When I wrote The Fire under Keir Starmer last year, I argued that Mr Starmer’s political future depended much less on public opinion than on his continuing usefulness to those who determine the broad direction of British government. I also suggested that, should he cease to be useful, he would not necessarily be defeated at a general election. He would simply be replaced. Governments in Britain are often changed without the inconvenience of changing the governing system. One management team leaves office; another arrives to administer the same enterprise.

The replacement of Mr Starmer by Andy Burnham therefore comes as no surprise. What matters is not that Mr Burnham is Prime Minister. What matters is that he is Prime Minister now.

Most political commentary proceeds on the assumption that governments respond to the wishes of the electorate. Elections are treated as moments when the people issue fresh instructions to those who govern them. Even the more sophisticated commentators merely substitute “public opinion” or “the mood of the country” for the electorate. This has always struck me as an unusually childish view of politics. It assumes that the visible institutions of government are also the centres of power. They are not.

Power in Britain lies where it has lain for generations. It lies with the monied interest centred on the City of London and connected by innumerable personal, financial and institutional ties to similar interests elsewhere in the Atlantic world. Whether these people think of themselves as British is of little consequence. Their loyalties are to an international financial order that happens to require Britain as one of its principal operating bases. Governments exist to maintain that order. Their success or failure is measured accordingly.

This is not to say that every minister receives secret instructions, or that newspapers publish editorials dictated by unseen committees. Nothing so melodramatic is required. The governing class understands what is expected of it because its members inhabit the same intellectual and social world. Politicians, senior civil servants, judges, broadcasters, university administrators, charity executives, consultants and the permanent bureaucracy pass continually through the same institutions, attend the same conferences, read the same reports, move in the same circles, and absorb the same assumptions. They are connected less by conspiracy than by culture. They need not be told what to think. They already know.

The mistake made by almost every political writer is to imagine that this ruling class possesses a single programme which it pursues regardless of circumstance. That is not how intelligent ruling classes behave. Their primary objective remains remarkably constant. Their secondary objectives alter whenever events require. The permanent objective has scarcely changed since the middle of the nineteenth century. Britain is to remain a secure headquarters for international finance and for the legal, political and military arrangements that enable international finance to prosper. Everything else is subordinate to that end. The supplementary objectives are another matter altogether. They exist only to protect the primary objective, and they are altered whenever circumstances alter. This is why governments sometimes appear to reverse themselves with bewildering speed. They have not changed their destination. They have merely chosen another road.

An analogy may help. Scatter iron filings across a sheet of paper and place beneath it a magnet. The filings arrange themselves into a recognisable pattern. Move the hidden magnet only a few inches and the pattern changes instantly. Anyone studying the filings alone will conclude that they possess independent life. Anyone who understands the magnet knows better. British politics resembles those iron filings. Cabinets rise and fall, departments are reorganised, party programmes are rewritten, newspaper editorials reverse themselves almost overnight. The visible pattern changes because the unseen force beneath it has shifted.

Seen in this light, the history of the last half-century becomes wholly coherent. From the election of Margaret Thatcher until recently, the supplementary objective of government was the systematic atomisation of British society. This has generally been described either as free-market economics or as ideological progressivism, according to the prejudices of the observer. It was neither. It was strategy.

Manufacturing industry created concentrations of skilled workers possessing independent incomes, coherent communities and institutions beyond the immediate control of the State. Churches, clubs, trade unions, local newspapers, professional associations and extended families gave them loyalties that could not easily be manipulated from Whitehall. They possessed economic independence and therefore political independence. Such populations are awkward to govern. They argue back.

The destruction of manufacturing was therefore no unfortunate by-product of anti-inflationary policy. It was one of the principal political achievements of the Thatcher Governments. Inflation could have been reduced by controlling public expenditure and restoring monetary discipline. Instead, interest rates were driven to levels that crippled productive investment while driving sterling to heights that rendered British exports uncompetitive. Between 1980 and 1983 approximately one quarter of British manufacturing disappeared. Coal mining was defeated not because it had become technically impossible, but because mining communities represented one of the last large concentrations of organised working-class independence. Mrs Thatcher did not merely defeat Arthur Scargill. She removed an entire social class from the political equation.

Tony Blair inherited the results and carried the process into areas Mrs Thatcher scarcely understood. The ancient constitution was dismantled piecemeal. Immigration accelerated to unprecedented levels. The universities ceased to educate and became instruments of ideological certification. Public administration spread through every corner of national life. Freedom of speech remained formally intact while becoming progressively more expensive to exercise. Careers, businesses and professional reputations could be destroyed without any formal prosecution. The ideal subject of the new order was not the imprisoned dissident but the citizen who censored himself.

The Conservative governments that followed Blair did not reverse this settlement. David Cameron marketed it more attractively. Theresa May administered it more mechanically. Boris Johnson distracted attention from it by force of personal incompetence. Rishi Sunak managed its decline with the detached efficiency of an accountant supervising a liquidation. The names altered. The direction did not.

