk hence a) more and more things go to the PM’s office (hence so many mad No10 meetings in 2020 as only the PM’s office had the authority to do the sensible not the mad thing and ignore ‘the rules’) and b) PMs in desperation keep centralising. They fail anyway. But they can’t see any way out. And the next one goes through the same trajectory ending in Memoirs that ruefully describe the search for ‘the levers of power’.

Insider attention and why they can’t get things done

First, Insider attention hops from one ephemeral emotional wave to another in a constant churn of story after story.

Last year attention cycled through Sue Gray, scandals, riots, winter fuel, farmers, Southport, US election etc. In the first week of January it was rape gangs. In the week of 27/1 it was sort of ‘growth’ to the extent anything has dominated SW1.

This attention usually lasts less than a week, rarely two weeks, very occasionally it stretches to a month. The Grenfell fire (~100 dramatic deaths) was very unusual in maintaining Insider focus for 3-4 weeks. Far fewer than 1% of stories maintain much SW1 focus for a month. Only a tiny fraction of things are like Brexit that stretch years (with other things flaring up to capture most attention briefly then disappearing).

In 2017-18 I and some others built a tool — we called it Bubblescope because it measured the Bubble’s attention — to quantify SW1 attention. The numbers demonstrate what I’m saying: the Insider political elite’s attention is extremely fragmented and they surf from one ephemeral emotional wave to the next in an unending stream. Our experiment also showed that it’s possible to make useful predictions about the arc of a story as it bubbles up: how intense will it be, how long will Bubble attention last. (Even rough predictions about this are valuable. And it was a cheap fast side project, there’s vast scope for doing this properly.)

To a large extent these waves are driven by mimetics and cascades. It is easier for people at the apex of certain hierarchies (political power, celebrities like Tom Cruise) to create these waves than others because of the structure of the network: Tom Cruise is a huge node with many connections and spreading to many different subnetworks. But their ability to do so is inherently limited and the extent to which certain memes ‘go viral’ is affected by many things outside anybody’s control. Each story is competing in the ecosystem with others. Often political Insiders are overwhelmed by events. Planes crash. Terrorists kill. Markets panic.

And the set of stories that win the contest for attention inside the Insider ecosystem are, obviously, not the same as the stories that that win the contest for attention of voters. Compare, for example, the attention given to the launch of Hillary’s 2016 election campaign and the Johnny Depp and Amber Heard saga. People in political communication generally don’t understand this difference.

The ecosystem of SW1 runs on these waves. The MPs, officials, spads, think tankers and the professional spectators on Twitter get up, scroll, and dive in on the day’s issues. Suddenly they all have an opinion about tank tracks and weather in Ukraine. Or terrorist laws. Or DeepSeek which they’d never heard of yesterday. Or ‘does the PM agree with celeb X on Y’. Everyone chats about this all day and on WhatsApp. On to the next day. And much of the bureaucratic system follows this wave.

Suddenly a year has gone. Then four. And people look back and talk and write about how hard it was to get anything done, ‘the levers of power’ etc.

Second, the heart of power in No10 is pulled to these ephemeral waves and is not structured to:

• think properly about choosing priorities and what order it’s sensible to pursue them in

• plan operationally

• build high performance teams

• maintain focus on executing priorities step by step for years

• consider their own activity embedded in the broader system as a ‘systems problem’ requiring ‘systems thinking’ (people, management, communication, politics etc).

No10 is structured to a) talk to the old media and b) maintain the PM’s delusion that being in office is the same as being in power while officials do 99% of government outside practical political control. This includes hiding a PM’s true powers from the PM and, when necessary, making the PM think that exercising power is theoretically possible but would be morally/legally wrong (‘I’m afraid it would raise questions about respect for the rule of law PM’).

Hence the largely successful campaign by some lawyers and officials to elide the difference between domestic law and international law. The latter is not and has never been considered to be binding in the sense domestic law is. But they have persuaded MPs to consider international law as binding in the same sense of domestic law. And this gives officials and lawyers great powers to shape what a PM does. How judicial review affects the PM’s office is unknown in broader networks around the bar or SW1 and when I’ve explained it publicly lawyers say it cannot possibly be true. (Hence, for example, the widespread confusion over things like special forces droning people instead of arresting them, which I explained two years before the kerfuffle last October but which SW1 was so totally confused by they almost all got the wrong end of the stick.)

So it’s the same ten people in meetings on everything important: Southport, Trump, winter fuel, Ukraine etc. And it’s the same ten people making the big decisions on the long-term things like growth, prison building, MoD budgets etc. And it’s the same ten people considering the PM’s speech on growth and Ukraine and NHS waiting lists etc. And it’s the same ten people in an argument over policy, an argument over system failure, and an argument over ‘communication’, an argument over ‘handling the MPs’, and an argument about ‘what will GCHQ do if the current trends with the models improve cyber capabilities given HMT has banned it from hiring 99% of the talent it needs’.

One of the maddest things about No10 is that it starts the day with the PM being read stories from the old media. Everyone babbles. No10 issues statements on all sorts. And summons panic meetings to discuss one or more of these stories.

But everything important in the world that is hard and complex — building a product/service, delivering a hard government policy, winning a geopolitical context, creating new knowledge — requires intense focus on priorities for a long time. And intense focus on priorities requires saying No, stop, strip, simplify, focus.

But everything in No10 operates to make this practically possible and if someone tries in some way they are told what they want is ‘unconstitutional’ or ‘unlawful’.

Third, the obvious thing to do is to create a system to ensure intense focus on priorities when those ten people are not in a meeting about it saying ‘this is a top priority’.

This is what we started doing in 2020. It requires (assuming something like the existing system sort of exists and you aren’t starting from scratch) two other things: a) a fundamental change to Whitehall HR so appointments are open by default and b) the performance management of Permanent Secretaries by the PM’s office. If you can’t change the people and you can’t enforce priorities on senior people, then you can’t make meaningful changes to policy, management and system. You don’t control the government. The Cabinet Secretary agreed the new system and both of these things — the biggest change in Whitehall in many decades. It combined with unifying the No10 and HMT team rather than allowing HMT to withhold information from the PM, the totally mad normal system.

As soon as we left No10, the system effortlessly got the PM to destroy the thing he needed and revert to chaos, no priorities, and the default of ‘No10 as Media Entertainment Service’. This is all most officials have ever known and for most officials is preferable to a government controlling the government. And HMT immediately ended the system we built and reverted to keeping the PM in the dark like a troublesome spad — the system Starmer and McSweeney are now suffering.

I won’t go into it all here, cf. this and my official evidence to the covid Inquiry.

How will Labour cope?

Whitehall has been such a shock that new ministers and spads are blaming Whitehall for their flat spin and declaring ‘Cummings is right’ about the civil service. To be fair to some of the Labour MPs, unlike ~100% of Tories — especially those most liked by the NPC class such as Gawke — some Labour ministers actually want the government to control the government!

So it’s underrated that the Left is updating on Whitehall 10X faster than the Tory MPs did and may well end up in a much more radical position than the Tories after 14 years of failure. Just as Blair updated faster and clearer on Whitehall than senior Tories. But I don’t think this will change much in the next four years.

At the same time as this briefing, the PM appointed Wormald as Cabinet Secretary. It was logical for Whitehall to give the PM a choice for Cabinet Secretary of the guy who screwed up the Brexit negotiations or the guy who killed thousands screwing up the covid response — then presented this choice as ‘the serious people’ are in charge.

Starmer could have rejected the ludicrous process and its poisoned chalice ‘choice’ but of course he did not. He chose to drink the covid chalice. Wormald is the spider man meme in official form — the man responsible for the disastrous pandemic plan which amounted to ‘let the NHS collapse with over 500k dead and no health service for months because nothing can be done, vaccines and tests are impossible’, the man who tried to get the PM to go on TV and advocate for ‘chickenpox parties’ so people got covid as fast as possible, which was such a bad idea I’m pretty sure not a single regime on earth did it, the man who will be nominally responsible for removing those officials found by the Inquiry to have failed. And Wormald had to apologise to ministers after ministers were told documents relating to the blood scandal had all been properly given to the archives but they had not. He then revealed that his father was one of those investigated in the Inquiry.

It’s a perfect emblem for the morphing of real ministerial responsibility, which Britain was famous for worldwide, into the fake responsibility that dominates now. Logically Starmer has also appointed Ollie Robbins, architect of May’s abysmal deal, to lead the Foreign Office and J Powell in charge of surrendering Chagos.

The Cabinet Secretary apportioning blame for the pandemic preparations and VIP lane

Starmer even sabotaged ministers’ own power even further last year. Almost totally ignored by the old media, among the most important documents from the new government so far are a speech from the AG and a document sent round the Cabinet Office. These changes enhanced the already disastrous grip of government lawyers in the Cabinet Office on the government. They made even more true the Golden Rule of SW1: the government does not control the government and doesn’t want to. Ministers and spads are already experiencing this directly. They are being told: sorry, the AG’s changes mean it’s not lawful to proceed on X. (Obviously the IFG was very supportive.)

This is obviously part of the explanation for the Chagos farce. Prediction: a network of Labour MPs and spads will start trying to shove the AG out to save themselves, realising that the government can’t function if it’s controlled by the CO’s legal team.

Might No10 change course?

They will try to change course a bit. It’s already happening. In some areas they will panic and try to change. But the big things won’t change. And the biggest thing — how power works in Whitehall — won’t change.

Starmer is an official. He worked as a civil servant and as a lawyer.

In 2021 the MET had another disaster when a policeman kidnapped Sarah Everard off the street and killed her.

Boris was entangled in scandals and didn’t want to antagonise the police who were investigating him. He stood by Cressida Dick and played for time.

