Activities and Outputs

In August 2025, a book was published called What Went Wrong with Britain? An Audit of Tory Failure, edited by Steven Kettell, Peter Kerr and Daniela Tepe. It attempts to chart the legacy that was left by the Conservative Government which was voted out of office in 2024, fourteen years after David Cameron had first formed his coalition with the Liberal Democrats. Five prime ministers and multiple convulsions later, much of the social, economic and institutional fabric of the UK looked to be on distinctly wobbly foundations, creating a notably poisoned chalice for the incoming Labour government and nurturing further discontent of the sort on which hard-right populist nationalism thrives. My chapter is called, 'Talking the Country Up, Talking the Country Down: Modern Conservatism's Politics of Division'. It focuses on how the Johnson-Truss-Sunak governments came to rely ultimately on a mood music that dismissed any suggestion that the UK was anything other than the most successful country on the planet and the greatest place in which to be born. It charts the bluffing, the preposterous claims, the active dissimulation and the outright lies that became integral to the mode of governance that guided the country through the twin upheavals of Brexit and Covid. Britain was left noticeably worse off on almost any measure than it had been in 2010, but the Conservative Party increasingly denied people the right to say those thoughts out loud.