Nor should this surprise us. Had the international environment remained what it appeared to be during the 1990s, the strategy might have continued indefinitely. Britain had become an excellent platform for speculative finance. The working class had ceased to exist as an organised political force. National identity weakened. Productive industry contracted. The governing class expanded. The arrangement seemed permanent.

The first warning came in 2008. The financial crisis demonstrated that much of what had been celebrated as Western prosperity was nothing more substantial than an expanding pyramid of debt. Credit had replaced capital. Asset inflation had replaced economic growth. The response of governments was not to recognise the weakness that had been exposed, but to deepen it. Quantitative easing became permanent. Interest rates were driven towards zero. House prices, share prices and every other form of financial paper were inflated beyond recognition. Those who owned assets became richer. Those who depended on wages found themselves steadily poorer. Productive investment remained anaemic. The disease was treated with larger doses of the medicine that had caused it.

The real turning point, however, lay elsewhere. It lay in the gradual re-emergence of history itself. During the 1990s it had seemed possible to believe that all serious geopolitical rivalry had ended. Russia was dismissed as a failed petro-state. China was treated as a vast workshop whose destiny was to manufacture cheap goods while consuming Western financial products. Military power itself appeared to have become almost ornamental. Wars against Serbia, Iraq and Libya encouraged the comforting illusion that industrial capacity had ceased to matter. Air power and financial sanctions seemed capable of achieving everything that earlier generations had required steelworks, shipyards and millions of skilled workers to accomplish.

The illusion lasted rather longer than it should have done because the West spent twenty years fighting enemies too weak to expose it. Serbia could not retaliate. Iraq could not retaliate. Libya could not retaliate. These were police actions dressed up as wars. They proved nothing except that modern armies can defeat countries that possess no comparable armies.

Russia and China were different. Russia recovered far more quickly than Western planners expected. China ceased to be the world’s subcontractor and became, instead, its principal industrial power. The productive capacity that had been exported in pursuit of higher financial returns did not disappear. It merely changed ownership. Western investors congratulated themselves on improved quarterly profits while financing the emergence of the first serious industrial rival they had faced since the Cold War. The irony would have been amusing had its consequences not been so profound.

The Ukraine War exposed the position with embarrassing clarity. Whatever view one takes of its origins, it demonstrated one inescapable fact. Financial systems do not manufacture artillery shells. Investment banks do not produce tanks. ESG reports cannot replace blast furnaces. Sanctions do not substitute for productive industry. The countries that retained the capacity to make things discovered that they also retained the capacity to wage prolonged war. Those that had exchanged production for financial engineering found themselves with sophisticated accounting systems and little else.

The lesson could hardly have been more obvious. An empire cannot exist on legal services and financial derivatives alone. Hard power rests ultimately on hard production. Steel must still be rolled. Chemicals must still be refined. Energy must still be generated. Engineers must still be trained. Someone must still know how to build a turbine rather than merely arrange the financing for one. Britain had spent forty years congratulating itself on abandoning these unfashionable activities. It suddenly discovered that they were the foundation on which every ambitious foreign policy ultimately depends.

This explains the change that has overtaken British politics during the past few months. It has been interpreted by many as a victory for common sense. Others have described it as the collapse of environmental idealism. Both explanations are superficial. Common sense has very little to do with it. The climate models have not changed. The scientific papers remain what they were. The economics of North Sea oil have altered not at all. What has altered is the strategic calculation of those who govern. Expensive energy made sense while Britain imagined itself to be a post-industrial financial entrepôt protected indefinitely by American power. It ceases to make sense if Britain is expected once again to manufacture, to rearm and to compete with countries whose industries enjoy abundant domestic energy. The question has never been whether North Sea oil was environmentally virtuous. The question has become whether Britain can remain strategically useful without exploiting it. The answer is plainly no.

This is why Andy Burnham’s first announcements matter far more than the journalists seem to appreciate. Before he has fully occupied Downing Street, we are told that the Government intends to facilitate production from the Rosebank and Jackdaw fields, to place greater emphasis on domestic energy, to accelerate house building, to revive high streets and to provide immediate relief from the cost of living. Even the language surrounding these proposals has altered. Oil and gas are no longer spoken of primarily as moral embarrassments. They are once again discussed in terms of industrial capacity and national resilience. The governing class has not discovered a new philosophy. It has rediscovered geography.

It is tempting to describe this as a political conversion. That would be a mistake. The permanent objective of the ruling class has not altered in the slightest. Britain is still required to serve international finance. What has altered is the list of conditions necessary to preserve that role. Between 1980 and 2022 the destruction of industry strengthened the financial order by eliminating competing centres of economic and political power. After 2022 the same destruction began to threaten that order by weakening the productive base on which military and geopolitical influence ultimately depend. The policy therefore ceased to be useful.