The biggest open goal in British politics that year was to go on TV and say:

This is the latest in a long string of disasters for the MET. The MET leadership are clearly incapable of sorting themselves out. Cressida Dick and other senior management must be replaced immediately. We need respected outsiders brought in to the MET to figure out what’s gone wrong and how to fix it. No more coverups. No more excuses. No more delays. The PM has refused to act. He says he’s standing with the senior management. It’s another appalling misjudgement. The country demands action. We cannot possibly let those responsible for these disasters yet again give excuses and wait for the media to forget about it. The country wants real responsibility. The PM must listen, reconsider and do his duty — and replace the senior management immediately. We will pressure him every day until he acts.

Instead Starmer went on TV and said — I’m standing with the PM and the MET management!!

People ask ‘what’s the core of Starmer?’. That is the core of Starmer. He really believes in defending the old system — he believes in it with an instinctive inner faith that’s like my belief that the old system is rotten. He thought the Tories were awful and Brexit was awful and these two things were causing the problems. Once him and the good people returned, the system would naturally be fine. Starmer and thousands like him have trained themselves for decades to believe fairy tales. Now they’re really confused but they won’t ditch their fairy tales. Starmer will conclude: the damage from Brexit was deeper than I thought! Many pundits will echo this — what else can they do?!

Someone with this instinct will not be able to use the power he has in the constitution and start replacing senior management and rebuilding functional institutions while the system around him screams ‘unlawful, the lawyers object’. Starmer can no more take on the Cabinet Office than Sunak could take on the Treasury. Like Cameron and Sunak, Starmer will prefer to fail respectably with Permanent Secretaries giving him a patronising smile as he leaves — you did your duty PM, they’ll say, as they prepare to chop the balls off the next NPC-PM.

Spads and ministers are discovering the Labour insider view on Whitehall was wrong. But the system is now so rotten that it cannot be usefully tweaked. Announcements like those last year by McFadden about ‘reform’ amount to confirmation that nothing important will challenge the old system which will continue to shift more power from politicians to officials and lawyers every year. (In classic fashion, most of what he announced as ‘new’ actually already existed and the rest was trivial.) Only vast changes can have effects on a scale noticed by voters. And this includes bringing in talent from outside and fundamentally speeding up Whitehall. When every major project is now measured on the scale of 20-40 years, it does not matter if you performatively tweak this or that and spin ‘we’re reforming’ — all ‘reforms’ (tweaks) are swamped by vast bureaucratic inertia. And HMT is both more powerful than ever and on the side of inertia.

Whitehall feels no fear. It assumes it has Starmer where it wants him and when he blows up there’ll be another NPC shuffled in. They think they survived the existential crisis of 2020 so they’re safe. Looking at the Tories they see no threat. The only lurking worry is the rise of Reform. But that’s a distant threat.

Starmer, like the Tory MPs and other Insiders, is in a trap: the system generates constant failure, you’re under political pressure to ‘do something’, small changes are meaningless and the system turns them into mush without effort, but big changes are an existential challenge potentially taking up all bandwidth and provoking bitter resistance, and most of your life has trained you to rub along with those threatening bitter resistance — not fire them!

So, Starmer will say some things about ‘reforming Whitehall’ that will reliably hit the sweet spot of annoying officials but changing nothing. Only something beyond the scale of covid or Ukraine will prompt Insiders to radical action, such as a worse-than-1929/2008 financial crash.

Long-term though, the fact that a bunch of Labour MPs and spads will join people on the Right in having witnessed the pathologies of Whitehall will be important. It means more energy building up that can’t find release. So when the right crisis comes, there will be more energy behind ‘actually rip it up’ than Whitehall realises — similar to how there is much more energy behind changing DC in 2025 than there was in 2016. Imagine four more years like the last six months. There will be more and more people who grasp: Whitehall isn’t going to get a PM who works harder than Sunak or who is more of a system defender than Starmer, if THEY couldn’t make it work then it means it CANNOT work, the only way out is A GOVERNMENT THAT CONTROLS THE GOVERNMENT!

If you want the full context and detail on the civil service and what really happened 2019-20, then look at my evidence under oath to the covid Inquiry.

If you want to cut through a huge amount of complexity, here is a way to do it. Follow Machiavelli and ask yourself, who really has what power — who is really in charge, who can and does fire whom? How often do you see Ministers fired because of leaks from officials. How often do you see officials fired? Exactly. The officials fire ministers. Hacks work with officials to fire Ministers. Ministers do not fire officials regardless of almost any scale of debacle. Over the next four years you will see a stream of Ministers shuffled back to the back benches — decades of careerism culminating in a NPC job from which they’re removed by officials working with hacks because of things over which they have effectively no true power or responsibility. And I doubt you see the PM say even once, ‘I am removing senior official X because they can’t do the job’, never mind actual systemic change.

Kemi — another vacuous Insider project

Kemi’s a striking signal of how low SW1 standards have sunk.

The basics:

1. Kemi is lazy, brittle and delusional. In her previous jobs she was useless but learned to blame others. She doesn’t have any of the things needed for a serious leader. The people who like her are a) people who’ve swallowed Insider spin or b) a subset of Insider characters whose preferences and tastes are very far from the median voter. From all parts of the ideological spectrum I hear identical lines: ‘She won’t listen to anybody, she picks fights with everybody, she meets a businessman who made a fortune in X then explains why they’re wrong about X, she’s lazy and won’t read, she sits in her office playing computer games on her iPad, she sees stuff on Twitter and blurts it out, I can’t see her developing in the job’. Most spads and donors who created her did not work on her leadership contest because they got so disillusioned. People inside her inner circle are already telling friends ‘I can’t see this working’.

2. ‘A’ players hire A players, F players hire F players, so she’s hired mostly the F Team as advisers including Carrie’s friends who pushed the Tories to self-destruct. While we were fighting the second referendum campaign in 2019, Carrie’s friend Newman, appointed by Badenoch to a senior role, was pushing the Stonewall insanity with second referendum campaigner Starmer. This pressure continued from Carrie and her friends after the election hence Boris going to Stonewall events etc as the madness spread. This is a team who see politics as following SW1 trends/memes/Narrative Whiplash, not focus on the voters. They’re not trying to escape the pull of mimetics, their lives are a surrender to it. Kemi has no instinct for voters and her team won’t supply it.

   

3. She’s appointed shadow ministers who shadow the areas they occupied in government so a) they are compromised on admitting errors and b) Labour constantly throws back at them ‘but you said just 9 months ago that what I’m now doing is the right thing’ — cue general laughter and contempt for Tory babbler.

4. She went along with the Trolley-Sunak consensus on everything including tax rises and the Boris-Carrie uncontrolled immigration wave.

5. She is one of many MPs who made the argument that the problem 2020-24 was ‘too much listening to focus groups not conviction’. This is moronic. You have to work in SW1 to believe that ‘listening to focus groups’ could be the reason for a) opening the floodgates on immigration while b) letting the NHS disintegrate and kill thousands and c) letting out early a string of murderers and rapists. A simple way to understand how lost the Tories are is to consider that they say to themselves ‘we lost because we listened to focus groups' while actually they did the opposite of what focus groups wanted because they actually listened to each other and the regime media — they’re so thoroughly confused by politics that they don’t even understand how they themselves think and act every day!

6. Her main contribution to public debate has been to brag about her tribal Nigerian hatreds. A Nigerian bragging about tribal hatreds is not the look needed from a despised Party that imported tribal hatreds at vast scale to disastrous effect including mass rape of white girls, covered up across SW1 in order not to disrupt the consensus on importing millions of no-skilled people with primitive religions from the least civilised places on earth.

7. Her ‘plan’ — a year on ‘rebuilding trust’, a year on ‘establishing credibility’, then ‘policies’ — is pure Tory ‘comms’ world garbage. She will ditch it and start rushing out ‘policies’ in response to pressure from MPs and regime media and polls. And the execution will be rubbish. And the more she does the worse her position will get.

This project is programmed to self-destruct.

It has one and only big force going for it short-term: Starmer going straight into a flat spin relieved some pressure on the Tories and gave them excuses for comforting delusions, and there is strength in the argument — Starmer is an existence proof that you can be totally rubbish yet still win if the government implodes (see below).

A very striking shift among a subset of the young and entrepreneurs

The LFG event in December was interesting in many ways. And it showed similar things I’ve seen for two years as I’ve given talks to younger people and people generally outside SW1. But the trends are strengthening and accelerating.

The most striking aspect was the quality of the people. Lawrence’s invite attracted hundreds of much higher quality people on average than we could attract to Brexit events in 2016 or to Tory events in 2019. (99% of these people came without knowing I would be speaking, they weren’t coming to ‘hear someone famous’ but to discuss the ideas.) In the audience was exactly the sort of people the Tory Party wants to win back but who won’t touch it — people with very serious brains and jobs. A decade ago elite talent outside politics either a) did not agree about the rot of the old system and need for profound change and had the attitude ‘let people like Obama and Cameron do politics while I make money and do my career’ or b) they agreed but would not come to such political events because of bad consequences for their career and social network.

This has clearly shifted in ways that SW1 doesn’t see. There is a shift to ‘the right’ or to ‘the Outsider perspective’ — however you want to describe it, neither term is quite right. It’s also a fragmentation and polarisation. There’s far more cheering Elon and far more cheering Luigi-style killings.

The phenomenon here is related to the preference falsification/cascade revealed in America after Elon bought Twitter — suddenly it was revealed that many had not been saying what they believed because of social pressure. (Cf. Timur Kuran: Sparks and prairie fires (1989), and Private Truths, Public Lies (1995).)

But this shift is not at all a shift to ‘the Tories’, quite the opposite. As I wrote in my blog on Trump’s win, a much more useful way to think about politics now than Left/Right or Tory/Labour is Insider/Outsider. The preference cascade is of elites shifting towards the Outsider perspective — following the voters who shifted this way years ago but were not listened to — and this process remakes the elites and generates a new Insider class.

