There’s been a ‘vibe shift’. After the resounding victory at the recent US election, at long last things are changing, and heading towards some form of hope and sanity. This Christmas, there’s hope for the future on the right.
Is this December 2024 or December 2019? Because the current anticipation for the second Donald Trump term in America is very much reminding me of the similar aura of relief and positivity that followed Boris Johnson’s election win five years ago. And we all know how that turned out.
I can’t help feeling jealous of the Americans, because what are we stuck with?
One of the few advantages of getting old is that the years zip by so quickly, like the names of stations viewed from a non-stopping train. Bad times don’t last. The Boris victory of December 2019 seems like a few months ago; with any luck Starmer’s remaining years will be over in even shorter (seeming) order. But lately I can’t help keep thinking back to that brief – very brief – golden dawn.
I’d be lying if I didn’t report that, even then, with Jeremy Corbyn banished to outer darkness and the eternal wrangle over Brexit finally knocked on the head, I kept having pangs of misgiving. This is either thanks to my temperament or family tradition steeped in centuries of peasantry, in which all glad tidings must be doubted and all counting of chickens forbidden even if they have already hatched. When I signed the contract for my first book, my mum’s first reaction was ‘don’t get excited and run into the road without looking!’
But whatever its origin, that Christmas my worry reflex was going like the clappers, even if it was in secret. (I didn’t want to rain on the parade, after all.) Yes, all the signs were positive ones. We were entering a new decade, the new Roaring Twenties. The landscape would soon be peppered with high-tech Dominic Cummings-approved powerhouse scientific institutions and research centres. We’d have a loveable bluffer, Old King Cole Boris, as PM too. Fun fun fun! He’d done OK in London, hadn’t he?
But something was niggling at me. Something about Boris reminded me of me. A rambling public speaker, erratic, scruffy, prone to sudden changes of mind and conflict avoidance and liking nice tea. I just wasn’t sure someone like me should ever be in charge of very important things. Given how it all turned out, I now can’t help reaching for the worry beads when I look across the Atlantic today.
The big difference, of course, is that we’ve already had a Trump presidency. Before that, back in 2016, we kept hearing that Trump’s first term would be Armageddon on stilts – but nothing much seemed to happen at all. There was a welcome lack of drama in some ways, but not in others. No wars, no – but woke, for example, cracked on almost unbowed, bringing with it the manias of gender, BLM and #MeToo.
This time it’s supposedly going to be different. But it will take incredible shrewdness and adroitness to pull off what Trump is promising. The sheer size and power of the American establishment, with its litigious gumming-up of anyone attempting even minor changes, is daunting. Trump intends to pull out of the World Health Organisation, slash spending through the Department of Government Efficiency, stop DEI, close the borders, carry out mass deportations – all at the same time. There will almost definitely be an unknown unknown to cope with too, though hopefully nothing as big as Covid. (Little did we know in our upbeat December 2019 that the first cases of a mysterious respiratory virus were being reported in China, and would go on to kill all of Boris’s big plans stone dead.)
Still, I can’t help feeling jealous of the Americans, because what are we stuck with? The cold dead hands of Starmer and Reeves, mean and vindictive crabbed little policies like VAT on private schools and scrapping Latin classes – and Ed Miliband almost literally urinating into the wind. The ONS has revisited its growth estimate for the first months of this government; in familiar words, it has been ‘revised downwards’. What apposite words for the UK, in every way, today. They could be our new motto, appended to the Union Jack. ‘Great Britain – revised downwards.’
So, for our own sake, I’m crossing everything for America and its incoming administration. Because this feels epochal, the last chance to jolt Western civilisation onto another track, off the rail of progressive decline and ‘revised downwards’ despair. If it works, it could be the example for the rest of us. So. Donald, J.D., Vivek – please, please, don’t muck it up.
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