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November 16, 2012

Border Vigils: Keeping Migrants Out of the Rich World by Jeremy Harding – review

Andy Beckett on the troubles of refugees and economic migrants

Near the end of this tightly-coiled, unpredictable book, a border guard invites the author to try scaling a fence. The fence is one of a pair intended to stop illegal immigrants entering Ceuta, the Spanish city surrounded by Morocco which is a favoured way into Europe from Africa. Overcoming this barrier, Harding discovers, "took about 45 seconds. Balancing for the turn at the top, where the only handhold is a straight line of clipped wire, I cut both hands." The guard is unmoved: "[He] said he had watched migrants take both fences in less than 20 seconds."

In an era of footloose capitalism, stark inequality between countries, and ever more information about foreign job possibilities, it is not hard to present the fortifying of national frontiers against immigration as essentially futile. Harding sees restricting migration this way as a "morose task": the European Union, he points out, has a land border of "nearly 9,000km" and a coastline of "another 42,000km". Ingenious people-smugglers and indefatigable would-be migrants talk to him in stranger-than-fiction, concrete detail about their schemes for gatecrashing the rich world. One regular breacher of the Mexican-American desert border endured a three-day, not untypical crossing: "He was flayed below the knees by cacti and when his shoes came to pieces … he walked the last day barefoot over red rock, a coarse oxidised sandstone … The soles of each foot [became] a single blister from ball to heel, like a gel pack. [From America] he was deported again... [He made] his next attempt shortly afterwards …"

Yet apparently doomed government policies can still have large consequences. Harding's panoramic volume, an expansion and updating of his 2000 book The Uninvited, surveys the vast military-industrial complex that has grown up to police immigration across the rich world. In recent years, the economic slump has made immigration even more politically sensitive than during more confident eras. His underlying stance is liberal: broadly supportive of the migrants, highlighting the human cost when their desires are blocked. But as a longstanding writer on the ambiguous relationships between rich and poor countries, he is too streetwise to be pious. He is alert to the complexities of a world where refugees and economic migrants are not always easy to tell apart – even in the minds of the immigrants themselves – and where the same traffickers smuggle people, willing and not, and other illegal cargoes. "Nothing in the world of unauthorised migration," he writes early on, "is quite what it seems."

His first frontier report is from the narrow sea between Albania and southeast Italy. Riding in an Italian police speedboat, he sits in on a night pursuit of a people-smugglers' inflatable. In the hands of a more macho writer, the encounter would be all hardware and adrenaline, with the politics of the situation lost in all the spray and tight turns, but Harding keeps the action to a single taut paragraph. "A chase is dramatic," he writes, "and largely symbolic." The smugglers get away.

Harding is more interested in loitering and listening in the migrant camps on both sides of the rich world's borders. In government detention centres for captured immigrants, and more sympathetic charity-run compounds, and muddy, improvised illegal settlements, he speaks to people from Afghanistan and Albania and Ethiopia, carefully using indirect quotation and only first names. The Afghan ("young, personable … spoke fair English") is a former soldier in the western-backed Afghan National Army: "Early in 2011, going home on leave, he was called to account by local Taliban as a collaborator and told he would have to take part in a car-bomb attack on a nearby hospital if he wanted to redeem himself." He refused, left his family behind, and made his way to northern France. From there, he hopes to steal further north to Birmingham, to join his recently arrived cousin, who has also fled Afghanistan for political reasons. "The west's exertions on far-off battlefields, shaping a world in its likeness," writes Harding, have helped prompt the great northward migration so many western politicians fear and decry. "In ways we fail to acknowledge, we issue the invitation and map [the migrants'] journeys towards us."

Harding makes his ambitious, continent-crossing arguments in economical, sometimes elegant, usually understated prose. Occasionally, he is so understated that the book becomes an erudite murmur when it should be clearer and louder. Two middle chapters on immigration law and the slowly evolving attitudes of western officialdom, while authoritative, become a little airless: you start to crave Harding's return to the border.