I’d summarise the emerging perspective I hear from young people a) much smarter than me, b) without experience working in politics/government, c) have not gone in the commie direction, as roughly:

We realise the old system is broken, the old parties, old media and old Whitehall are imploding, Britain is in very deep trouble, something very different and new is needed and we’re happy to discuss things as reasonable that SW1 Insiders regard as ‘very extreme’, like the end of the permanent civil service — which sounds really weird, why would you promote almost entirely internally? We want growth, to rip up the planning system, massive nuclear power. We want a government that can get infrastructure built. We want a government that cares deeply about technology. We want much more seriousness on crime and security and don’t care about the old media screaming ‘racist/fascist’. We want a government that isn’t a constant farce. It seems crazy that the political world seems in a parallel world on what’s happening on AI, but less crazy given it just seems broken. But we haven’t studied the political system in detail, we don’t feel we understand it, and we don’t have a good map of how it can be changed. We don’t want to touch the Tories but then how do we change anything? Should we try to shape Reform? Someone must get this map fast and build something, we obviously can’t rely on Labour or Tories or Whitehall! We need DOGE, but how?! We need a government that is super-focused on AI, but how?! I don’t want to leave but lots of my friends have left or thinking of leaving. It feels like we’re on the edge…

To the extent this energy is touching politics now it is seen in energy for Reform and for other non-Tory campaigns like Crush Crime and LFG.

(** Why do I think violence will become harder to avoid? Crudely… We have roughly a division of force plus special capabilities. There are something like 4-5 ‘divisions’ supposedly on one or another watch list plus many more thousands extremely hostile and not under surveillance. The MPs and courts have dismantled border control. Parts of the country are already outside police control. Most of Whitehall has demonstrated throughout the rape gang scandals that they will prioritise coverups in order to continue mass immigration. The HRA paralyses and corrupts the deep state. How do you think this evolves? Do you think another decade of speeches on ‘diversity is our strength’ and ‘integration is a British success’ will work after the last 30 years? How easy has ‘integration’ been with people from Ireland and Scotland? Do you think it will be easier and quicker with Taliban country and Somalia?)

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What are the core things needed to change our trajectory?

‘Systems’ thinking…

The best way to think about politics — campaigns and government — is as complex systems problems requiring systems solutions. Small changes can be done in standard ways. But we can only improve the country substantially if we try to improve each of people, institutions and ideas together — they all affect each other in highly nonlinear ways, crises cascade, weird properties emerge bottom-up. (Cf. my paper on the emergence of ‘systems engineering’ and ‘systems management’ from Manhattan, ICBMs, and Apollo.)

We have all these problems and self-sabotage everywhere. But the political system supposed to fix the failures is causing the failures. MPs and Whitehall HR can’t fix themselves.

Westminster debates pointlessly recycle week after week, decade after decade:

It’s the policy, no it’s the delivery, no it’s No10’s too weak, no it’s No10’s trying to do too much, no No10 gets dragged in because the departments are so bad, no it’s the PM, no it’s HMT, no it’s the Cabinet Office, no it’s the ministers, no it’s the MPs, no it’s the officials, no it’s the spads, no it’s the HR, no it’s the bad pay, no it’s the media, no it’s the incentives, no it’s the CULTURE, no it’s the policy…

No. It’s all of that and more.

So we need to think about building interconnected things in parallel. And some ends are ways and means to achieve deeper ends. It’s mindbogglingly complex but there’s no escape from a systems crisis without some sort of map of the whole at some level of abstraction.

1/ Real regime change.

The fundamental goal now — as it was in 2015-16 — is a radically different political regime in Britain, a strategic transition across people, ideas, and institutions which can then execute a transition across all main policy areas.

What does ‘a radically different political regime’ mean?

Five benchmarks:

1. A shift roughly as big as from Singapore before Lee Kuan Yew to Singapore after Lee Kuan Yew had been going for decades.

2. Or a shift like the shift 1790-1815 as Pitt changed the civil service, procurement, naval building and other critical national security capabilities (see my blog on this HERE).

3. Or a shift like the shift from the old medieval regime to the modern state with the Bank of England, central taxes, representative parliament, independent courts protecting property rights, capabilities for state warfare (rather than kings and lords organising it personally) and so on.

4. Or a shift like the shift to the Northcote-Trevelyan system of permanent officials gradually replacing the old ministerial responsibility Palmerston refers to at the top — but in reverse.

5. Or a shift similar to the old Republic before FDR and how Washington worked after FDR. (Which is what the White House/DOGE is trying to emulate now — another once-in-70-years structural regime change, per Curtis Yarvin.)

Almost everything crucial is downstream from retiring and replacing the leadership of the old parties and old civil service, and terminating with extreme prejudice the legal and financial foundations of both. The Northcote-Trevelyan regime of permanent officials taking over most meaningful power must be abolished. This will allow the rebuilding of rotten institutions and creation of new healthy institutions. If it isn’t, then it will continue to strangle all attempts at changing policy.

Only a new regime with new people, ideas and institutions can organise the transition we need across all the main elements of our broken government:

1. productivity growth (e.g the ~£300B per year procurement budget, planning system, environmental review system, ‘the hybrid bill system’ for big infrastructure, skills/vocational training, lower simpler taxes, massive deregulation)

2. the science and technology ecosystem: R&D (public and private), investment (public and private), labs (public and private), universities, startups

3. public services such as the NHS

4. public order, police, courts, CPS, immigration, asylum

5. national security, foreign policy, the armed forces, MoD, and intelligence services

6. critical capabilities: e.g building strategic advantage in subfields of science and technology; creating new forms of ‘special forces’ based on new mixes of skills and technologies etc

7. constitutional change including the end of the ECHR/HRA and Equalities Act, big changes to judicial review, and a big shift of power and money in many areas from central to local government and from government to markets (our unique centralisation combined with HMT power is central to economic dysfunction, bad services, and collapse of faith in politics)

8. how the core ‘No10 system’ itself works: institutions of No10 (policy, data, management of priorities etc), Cabinet Office, HMT (which should have key functions shifted to No10); civil service recruitment and ‘HR’ etc.

The old No10 door will still be there. There will still be a ‘Cabinet’ and ‘Parliament’. But beneath the surface, the transformation must be vast and based on a shift in elite talent, training, ideas and the institutions they work in.

(For some further details, see: What I spent my time on in No10)

2/ Take power in No10.

The project for real regime change must capture power in No10 — a necessary but not sufficient condition.

This means:

• A PM who is at least a beta politician with the skills, self-awareness and ambition to empower people to build a great team. It can be done without someone with Bill Clinton or FDR communication skills. But it can’t be done without someone who can empower the creation of a great team. It can’t be done with someone temperamentally similar to Cameron, Sunak etc: occupy the office, ‘respect the institutions’ (i.e support all the failing old institutions), exercise very little of the constitutionally available power, and leave office with the system even more rotten than before then write the usual memoirs about ‘how hard it was to find the levers of power’. We don’t need Bismarck but we can’t do it with another ‘respect the institutions’ NPC.

• A team with the talent, ideas and organisation to change the regime.

This means — leaving aside a coup or regime change via chaotic/violent regime implosion, which often happens historically but not in Britain for 400 years — either (Option A) taking over an existing party and changing it so fundamentally the voters see it as something essentially new because it is essentially new or (Option B) building a startup party, which might be i) something totally new but ii) could take the form of Tories and Reform dissolving and merging into something new along with other forces.

Either via A or B, you need to occupy No10 with a team that can do regime change. See below for thoughts on relative likelihood of A and B.

3/ Bring elite talent into politics-government.

It’s impossible for the same cast of MPs and advisers and officials that have dominated SW1 since Thatcher to generate anything other than continued massive failure and massive institutionalised delusion.

As I’ve described many times, for decades elite talent has largely steered clear of politics-government and focused on money, business, hedge funds, private research etc. This is a core cause of our crisis. We only have a chance of overcoming our crisis if we can partially reverse this.

A subset of non-political elite talent must be persuaded — via hope, fear, interest, and/or glory — to abandon their walled gardens and fishponds and engage in politics for a substantial fraction of the next 5-10 years.

We’ve just seen it happen in America when a substantial section of the Valley / Live Player elite decided to go all in with Elon.

Improving performance is inseparable from a shift in the makeup of the ruling elites and a shift in real power — are the permanent officials (the Professional Managerial Class of the old regime) really in charge of 99% or are the politicians? Who fires whom?

Every really big change in politics and technology is accompanied by a change in the nature of the ruling and most culturally influential elites. Look at the rise of new financial, business and media elites in the 19th Century across Europe, connected to the changes in politics (e.g extending franchises) and changes in technology (e.g railway, telegraph, media). Look at the new elites created by the development of modern universities across the world in the 20th Century. Look at the emergence of the class of people building nuclear weapons technology and thinking about their use across the world from the 1940s. And look at the class, mainly in California and China, building the new AI companies: Elon is the icebreaker of the revolution.

It doesn’t have to happen all in one go. We need the pioneers to commit to spending a meaningful fraction of their time on politics. They will recruit subsequent waves. This can set off a chain reaction. Not everyone has to pack their jobs in but some will have to.

A small amount of talent was central to VL’s win in 2016 and 2019. In a collapsing political system, a little talent goes a long way.

4/ At least some elements of the first post-Nietzsche political philosophy that can justify a new regime and cope with the challenges of technology’s dynamism.

The decadénce in the valuating instinct of our politicians, our political parties, goes so deep that they instinctively prefer that which leads to dissolution, that which hastens the end.

Nietzsche, Beyond Good & Evil

Nihilism has become the American way, which is a fatal shock to cultural development and the American spirit… If the value system collapses, how can the social system be sustained?

