Certain types of political column are dead before they trouble the printing presses. There is the banal exhortation, which asks the government to “show leadership” and “make the case” for something.
There is the misplaced reportage, which substitutes local colour and vox populi for argument. There is the insurance policy, which says an improbable event “could” happen, its veneer of originality actually risking nought.
And then you have the speculative futurology. Rather than deal with politics as it is, this projects you forward to a time where all is transformed. The clairvoyance is plausible but also reads like a dart thrown at a board.
Once in a while, however, the arrow feels true in the grip and its destination seems inevitable. Only the flight path is to be worked out. Britain’s referendum on EU membership has not illuminated anything except the future of party politics.
If there is a lesson from recent weeks, it is that mild Conservatives and moderate adherents to the Labour cause share more with each other than with the rest of their own parties. On Europe, but also migration and globalisation, they want to amend the status quo not break it. In their tone is an absence of anger that my trade habitually elides with a lack of passion.
Wider mistrust
Against them in this referendum is a party in all but name and formal incorporation, drawn from the Tory right and the Labour left and incubated in the Leave campaign. These politicians are conservative and anti-establishment at the same time. From their Euroscepticism you can usually, though not always, infer a wider mistrust of markets and the social disruption they bring. Theirs is the cross-party craving for order that dealt Margaret Thatcher her sole parliamentary defeat – on the loosening of Sunday trade laws – 30 years ago.
Concepts are another drag on political writing so let us ground this one in personalities. Amber Rudd, the Conservative energy secretary, is in the same party as Iain Duncan Smith, who quit the cabinet after one pious dissent too many and now campaigns for Leave. But she is in a different party to Labour’s Chuka Umunna, with whom she shares a homing instinct for the ideological centre and the kind of ease with modernity that cannot be feigned. This trio is not rare in its odd distribution across party lines. There are strays and misfits everywhere.
This used to be explained away by the primacy of economics. Politicians with a shared disposition to the world nevertheless favoured different levels of expenditure and regulation at the margin. But take Ms Rudd and Mr Umunna, or George Osborne, chancellor, and his former adversary Ed Balls, or even David Cameron and any of 100 Labour MPs: do they disagree over the size of the state more than they agree over Britain's place in the EU, its future as an open economy, its indispensability as the liberal thumb on the continental scales? And which of the two sets of issues is now the real stuff of politics?
Recent general elections were fought on authentic but small differences in fiscal policy that winnowed further in the implementation. Under the blur of digits, these politicians have the same basic orientation. Scorn it as the Davos consensus but it has done more for British prosperity and self-respect than the admixture of socialism and Tory paternalism ever could – or, to judge by the 1970s, ever did. If this settlement is menaced by forces that will outlast this referendum, it is myopic of its guardians to remain separate out of fealty to a party system that was forged in the industrial age for an empire nation.
Stymies newcomers
Plotting a trajectory from dart to board is beyond this column. Britain’s electoral model is sticky. It coddles incumbents and stymies newcomers. It will not be the presiding generation of leaders who attempt a reconfiguration: their tribalism is in the marrow. But between the Tory brawl over Europe and Labour’s death-walk behind
Jeremy Corbyn
, there may be a way to a different arrangement of forces.
If it comes, do not expect pristine lines between parties and immaculate coherence within them. You will still have to choose the party that fits your instincts least badly. There will still be ovoid shapes in round holes. But at least elections between a Christian Democrat-style party and a Liberal-ish party would correspond to the arguments we are having today. Millions of Eurosceptic Labour voters would have a team, and so would those of us who want more not less of the world as it is. I hear the Tory and Labour moderates newly mingling in the Remain offices rather get on. As a glint of the future, it will have to do.