This, and nothing else, is what I have meant by Thermidor. The French Revolution did not suddenly repent of revolution. The men of Thermidor did not become royalists. They remained revolutionaries. What changed was their recognition that permanent revolutionary excess would destroy the Revolution itself. The guillotine had become strategically counter-productive. The Terror had frightened not only the enemies of the Revolution but its friends. Stability therefore became the new revolutionary virtue. Enough of the earlier madness was abandoned to preserve everything that really mattered.

Britain has entered such a phase. The revolution against the old nation has not ended because its authors have rediscovered patriotism. It has paused because continued demolition has become incompatible with the wider interests of those who ordered it. The object now is not restoration but reconstruction. Britain is to be given back sufficient industry, sufficient confidence, sufficient social cohesion and sufficient freedom to become useful once again. It is to be rebuilt, not as a nation pursuing its own destiny, but as an enforcement agency for a financial order that suddenly requires productive states as well as profitable ones.

That is why Keir Starmer had to disappear. He belonged intellectually to the previous phase. His instincts remained those of perpetual managerial revolution: more regulation, more symbolic politics, more Net Zero, more moral posturing, more censorship. He never realised that the magnet beneath the paper had moved. Like a Soviet official in the final years of the USSR still delivering speeches against private enterprise after the leadership had quietly decided to permit it, he continued faithfully implementing policies whose strategic purpose had already expired. He was removed not because he had ceased to be loyal, but because he had remained loyal to yesterday’s instructions.

It follows that the principal beneficiaries of this change could never have been the Labour Left. They had become the political expression of a strategy whose usefulness had expired. Their conception of government remained entirely moralistic. Politics, as they understood it, consisted of regulating speech, managing identities, multiplying environmental restrictions and redistributing a prosperity that no longer existed. They had become the custodians of yesterday’s orthodoxy. They were therefore incapable of administering tomorrow’s.

The Blairites are different. Their critics have always mistaken them for ideologues. They have never been anything of the sort. Tony Blair himself possessed few fixed convictions beyond an almost religious belief in his own historical importance. His real talent, and the talent of those who surrounded him, lay elsewhere. They possessed an extraordinary sensitivity to changes in the requirements of power. They understood what the ruling class wanted after 1997, and they supplied it with exemplary competence. They dismantled constitutional restraints, accelerated immigration, completed the transformation of the universities, embedded the managerial state and aligned Britain ever more closely with the interests of international finance. They were not original thinkers. They were able administrators. The same quality now recommends them once again. They are neither embarrassed by yesterday’s policies nor particularly attached to them. Their loyalty is not to programmes but to power itself. They understand instinctively that governments exist to execute strategy, not to debate it.

This explains why so many apparently contradictory policies now appear side by side. The Government continues to speak the language of climate responsibility while quietly facilitating domestic oil production. It continues to praise diversity while placing increasing emphasis on skilled labour, industrial capacity and economic growth. It maintains the vocabulary of managerial liberalism while adopting measures that only a short time ago would have been denounced as reactionary. There is no contradiction. The language belongs to the previous phase. The policies belong to the present one. Political vocabularies always lag behind political realities.

The Blairites can perform this balancing act because they have never mistaken rhetoric for substance. They understand that slogans are disposable, while institutions endure. A minister who genuinely believes every speech he gives soon becomes unemployable. A minister who understands that speeches exist to manage perception can survive almost any change of direction. And it is for this reason that I continue to believe Labour, not Reform, will win the next general election.

Many readers will object that Reform has succeeded in changing the national conversation. That is true. Nigel Farage deserves more credit than his detractors allow. He has forced serious discussion of Net Zero, energy costs, deindustrialisation and the economic consequences of uncontrolled migration. He demonstrated that millions of British people had ceased to believe the official narrative. That was no small achievement. It is also why Reform’s historic role is approaching its end. Pressure movements flourish while they articulate demands that the governing class choose to ignore. Once those demands begin to be incorporated into government policy, their strategic importance diminishes. They have succeeded. Their reward is redundancy.

The governing class has listened. It has concluded that enough of Reform’s programme has become strategically useful to justify adopting significant parts of it itself. Cheaper energy. Industrial reconstruction. More controlled immigration. Less enthusiasm for the more extravagant forms of Net Zero. Greater attention to national resilience. None of these represents a victory for Reform. They represent the appropriation of Reform’s programme by a governing class that has decided it now serves its own interests.

That is why Labour is likely to dominate the next phase of British politics. It will not become genuinely conservative. It will not become nationalist. It will not dismantle the managerial state or challenge the privileges of international finance. It will, however, concede enough to persuade a substantial part of Reform’s electorate that the direction of travel has altered. Many voters do not seek ideological perfection. They seek evidence that someone has begun moving in the right direction. If Labour can offer lower energy costs, some industrial revival, more realistic immigration policies and a partial retreat from the more absurd manifestations of identity politics, it will occupy much of the political territory on which Reform presently depends.

That is the political logic of Thermidor. Revolutions survive by abandoning those excesses that have become dangerous to themselves.