Wang Huning, adviser to Xi

Not to read Eliot’s “Wasteland” is not to be able to understand the fundamental state of cultural thought in Western modernity. The meaning of this title “The Wasteland” is that modernity has taken hold of Western culture and transformed it into a … spiritual wasteland, a cultural wasteland. The first line of the poem is quite shocking, “April is the cruellest month”. What does this mean? April should be the return of spring to the world. It is the most flourishing month; but after Western modernity, the world in the month of April is a tract of barren land without water, life, or spirit, only abounding in the unabashed lusts of modern men. This is not simply to say that we must oppose modernization from the outset, but rather that after you read a bit more Western literature of this sort, you will very naturally begin thinking, “Why would the greatest Western thinkers and poets have this sort of highly critical attitude toward Western modernity? Why does the West itself have this kind of anti-modernity cultural tradition, a tradition of self-criticism that criticizes modernity? And what is the relationship between these ideas of Western culture and us Chinese people thinking about modernity and modernization?”

Gan Yang, Chinese Straussian

If you’re thinking ‘philosophical issues are an esoteric, idiosyncratic interest far from practical politics’, please reflect that they are the object of discussion at the highest political levels in Beijing — though not in SW1 or Brussels.

The most powerful man in the world that few westerners have heard of — Wang Huning, henchman to Xi — spent years studying Strauss and has so encouraged the translation of Strauss’s work that more of Strauss’s writing is now available in Chinese than in English. Strauss is more studied, and at higher levels, in Beijing than London, Paris, Berlin, Rome — though the new Trump regime has, tellingly, some experts (cf. Michael Anton just arrived at State). Wang also closely studied The Closing of the American Mind and similar books about the west’s spiritual crisis.

The old parties are partly dead because of the talent collapse. But they’re also partly dead because the core ideas acting as foundations for ‘western democracy’ no longer work to explain the world, motivate action or persuade voters or elites.

The West’s political crisis is partly the result of the spiritual and philosophical crisis of modern (post-Napoleon, post-Darwin) Europe first seen deeply in Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and Nietzsche as Europe went through a previous cycle of regime change 1848-70s.

This spiritual-philosophical crisis hit a critical point in 1933 when Heidegger — the greatest scholar of Nietzsche in the 20th Century and the century’s ‘greatest historicist’ (Strauss) — supported the regime that would build Auschwitz. For those interested in recent campus madness, I recommend Heidegger’s notorious address to German universities and German youth in 1933. With little tweaking, you could give this speech to Harvard, end with the battlecry ‘we must destroy Israel if we are to become what we are’, and get a standing ovation from students and faculty.

The recent burst of malign, deranged energy from the Left, which captured so many institutions, was generated by a longer metastasis of the post-Nietzsche European intelligentsia which mutated through Heidegger and Marxism-Stalinism and French existentialists such as Sartre to capture and poison the humanities departments of western universities and then reprogram much of our political-cultural-business elite, and take over HR and legal departments everywhere in a ‘long march through the institutions’. We’ve lived through a form of madness in which the shameful — such as men pretending in private to be women to indulge in niche sexual perversions — have been celebrated as ‘the next frontier of the civil rights struggle’. And normal people have been told that they must honour the perverts or face legal penalties. And such madness took strongest hold in the places with the most money and the highest status including our ancient and most respected educational institutions. (This is what Wang and other Straussians suspected would happen in ~1991 when the Cold war ended.)

But not one in a thousand of those repeating memes like ‘river to the sea’ or ‘trans rights are human rights’ — or those ‘reporting’ on such phenomena in the old media and academia — understand why they are repeating it, why the universities mutated from Enlightenment values to mass rallies supporting murder-torture-rape. They have no model, no map of the mimetic-meme system and its causal structure. Elites and the old media are lost, as if they are dealing with something like a contagion of witchcraft from the medieval age.

There needs to be at least the beginnings of a new political philosophy that can integrate ideas about the dynamics of our civilisation — how we’ve come to where we are — and how we might steer it through dangerous and suicidal waters to safer harbours.

Old conservatism, the conservatism of Throne and Altar, ‘threw the earth on its own coffin’ from 1848, as Bismarck put it. After that political ‘conservatism’ morphed through various mutations as an overwhelmingly reactive political force responding to the developments of socialists, ‘progressives’ etc. One form of mutation has been a sort of debased mix of Adam Smith, Mises, Hayek plus some electoral nationalism plus ‘go slower’ on cultural change driven by the Left. And ‘mainstream conservatism’ has rotted so deeply that in recent years across the West old ‘mainstream conservative’ parties are being challenged/replaced. It has sometimes slowed trends but has understood them worse and worse — and this obviously connects to the talent collapse in public life and how elite talent has fled ‘mainstream’ conservatism.

Old ‘classical liberalism’ is long dead. If someone today describes themself as ‘classical liberal’ it’s become an almost infallible sign that they are shockingly out of touch with political reality and evolutionary logic.

Soviet communism had an existential crisis 1989-91. But the underlying ideas of Socialism and Communism — particularly those elements deriving from Rousseau and ‘second wave modernity’ — have proved amazingly resilient. And they have fused with the worst aspects of post-Nietzsche continental philosophy to generate the LGBTQH+ nightmare we see today, a mutation that mainstream conservatism had almost no immune system to resist.

Generally political philosophy was, as Leo Strauss described, poisoned by ‘political science’, a bogus academic discipline that fakes the application of the methods of natural science to political affairs. Although the field has a few non-charlatans, political science is as credible post-Brexit and Trump as public health post-covid or ‘international relations’ post-Ukraine.

We need a framework that can cope with natural science post-Darwin and the inevitably constant turmoil created by market civilisations with a lot of technological change. We need a framework that can integrate ideas about virtue and the good regime — the nation, markets, regulation, security and war, and technology.

Technology develops for many reasons — partly a) in response to out-group competition (e.g advances in radar, building the first nuclear device), partly b) in response to competitive market dynamics (e.g smartphones), partly c) pressured by regulations with unintended consequences (e.g EU regulation such as GDPR, intended to harm big tech companies but actually harming smaller companies, and the AI Act, driving EU talent to London and California). And it makes some traditions valuable and kills others, with vast social effects. For example, families have been deeply affected by the shift from production at home (pre-19th Century) to mass production and work in factories etc. And will be deeply affected by a new technology-enabled shift back to home production.

No political philosophy taught to political elites in the elite universities can cope with these things.

The political speeches of mainstream politicians now across the West are vacuous in the extreme. Voters see it. It’s partly because the phrases and arguments are tied to ideas from political philosophies that are no longer vibrant, no longer seem to connect to voters’ reality. And the politicians deploying these phrases clearly don’t themselves know how their phrases connect in any sort of meaningful framework. And it’s connected to the debased standards of elite education in the humanities.

This is why almost everything interesting in politics now is in weird corners of the internet and outside the political mainstream. ‘E-acc’ — i.e effective accelerationism — is an example as are its opponents: both are internet based and outside the mainstream. Hence also the rise of podcasts which has shocked Insider political world. For people who can’t get voters to pay attention to a 10 second soundbite, it’s shocking to see the rapid rise of large audiences for people discussing politics for HOURS.

Kamala’s campaign knowing they couldn’t possibly put her on Rogan for 3 hours summed up a lot. The dead scripts of the old parties were made for a media that’s dying with a political language that’s dying. They can’t be sustained for three hours of discussion with a comedian. Trying would only expose the hollowness.

Close to all interesting discussions I have about politics are away from SW1 Insiders. And I’ve had more discussions with technology people about how power really works in western regimes than I have with MPs in SW1. This is not coincidental. The Valley culture is interested in power. The MPs are interested in surface, surface, surface. Vibrant ideas are now almost all outside the ‘mainstream’. And part of why what’s happening in DC is so shocking to the old Insiders is that its development occurred in parts of the internet they weren’t watching. Back in 2015 when I was planning a startup to do Brexit and it was seen in SW1 as a sign of un-seriousness to be interested in things like DeepMind, Curtis Yarvin was roughly as niche as machine learning in SW1 and DC. Now the regime media is scrambling to write pieces about how often the Vice President and possible next President speaks to him.

In 2025 I will blog on essays of Leo Strauss.

Cf. Askonas on technology and conservatism. Me on Oakeshott.

5/ An Actual Plan to change the formal and informal exercise of power and restore real political responsibility.

This has three levels:

1. The policies you want.

2. The system that could make the policies happen — e.g the NHS incentives necessary such that system X shifts from state A to state B.

3. A ‘plan to do the plan’ including a map of the obstacles given existing power networks will try to sabotage the most important parts of the plan — something conventional think tanks and policy papers almost never do. What incentives mean Whitehall will fight against changing the NHS incentives necessary such that system X shifts from state A to state B.

It also must address the mix of (A) using the full constitutional powers of the PM — in many ways stronger than the US President especially over appointments in Whitehall — and (B) primary legislation for specific problems.

Serious regime change means having Bills drafted for immediate introduction days after the next election, as we did with Brexit in 2019. These Bills must be extremely explicit with explicit ‘notwithstanding’ clauses nuking the HRA and other rat runs for lawyers in judicial reviews, as we did with the Internal Market Bill 2020. And the power of the Supreme Court itself must change.

The primary legislation must inter alia:

• End the dominance of the permanent bureaucracy. A few functions like libraries, which ironically the old system pathologically destroyed, can be ‘permanent’ but the permanent grip of Whitehall’s closed caste over its own appointments, the fake responsibility, the fake meritocracy must end. We took back control from Brussels but now No10 and Parliament must take back control from Whitehall. Palmerston’s description of ministerial responsibility to Parliament must be restored so politicians are truly responsible again. This means they can appoint the best people for the job and remove duffers and take responsibility for their personnel judgements.

• Repeal the HRA and Equalities Act, withdraw from the jurisdiction of Strasbourg. This is connected to the restoration of true ministerial responsibility to Parliament: no more hiding behind pathetic blaming of judges.

• Limits on judicial review and the imposition of compressed deadlines on judicial review imposed on the courts by primary legislation. A civilised society respects laws and courts. But it should not allow the current farce whereby courts make rapid action practically ‘unlawful’ in practically every crucial aspect of state power, killing people, wasting vast amounts of the people’s wealth, undermining security against criminals, terrorists and spies etc. And it should not tell the judges to start making policy on issues that are for governments, as our politicians have with the HRA/EA plus judicial review system — cf. the recent mad Supreme Court judgment in NEXT’s case on the Equalities Act. The MPs of both parties are to blame for allowing and encouraging this, then, with great cowardice and dishonesty, blaming ‘the judges’ when voters complain about a judgment.

It is impossible to change many crucial aspects of policy and execution without doing these three things. Sunak and the absurd Rwanda policy is an existence proof of how smart people can create disasters when you refuse to face reality on these three things. And all of them can be very popular and a great campaign asset if properly explained. Especially in the context of the next three years of Starmer.

6/ A New Political Story.

Connected to the collapse of western political philosophy and the collapse of the old parties and regimes is the failure of the old political stories the old parties tell.

Opportunity. Security. Change. The slogans and speeches are empty. There’s a constant cycle of reheating hits from decades past because nobody has a convincing new tune. And few pay attention to them except the dwindling hacks of the old media and satirists.

I won’t go into what I think this new story is here but it is obvious that a new regime that can generate a decisive strategic transition in British government and culture needs a new story for itself and the voters.

The Story comes from a mix of the New Philosophy, the Actual Plan, and New Elites.

7/ Mass Support.

Regime change comes from a subset of elites defecting from the old regime and allying with the demos.

Elites supply new talent, ideas, institutions, tools.

Masses supply energy and legitimacy.

The Story must move the masses.

This means a set of campaigns on specific themes that together have mass support.

And it means projects that just do things.

For example, on crime, education and health there is scope for projects that help people today and build political support. And people in technology can build things that connect to the Actual Plan.

8/ A political strategy that can (re)build a coalition

I could never persuade Tories about fundamental aspects of voter attitudes. I couldn’t do it before the referendum. I thought they would update after we won but I proved totally wrong. We didn’t persuade people in 2019. I didn’t make the same mistake that time — I said in No10 after our victory, a few weeks after Christmas everyone will go back to saying we’re morons and the new 2019 electoral coalition is a mix of a fluke and a disaster. And they did.

The Tory MPs were phlegmatic as the Trolley, Truss and Sunak machine-gunned every part of this coalition. When I warned in 2021 against ditching the 2019 tax guarantee, I got no traction. When I pointed out that the referendum was 52-48 but we won two-thirds of seats, eyes glazed over.

And the mainstream pundits wrote over and over again:

• 2019 was a weird fluke because of Brexit and Corbyn.

• You can’t appeal both to those who want dynamism and older social conservatives. (Total rubbish — as Trump just showed again — but widely believed in SW1 because it’s psychologically crucial to argue that it’s ‘politically impossible’ to sell dynamism.)

• The 2019 coalition was actually a millstone round the necks of Tories because it pulled them towards the racist instincts of the working classes.

• Instead the Tories should dream about how to ditch it and go back to the Cameron strategy — which couldn’t win a majority in 2010 after the biggest financial crisis since 1929 and barely managed a tiny fragile majority against Milliband’s joke campaign.

I also couldn’t persuade people that the 2019 coalition was a nightmare for Labour if we actually governed 2020-24 with the VL agenda because they would have to simultaneously a) hold London and their own MPs while b) reaching out to the working classes of the Midlands and North, while c) we made this harder and harder on issue after issue.

I thought after the election that if the Boris-Carrie situation did NOT blow up, then we would turn the Tory Party into essentially a new party, and a much more popular party, and would probably collapse Labour. We now know that Starmer was a whisker from resigning in 2021 after the Hartlepool election when No10 was in the hands of Idiocracy.

But but but… It’s important to note that when I talk to Tory MPs and people working with them all day they report:

Dominic, they do not think that the worst ever defeat means they need to restore the 2019 coalition. Many perhaps most would much prefer to stay in Opposition than try to rebuild it.

It’s crucial to remember that many Tory MPs and the social network in which they swim do not want to have to think about working class voters or the north. So if they’re offered an alternative, it’s psychologically appealing even if the alternative is as braindead as ‘rebuild Cameron’s coalition not the 2019 coalition’.

I return to this below.

It is a very hard problem bound up in the question of whether the Tories can be, or should be, saved. On one hand to remove the Left we need a strategy and a coalition. But many/most Tories oppose the strategy and coalition that worked so well and many/most would rather lose than adopt it. And the strategy many/most prefer — talking to familiar people in the prosperous south via interviews on Today — can’t win and sustain regime change.

9/ A new information ecosystem to provide more accurate, more truthful, and more interesting information

Connected to all the above: the mainstream in SW1 — MPs, advisers, officials and journalists — largely share a set of ideas about ‘communication’ that were largely wrong even before social media and AI turned up.

The regime media has destroyed trust in itself and its business models are broken. And almost everything about the old ways of ‘political communication’ are a failure and have lost the voters.

And when you talk to young people at the big old companies like SKY News, it’s striking how scathing they are about the senior people like Boulton who are doing what every dying industry does — keep doing the same things as the customer base shrinks and stop the young people experimenting. ‘They won’t listen, they won’t do anything different, it’s so frustrating, I’m thinking of leaving.’

As an old approach fails, there’s always pressure from the senior people in the dying incumbent to keep squeezing what’s left from the old way and not risk further problems with experiments. This means a similar dynamic operates here to Whitehall — the more entrepreneurial, risk-taking dynamic characters leave and the most risk averse do-nothing stay. So the old things get into a deeper death spiral.

Yet although their ideas on how to communicate are bad and the audiences for the regime media have collapsed, one nevertheless sees repeatedly in private discussions in SW1 that people do not do things (or even try) because they are operating on false ideas about ‘what voters think’ and ‘what they could be persuaded to think’. People swap memes about what others working in SW1 think as if these memes are true of voters.

A new ecosystem is emerging organically in America and played an important role in the last election.

Britain and Europe are far behind. Some of the story will be similar as the audience preferences can’t be stopped. But in the EU I think it likely that powerful parts of the old system try a last ditch Democrat-style clampdown on free speech on the internet. They have various laws including the Charter of Fundamental Rights. And the ECJ will enforce whatever it thinks necessary to preserve the EU.

E.g The former EU Commissioner Thierry Breton has stated that the European Union can counteract a potential election victory by the AfD party:

We did it in Romania and we will obviously do it in Germany if necessary.

Despite 2016 and 2019 in the UK and Trump in 2024, few in the mainstream have learned about effective campaigns. This contributes to the old entities failing to communicate but also means there’s more and more low hanging fruit to exploit by bringing together a) true knowledge about communication and b) the new ML tools. It’s easier than ever to build new political movements that can overwhelm mainstream legacy institutions.

(I’m talking about the political media. There’s a lot in the old media outside politics that remains great. What should change viz politics does not necessarily apply to other things. And you can’t treat art like politics.)

10/ A campaign-conspiracy to make the above happen!

Obviously the old forces can’t generate the above list.

A new force must spark new forces.

Part closed conspiracy, part semi-open conspiracy, part open campaign.

I’ll come back to this…

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How could SW1 events play out?

Assumption (A). Most big events are likely to be mishandled by someone bad at politics so there is far more potential downside than upside for Starmer. And the Party contains Blairites, Muslim extremist nutjobs, Corbyn commies, and Starmerite careerists. And some good (mainly young) people who can feel the old system is knackered and are desperate for Labour not to repeat Trolley-Truss-Sunak and waste four years — but who are not represented in Cabinet. It is not a happy party. Without charismatic leadership, all the divisions will grow and the Left will keep pointing to the AOC Left in America which will be popular with much of SW1.

He has started to haemorrhage votes to LibDems, Greens and LGBTQH+. This will continue in most scenarios.

Assumption (B). Let’s assume Farage doesn’t die, move to America etc but keeps trying to build and replace the Tories.

Assumption (C). Reform is on around 25 points, in some polls it’s ahead of the Tories and neck-and-neck with Labour. It’s in second place in 100 constituencies.

Without building much and just taking 25%, (C1) Farage can win dozens of seats and stop the Tories winning, or even advancing.

If he sets out a serious plan for how to develop Reform, including why serious talent should join him and how he’ll build a Shadow Cabinet better than the two old parties, then roughly executes the plan, (C2) he could win over 100 seats.

And these things are dynamic — if he says this then it starts to happen, a lot of Tories saying today ‘don’t worry dear boy he’ll blow up, where are you shooting this weekend’ will go crazy with panic, they meltdown and (C3) he could win more seats than them. (See below)

But (C4) it’s unlikely he can win a majority and go to No10 unless the Tories totally collapse.

So (C5) we’re on course for both it being easy for a unified Right to beat Starmer and capture No10 BUT it won’t happen because the two cancel each other’s chances with 45-50% split roughly in half — each getting between 20 and 30.

What does Farage have to do to pull off C2 or C3?

Reform is high variance but could panic and even split the Tories if they are bold and can execute.

Tory MPs mostly assume ‘Farage will blow up’.

But by all accounts, Zia (who I’ve never spoken to) is a capable person and Farage has put him in charge of things like vetting.

• Do they build Britain’s first party optimised for the new media landscape? Neither Labour nor Tories understand the emerging internet ecosystem and political communication in it. So there’s a big first-mover advantage.

• Can they change the nature of Reform so they can recruit elite talent? Now they have a similar problem to the Tories — some elite talent is sympathetic to them, or at least is desperate for a new UK political force, but — just as talent does not want to be associated with the hated Tories — talent is reluctant to be seen publicly supporting Reform. Does this change? Does Reform prioritise it? Do those who have power inside the Party now prioritise retaining their power?

• Can they raise money? So far in 2024 their success translated into a surprisingly little money. But it doesn’t take much to change this. And Kemi’s uselessness means most Tory donors are sitting on their cash and looking for other options. Some of the most staunch Tory donors, who go back to the days of Thatcher, are seriously considering that the Tories are finished and ‘why not go all in with Farage’. I think it’s underrated in SW1 that a shift by donors contributes to a panic over Kemi and another spasm.

• How many more defections do they get? I think there’ll be many including sitting MPs.

They have not hired talent on any scale. But they could.

How?

If Farage sets out a path for how the party will change over 12-18 months.

• How policy will be made so people have a sense that it isn’t just whatever he decides to tweet.

• The sort of talent he wants to hire with job descriptions — staff and MP candidates.

• A vetting system to suppress previous problems he’s had with candidates. Clear principles for what sort of things are actually racist, unacceptable etc. Many people age 50+ will have told jokes that would be considered ‘unacceptable’ in SW1 today. Are all such people barred? Obviously not. But what are reasonable lines?

• How a functioning Shadow Cabinet will operate.

And he might say something like:

I’ve fought a lot of battles. A lot of people don’t like me. Often this dislike is because of media lies. But I have to face truth — some of it won’t change. And I’m getting on. The country wants to move on from the old Brexit arguments. It needs new generations coming through to replace the rotten lot in Westminster. I want to help this transition. In the next two years we’ll find many brilliant people who join Reform. Some will join our Shadow Cabinet.

Britain’s full of amazing talent. Sadly the old Westminster system fights to keep practically all of it out of power which is why so much is falling apart. I’m going to change this. We’ll recruit entrepreneurs, soldiers, doctors, educators, police, scientists, technologists, creators of all kinds. It’s time for the people to take back control of Westminster from the failed old parties and the failed old civil service. They’ve given us grooming gangs and Southport stabbings. They’ve given us the worst real wage growth since Napoleon. We’re sick of the lot of them!

So the party will change, how we work out ideas will change, we’ll get a real plan for how to strip out the rotten wiring of the bureaucratic state, and make Britain once again the best governed country on earth as we used to be…

And this will in turn bring… [peace, bread and land etc]

Go to our website, look at the job descriptions. Apply to work here. Apply to be a candidate. When people look at us in 2028, they’ll see our Shadow Cabinet and they’ll see the best of this country — then they’ll look at Labour and Tories, the same failing useless characters on both sides. And they’ll say — it’s time for real change, it’s time to vote Reform…

If he were to say something like this and follow through, he would surge in the polls, there’d be a surge of interest and money and energy. He’d get more defections. And much of the old Tory guard would start sputtering about they’d prefer to join with Starmer and Blair than the ‘far right’ — provoking more defections of their few remaining members.

Of course, there is a big IF.

Building coalitions is very very hard. A lot of people who want to be in politics are much harder to deal with than normal people. And the history of the eurosceptic right is one of most people much more interested in their factional/personal hatreds than in winning. Until now, most thought that they could gain a position to be noticed but they couldn’t actually take over. Many don’t really imagine being in No10 and are not optimising for that — their talk about government is role play, internal fighting really is the actual job.

For Reform to make the transition I’ve sketched would need a very determined approach from Farage and Zia and a bootstrapping process by which they hire some very able people and empower them and back them up through inevitable chaos and then keep building — and fuse elements of the past with new forces, while quietly discarding some of the past.

This is hard and personally demanding.

And it is much easier for them to carry on as they are given the Tory/Kemi failings, just as it’s easier for Tories to stay delusional because of Starmer’s failings.

Big changes tend to come after crises, not while you feel you’re making progress.

Assumption (D). The Tories cannot repeat the trick we pulled in 2019 and squeeze Farage’s vote as much as they need to.

Many Tories say ‘we didn’t do a deal in 2019, we don’t need to do a deal now, we can squeeze Farage’s vote’.

But this is a bad analogy.

In 2019:

• There was the biggest constitutional crisis for at least a century with Brexit at its heart.

• The best political campaigners in Britain controlled No10.

• We had a good campaigner determined to win and terrified of getting the boot as PM (then largely under control and Carrie helping control him).

• Brexit Party voters really wanted Brexit to happen, no second referendum, and no Corbyn as PM.

• We’d exacerbated the divisions of the Remainiacs, driven them mad and smashed their OODA loop.

• So we could squeeze the Brexit Party vote with Get Brexit Done.

None of this maps to the Tories’ situation now:

• No huge issue the Tories can, after 2010-24, credibly campaign on (with Kemi) that could steal Reform votes.

• Tories are a feeble Opposition with pitiful talent and a shattered and bankrupt campaign machine they won’t rebuild. Yes things like the ECHR are huge but the Tories can’t exploit them.

• Farage is more famous than anybody in the Shadow Cabinet by far. He’s probably more famous than all the Shadow Cabinet combined. Many of the Shadow ministers *I* have never heard of so a fortiori no normal voter with normal political attention has or will.

• Many pundits want the Tories to attack Farage on immigration etc. This would only hasten their own collapse. So they cannot attack him without blowing their own feet off. And if they talk about immigration etc in any normal Tory way then it raises the salience of an issue that helps Farage relative to them. So they are snookered.

• It’s practically impossible to imagine the Tories squeezing Reform to below 5%, absent something like Farage moving to America or blowing himself sky high in some scandal.

So the Tories won’t retake the votes they lost to Reform 2022-4, are on track to lose many more, and in their current form they’re very unlikely to take back control of No10 without some sort of a deal/merger with Farage.

Assumption (E): The Tories will stay largely delusional and prefer to lose again than change much and/or do a deal/merger. This does NOT preclude a spasm and a leadership change — they could change leader AND just settle down into sloth and failure yet again.

Remember: 1997-2001, Tory MPs avoided facing reality and maintained widespread delusional groupthink despite being 15-20 points behind Blair in the polls. I had many arguments with MPs and donors in 2001 who told me ‘polls and focus groups are Blairite nonsense, William is excellent in PMQs and this is getting through’. Much of Tory world — MPs and donors and pundits and think tank world — was shocked when the 2001 result was what the polls predicted.

So why would they be more realistic when a) as a set of people they are lower grade than 1997-2001 and b) they can see Starmer useless and failing and the polls showing Starmer on 25-30, unlike 1997-01?

Why would a set of MPs and spads who did not take power seriously when in office start taking power seriously when out of office?

The truth 1997-2001 was: Blair’s position in the polls is extremely solid, the Tories’ standing is extremely bad, he’s on course for another big majority.

The truth 2025 is: Starmer’s win was very fragile and brittle, it was based on overwhelming loathing for Tories not positivity for Labour, his coalition is already coming apart. And Starmer is an existence proof that you can be rubbish and still win big!

So the Tories arguing for complacency and ‘Starmer is hopeless and falling apart’ will be making at least one good argument and this will make it harder for those who want the Party to grow instead of rot.

And MPs realising ‘Kemi is rubbish’ does not equate to ‘she must be replaced’.

Maybe Starmer’s collapse will be so bad we just win by default like he did!?!

Outside SW1 it is assumed by sensible people that obviously the Tories must be engaged in a fundamental rethink after their worst ever defeat.

No!

The old senior Tories lean over in the Commons bars and say:

No need for any great panic dear boy. You know, all governments got hammered last year, incumbent effect they call it! We got unlucky — covid then Ukraine. And of course Boris and Truss blowing up. But Starmer’s already on the ropes. Nigel will blow up, that lot always end up in poisonous infighting, can’t help it, bit like the ERG hahaha. We just need Kemi to be steady away, for god’s sake no policies and ideas haha. George and Francis are very persuasive on this — the 2005 model is what we need. Just don’t muck it up, Starmer and Nigel blow up, and the natural party of government will be back in our chauffeur driven cars in 2029 mark my words. Those awful lunatics suggesting we need to explore why we failed in government, how we couldn’t grip Whitehall — nonsense! Covid and Ukraine! Bad luck! Global wave against the incumbent! Pheasants any good last weekend? Where are you skiing old boy?

And it’s crucial to realise that if you put a gun to their heads, at least a third and maybe more than half Tory MPs would rather lose and leave Starmer as PM than see a merger and/or a new Party actually arguing for a decisive break with the last 30 years.

Many smart people assume ‘the Tories must realise after Brexit and their failure 2021-4 they can’t just be the old Cameron-Establishment party’.

Wrong.

With Tories it’s always worse than you assume.

Assumption (F): Connected to (E), a takeover and fundamental re-making of a Party, similar to what we started 2019, is impossible with Kemi and very hard on principle.

Trump has done it with MAGA replacing the old GOP.

We started to do it 2019-20 and succeeded enough to win the 2019 election on a message of ‘time for change’ even though we were incumbents.

But it then blew up. Deep projects like this are very hard and often dependent on tiny chances (such as a PM getting a new girlfriend who wants to control the PM’s office). And it will be resisted by roughly everyone as it threatens the existing distribution of power.

A takeover might become possible when she’s replaced. But most MPs would oppose it on principle.

It would need:

1. A new leader who will risk failure, collapse and replacement to push it through. Psychologically it’s always easier to avoid fights today.

2. A team to support them.

3. A very tricky walk through a minefield that persuades enough of the party that the alternative to *very unpleasant unsettling thing* is doom, which will be tricky for the reasons above: Starmer’s problems reinforce all psychological instincts for caution and inertia.

Conclusion: a takeover of the Tories per 2019 is conceivable but unlikely (without some new powerful force) and even if done doesn’t itself solve the Reform problem.

Assumption (G). If Kemi collapses, it’s very plausible, arguably most likely, that the old guard successfully shuffles in Cleverley.

There’s the above factors: delusion, complacency, ‘Starmer is collapsing’, ‘rather Starmer than really change ourselves’ etc.

And Cleverley is a very natural choice for many MPs.

Cleverley was loved by the worst officials and government lawyers across Whitehall because he was pure NPC — he could always be relied on to read out the most laughable NPC script from government lawyers. Need a minister to read total nonsense on immigration and the ECHR? Shove out Cleverley, he’ll read his script without questions. Need someone to front the surrender of British territory because Boris-Carrie have surrendered to the lawyer's’ nonsense? Shove out Cleverley on Chagos, he’ll read his script without questions. And if you asked the worst people in Whitehall — which senior Tory would you want ‘asking questions’ on institutionalised coverups on rape gangs? — they would immediately think ‘Cleverley, he’ll read his script without questions!’ He’s a profound symptom of the anti-serious modern SW1 so it’s totally logical that SW1 conventional wisdom has bestowed its favourite compliment ‘serious grownup’ on him, as with Sue Gray and Dan Rosenfield.

He is aggressively on the side of the Establishment meme — no hard thinking is needed, we just got unlucky, tell a few jokes, seem normal, avoid tricky questions, wait for Starmer and Farage to blow, and the natural party of government is back by default.

This worked at Conference. Most engaged Tories want to be deluded.

He’s therefore a Schelling point for the old Tories who don’t want to face reality (many), the NPC complex, Whitehall, and many (perhaps most) Tory members. The membership has lost tens of thousands in the meltdowns of 2022-4. If you really care about immigration, crime, ECHR etc, why stay? So many of its members would love the comfort blanket of Cleverley standing on a platform with Cameron, Hague, Sunak and Boris and pretend they’ve got a ‘sensible moderate chap with a sense of humour who normal people will listen to’.

Cleverley is also the dream candidate for Farage. This shuffle would prompt defections of MPs and members. And it could prompt another fast meltdown sending the rotten Tory ship to the bottom, increasing the chances that Reform overtakes the Tories in 2028-9.

So, many have very ‘mixed emotions’ about Cleverley taking over, as Gordon Gecko said, kind of like watching him drive off a cliff, in my Maserati…

Perhaps it should be the default likely option for the Stupid Party, similarly to how in 2022 the most stupid thing was to wing Boris then leave him in situ then have another go then put Truss in — so that’s what they did.

You can see the anonymous quotes now:

The Black Thatcher turned out to be the Black Truss but now we’ve got the Black Boris!

Assumption (H): Farage is understandably hostile to discussion, and the actuality, of a deal.

He is now in the Commons watching the MPs. He can see the delusions. He can see how he represents much of the country better than they do. He can see a clear path to winning dozens of seats from them and being in a position to say — they’re dead, they should close, the survivors should join me.

And there is 30 years of distrust, contempt and loathing. Much of the rotten old Tory world made clear their contempt for him personally. And he’s seen them constantly put immediate ideas of Party advantage ahead of what he thinks of as the national interest. So he has contempt for them.

If you are optimising for *remove Labour and be in the Cabinet from 2029* then a deal makes sense but if you are optimising for *kill the Tories and avoid hard decisions that will alienate natural allies*, a deal is off. He can just wait for his position to strengthen and the Tories’ to worsen after the election. At the very least, it’s in his interests to delay while the Tories hit the rocks and internal war again.

A deal is not impossible but simply saying *it’s rational if you want to beat Starmer in 2029* won’t get it done.

Assumption (I): Extreme tension between what seems sensible to Insiders and to voters will keep the old parties paralysed.

Because of SW1’s mimetics, there’s often extreme tension between what seems sensible to Insiders and to voters.

An example. In September 2019 I told Boris to fire the 21 MPs. This was seen as ‘mad’ in SW1. If you look back at the reaction from high status pundits and a range of MPs like Hague who others listen to, you see the mimetic wave ripple through almost everybody:

Beyond stupid. They already didn’t have a majority. Self-destructive. A sign they’re totally lost. They don’t understand the Party. A sign they’re collapsing…

But the relevant voters thought it was great. As they said in focus groups:

Finally someone is trying to solve the problem and firing these useless gits, GREAT! Well done Boris!

Doing things that voters want is often seen as mad in SW1. Doing what’s seen as ‘smart’ and ‘serious’ in SW1 often drives the voters mad.

Now most smart entrepreneurs assume that Insiders are very skilled at understanding and balancing these trade-offs.

NO NO NO!!!

You’ve just seen exactly this phenomenon in America in the Trump election.

The Insiders continually memed themselves into thinking ‘stupid’ and simply did not listen to voters saying ‘Trump’s right about the cost of living / border / Biden’s senile’.

And with Tory MPs now, their overwhelming focus is the regime media — not the voters. And with Kemi and her team, this is bound to continue. Even when they try to break out of it, they will fold because to make ‘focus on voters’ work, you have to go through a pain barrier with Insider world and they won’t/can’t do this.

Assumption (J). It sounds weird but is true and important: SW1 does not understand campaigns. They understand talking to hacks. They spin ‘we’ll campaign on X’. But they almost never do campaigns. This is connected to a) they don’t understand communication, b) they don’t do building generally, c) they aren’t trained to think about ends, priorities, strategy, operations. Campaigns need all three.

You can observe this for yourself. Look at an issue like crime or specifically the rape gangs. As soon as the regime media stop talking about it, almost all MPs stop talking about it. There isn’t a team of people in Tories or Labour or elsewhere in normal SW1-world thinking ‘this is what we will build over two years and we will keep going regardless of what the media does’.

A major test for Reform is whether they, unlike the other two, develop this capability.

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A few possible branches of future history…

Path A: Kemi survives.

Let’s assume the factors sketched above mean she gets lucky and survives.

• Labour and Tories lose millions more votes to Reform than 2024.

• Labour loses loads of seats to a mix of Lib Dems, Greens and Hamas independents.

• Tories and Reform split ~50% of the vote roughly evenly.

• Reform win dozens, potentially 100 plus.

• Labour remains in government, maybe a coalition.

• The Tories’ strategic position is even worse after the next election than it is now. Their leverage for a deal is much worse. Farage has the momentum. The Tories look dead.

Path B: She’s replaced by Cleverley.

The Tories do at least as bad or worse than in A (in different sorts of seats).

• Labour and Tories lose millions more votes to Reform than 2024.

• Labour loses loads of seats.

• Reform win dozens, potentially 100 plus. This seems more likely with Cleverley as the defections to Reform of MPs, members and voters will be stronger.

• Labour remains in government, maybe a coalition.

• The Tories’ strategic position is even worse after the next election than it is now. Their leverage for a deal is much worse. Farage has the momentum. The Tories look dead.

Path C: She’s replaced by X who wins after arguing for a fundamental break with 1997-2024 and a merger with Reform as the only alternative to losing in 2029 then having to do a deal after Reform is much stronger.

Could this argument win with MPs?

Or would someone who believes this have to be Straussian and argue for ‘revive the Tories, no deal’ — then pull a switcheroo and go for a deal ‘because circumstances changed’?

Does a deal happen?

Why would Farage take a deal unless there was an offer of a joint leadership contest of the new thing?

Does Farage think a) stick with no deal, I definitely get loads more seats, my leverage goes up, I can punt hard questions, maybe I can grab No10 with ~30-35%, I’m not far away…?

Or b) I don’t fancy trying to win the 2033 election to get into No10, the country’s heading off a cliff, let’s do a deal and I can be in Cabinet 2029 and a small crisis from being PM?

C1. No deal. X wins back some Reform voters but can’t push it below 15%? Starmer remains PM 2029?

C2. Deal. How many MPs defect to Labour/LibDems?

I won’t go into the details here.

Path D. X takes over promising a fundamental break with 1997-2024 but NO DEAL with Farage.

Holding to this strategy rests on the new leader having the talent to squeeze Farage’s vote. See above, unlikely.

Path E. Farage somehow gets a majority without any deal because both other parties implode, possibly after a crisis like a financial crash.

Path G. Starmer’s replaced.

I’m not close enough to Labour to have any good sense about this.

Base rate: Labour doesn’t bin leaders.

Counter: as the old regime falls, base rates are less useful. They can already see he’s rubbish, it’s already counter-base rates for them to be briefing hacks about why he might get binned.

Starmer’s super predictable. A replacement could be even worse or much better.

Path H. What most Tories want: Starmer sinks, Farage blows up in a scandal and infighting, Kemi wins by default like Starmer in 2024 without having to do much and without the Party having to think or change.

Even if this happens, a joke leader and joke team just means a rerun of Tory chaos and propping up the self-sabotaging system.

NB. The above sketch assumes the system is left to its own devices and no powerful third force enters the game.

(Ps. I just realised in all this I ignored Boris. This is because MPs of different kinds all seem to agree he can’t return given the enormity of the Boris-Carrie Wave 2021-4. Anything he says on immigration, tax, crime etc would just be totally laughable. The Party is so bad nothing can be ruled out but his return as leader did strike me as quite likely but now seems much less likely.)

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Some questions and problems

The above is all obviously very depressing, very complex, and still only scratches the surface.

So what are some key things to watch?

• How fast do MPs realise Kemi is rubbish? How many Boxing Day tweets and ‘Im proud of my tribal hatreds’ can MPs stand in the context of what else happens?

• Does this lead to ‘replace her’ or ‘she can win anyway look at Starmer so get behind her and prop her up’?

• Do Farage and Zia set out a convincing path for Reform to reform?

• How bad are local elections spring 2025 and 2026 for the Tories?

• How bad are defections of MPs and members to Reform?

• What do donors do? Are rumours true about old school Tories defecting to Reform with public donations true?

• What new forces emerge? Lawrence Newport and others have started on Crush Crime and LFG. How do they grow? What else grows? There is more desperation than since the 1970s and desperation generates creativity.

• Is it plausible that the Tory Party goes through the next 5 years without some major split with a) the likes of Gawke, Green, Grieve, and various Cameroons shifting to Labour (it being with Starmer, ironically, now the pure ‘Insider defend the old system come what may party’ so is a natural home for those Tories) and b) a bunch of others merging with Farage? Which group walks out and which controls the rump legal entity? It could happen because there IS an attempted deal or because Cleverley takes over and a bunch walk out.

• Can someone — Elon/Trump?! — broker the creation of a new Party formed from a merger of the Tory Party and Reform along with a ‘third force’ from outside SW1? What if the new leader of the Tories 2026 and Farage found themselves with Trump and Elon and were told: we’re doing a deal in this room?!

• If not, who can solve the struggles over ideas, power, status etc to bring together a group that could then present an alternative government?

• If, as I fear, the Tories prefer to block progress and leave Starmer in No10 than be mixed into a new thing that can win, then they must be retired ASAP — but this makes it extremely hard to take over in 2029. Using 2029 to retire them means 2032 is the earliest a serious government comes. So perhaps the only way through is to threaten the MPs with the end of their careers in 2029 unless they cave and accept being mixed into the new thing?! To do this also requires a force with money and political energy that can essentially blackmail the Tories. And blackmail can fail against people who are fundamentally lost and irrational. This is hard, maybe insoluble.

• Violence changes politics profoundly. It’s easy to imagine more riots and the police losing control.

• Lots of financial/trading experts think the incredible debts could blow up. The mix of racially aggravated violence and financial crisis is historically the sort of mix that blows up knackered old regimes.

• Insiders/Outsiders, Left/Right, Leave/Remain — everyone — has big problems with women and families and they’re connected to big issues of technology. For another day…

The problem of coordination given character types.

A highly underrated feature of SW1 is how the personality type that now dominates makes is extremely hard to solve coordination problems.

There’s a personality type you see in great entrepreneurial projects: aggressively constructive, let’s find a way to get around (often bitter) disagreements and build something great. In this culture, the people who want to argue all day on Twitter are largely irrelevant. Its dominated by people who can build teams that build products and visions. Complex coordination and systems thinking are critical. Think General Groves, George Muller, Jobs, Elon. (Cf. this piece on Ron Conway, a Valley legend: ‘AM ON IT’ is the exact spiritual opposite of SW1.)

There’s a personality type you see in value investing: aggressively truth-seeking, let’s dig to the bottom obsessively, ignoring all the social pressure and incentives to conform to mimetics. Think Charlie Munger and Li Lu (the only person apart from Warren Buffett who Munger would allow to invest his money). (Cf. recent podcast on Li Lu. Patrick Collison: please get Stripe publishing to republish LL’s book!)

There’s a personality type you see with the very best funders of research: aggressively talent-optimising, let’s find the absolute best talent and give them freedom, help them connect in pursuit of an artistic vision. They have a very rare ability to ‘manage’ rare talent, which isn’t ‘management’ in a conventional sense. Think JCR Licklider, Ivan Sutherland, Bob Taylor — three of the great funders of science and technology, rarer than Fields Medallists according to Alan Kay who knew all three.

This is what I call ‘The power of the context’ or ‘Point of view is worth 80 IQ points’. Science and engineering themselves are famous examples, but there are even more striking processes within these large disciplines. One of the greatest works of art from that fruitful period of ARPA/PARC research in the 60s and 70s was the almost invisible context and community that catalysed so many researchers to be incredibly better dreamers and thinkers. That it was a great work of art is confirmed by the world-changing results that appeared so swiftly, and almost easily. That it was almost invisible, in spite of its tremendous success, is revealed by the disheartening fact today that, as far as I'm aware, no governments and no companies do edge-of-the-art research using these principles. (Cf. Alan Kay, Power of the Context.)

And there’s a personality type you see everywhere in SW1/politics world: aggressively obstructionist, intensely mimetic, and self-distracted to trivial word games, let’s keep arguing over disagreements and never build anything, ‘it’s much more complex than that’ applied constantly to everything not because they understand the complexity but as an excuse for avoiding hard decisions that will annoy people, so nothing happens and bitter resentment grows over a career.

These characters are aggressively low agency, even anti-agency, aggressively hostile to those who do things. If it looks like someone might just do things, the reaction is hysterical as the dominant worldview is threatened (hence the terror of DOGE). They rise naturally in the pathological hierarchies of SW1 because they fit the system’s crucial incentive: gains from long-term thinking/building are distant, ephemeral, and distributed, while the costs are immediate, severe and personal.

This is not an IQ thing. It’s a personality type thing. People who are 100X better than the median SW1-er at getting things done are plus three standard deviations on a handful of dimensions but often no higher IQ than the brightest done-nothing SW1-ers. These people do not come to SW1 now and they naturally find SW1’s culture, with its focus on intra-gang warfare over building things, repellent.

This basic problem was part of why Trump failed on a lot in the first term and is part of what his new approach is trying to solve.

And it makes it very hard to do constructive things in SW1. Almost everyone will coordinate to attack and ridicule and stop constructive things. Almost everyone will prefer to stop someone solving coordination problems. The culture of building is almost totally lost there.

I saw this in the referendum where much of the ‘eurosceptic right’ showed no real interest in trying to win and intense interest in internal battles. I saw it on education. A small example is the New Schools Network that some of us helped build 2007-11 to enable big changes to the school system. Tory MPs never cared, never understood and in government let the bureaucracy they nominally ‘governed’ close it. They didn’t notice. If you look at them 2010-24, the MPs built nothing. And their ‘think tanks’ were almost totally pointless.

This is the worst possible background for the job of trying to bring together Tories, Reform and a Third Force into something that is roughly harmonious and can focus attention on removing Starmer and smashing the mad Left.

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Final thoughts…

I’m not close to MPs. I’m confident about some of the above but less so about feeling in Parliament. I’ve written this to try to get an overall picture for myself and others of the situation so people can plan how to make useful efforts.

As always I’ll read all comments but can’t reply to all.

In a situation like this, it’s crucial to focus on a) ‘what can we build that will be useful in a wide range of possible scenarios, given we can’t be very confident about most aspects of the situation in a few years?’ and b) just build with people who want to rather than worrying about all the psychodrama and briefing and personality clashes of SW1. Ignore most of the drama. Most of SW1 will be super-mimetic when crises come.

Hence some of the elements I’ve sketched above that it’s worth people working on now where progress does not depend on the horrors of SW1, such as:

• An Actual Plan for a new regime — I’m helping some very able people do this. It will develop partly in the open with help from those who want to help. It should not be a closed project that produces a vast report in 2 years. It should be mostly an open rolling campaign so it shifts opinion, builds support, recruits interested people, and iterates via feedback from people who really understand the issues etc. More details soon and subscribers here will be able to get as involved as they want.

• Figuring out public opinion and an electoral strategy for a party at least half the country would love. Connected, at the moment I’m particularly looking at opinions of people 16-25 on politics, what they think, where they get information from. Please leave any useful links in comments. I’ll post on this soon.

• Helping Crush Crime and LFG, the campaign for growth. I strongly encourage you to sign up to both NOW! These and similar projects will shift opinion, nudge legislation/regulation/policy, find and connect talent, and develop a ‘third force’ that could help influence things one way or another at a crucial moment. The stronger a third force becomes, the greater gravitational effect it has when the old system hits crises soon and powerful mimetics kick in. Go to the LFG/CC Discord if you want to help with projects and get involved. (Subscribers to this blog have already got involved and done great work in changing national debates.)

One of the groups I’m helping is looking for someone who really understands how to use AI models for graphic design and video generation — e.g short 30 sec videos explaining complex arguments. Can be part time to start with. Please message me on the Substack app if interested — put ‘AI video’ at front of message. Or else post in comments and we can figure out how I connect you.

Also if you are expert on websites to display complex documents with charts, interactive features etc then please get in touch. If there are particularly wonderful, beautiful examples please post links in comments.

What else?

a/ If you have any agency, do what you can to push Kemi out ASAP. It’s never too soon to pull the plug on a disaster. On principle it’s not good for the country to have an Opposition so rubbish.

b/ Talk to Zia and Farage and try to encourage its growth in the direction I sketch above. If they respond with either change or clear ‘no change’ (or ‘can’t change’), either is clarifying!

c/ I’ll do an AMA on this blog Thursday 27/2 at noon. They’ve also now upgraded the ‘video to subscribers’ so I’ll experiment with that. And I’ll do some guest blogs and interviews with people as projects develop.

Part of what’s needed is a sort of ‘Monnet’s think tank crossed with a VC crossed with PARC crossed with Kronk gym crossed with Rick Rubin’s studio’ to train people who want to change politics/government and match talent to projects. It’s very hard in politics. Finding talent is easy. Finding things that seem a better use of time for those people than working on a startup or private research etc is very hard because the old entities see as their core job fighting to stop talented people creating value. So talented people don’t see a path to getting things done. This is the vicious circle we must break. DOGE shows it can be done!

Hopefully as some of the above projects develop, we can help something like this evolve.

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Further reading

Jon Askonas on modern media, on consensus reality, and on conservatism and technology.

Dario on DeepSeek:

DeepSeek-V3 is not a unique breakthrough or something that fundamentally changes the economics of LLM’s; it’s an expected point on an ongoing cost reduction curve…

Making AI that is smarter than almost all humans at almost all things will require millions of chips, tens of billions of dollars (at least), and is most likely to happen in 2026-2027. DeepSeek's releases don't change this, because they're roughly on the expected cost reduction curve that has always been factored into these calculations…

[B]ecause AI systems can eventually help make even smarter AI systems, a temporary lead could be parlayed into a durable advantage.

Tyler Cowen reports using OAI’s new model. But in SW1 this is ‘fad’, ‘bubble’, ‘crap chatbot’.

Dwarkesh interviews Jeff Dean, Google's Chief Scientist, and Noam Shazeer who co-invented the Transformer, Mixture of Experts, Gemini etc.

Dostoyevsky, the modern intelligentsia, the spiritual crisis of the West, regime change

Oakeshott on rationalism and politics.

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