Once or twice, he abandons his cool, observational tone to let off a potent bolt of anger. A steely sentence is aimed at the age-old tabloid spectre of the immigrant "scrounger": "Social security entitlements come low on the list of priorities for the survivor of an 'anti-terrorist' operation in Turkish Kurdistan who leaves his village on horseback … raises the cost of a passage to sanctuary … buys a place on a boat to Albania and, three months later … is invited to step out of a lorry on the A3 and make his way to a police station in Guildford."

In Arizona, author becomes participant-observer as Harding helps push wheelbarrows of water containers to a desert water station, set up by a pro-immigrant charity, Humane Borders. Drawing a clever, resonant parallel, he notes the similarities between America's intensifying efforts against illegal Mexican arrivals – only intermittently reversed by Obama – and the country's wars abroad: ever-bigger fortifications; the detection, pursuit and forced deportation of wily-seeming foreigners; the dusty, mountainous, hard-to-control landscape. As with the "war on terror" – another reason for the west's anti-immigrant turn – this semi-war on illegal migrants has eroded civil liberties, with anyone Mexican-looking quite likely to be harassed by officialdom for the most minor civil offences, or on no pretext at all, to see if they have the correct immigration status. Harding fears the EU is hardening likewise: into "a federation of police states" for migrants.

However, he is not starry-eyed about the alternative promoted by "libertarian elites", usually free-market absolutists or businessmen wanting cheaper labour, of an immigration free-for-all. While respecting their consistency – it is the many free-marketeers who demand unhindered movement for goods and capital, but oppose it for people, who really draw his scorn – Harding is not an anarchist. He thinks states have the right to meaningful borders. And he is frank about the increased competition for resources that immigration can bring. At his own children's north London primary, with "dozens" of pupils from the former Yugoslavia, "a sour parental anxiety stirs … at the thought of language difficulties in the classroom and the diversion of resources to cope with them." He does not wholly exempt himself.

Refreshingly for a liberal, Harding does not present migrants solely as victims, but as assertive, sometimes selfish, sometimes on their way to becoming powerful. It helps that he knows well most of the countries they come from. Having detailed the cruelties and absurdities of much western policy towards them over the last decade and a half, he only offers the briefest sketch of a better approach. It would involve "rethinking the economic relationship between richer and poorer countries", using migrants as economic "ferrymen" to carry money and energy and ideas between the two worlds, much more equally in both directions than currently, and with far greater government assistance.

It sounds ambitious. But it's probably less far-fetched than expecting the west's half-built anti-migrant fortress to hold for the long term. Besides, by then, the immigration issue may have changed shape entirely. Harding quotes the Dutch migration expert Hein de Hass: when western countries are genuinely caught up by the big emerging economies, the "question will no longer be how to prevent migrants from coming, but how to attract them." Nothing reveals that a city is dying like a lack of foreigners.

• Andy Beckett's When the Lights Went Out is published by Faber.

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Published on November 16, 2012 14:55

Border Vigils: Keeping Migrants Out of the Rich World by Jeremy Harding – review

Andy Beckett on the troubles of refugees and economic migrants

• Andy Beckett's When the Lights Went Out is published by Faber.

Politics Society International criminal justice Migration Andy Beckett
theguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

View more on Andy Beckett's website »

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Published on November 16, 2012 14:55

November 13, 2012

Eton: why the old boys' network still flourishes

The new archbishop of Canterbury is the latest Old Etonian to make it to the top of the establishment. But what is it about the school that makes it such a breeding ground for leadership?

In the Porter's Lodge at Eton, a surprisingly small, panelled room that guards the main entrance to probably the world's most famous and self-conscious school, a recent issue of the Week magazine lies on a table between two chairs for visitors. On the cover is a cartoon of David Cameron, the 19th Old Etonian to be British prime minister, and a photo of the mayor of London, Boris Johnson, who may become the 20th. The magazine is well-thumbed: outsiders remain as fascinated by Eton's influence as the school is.

On the official Eton website, an elegant sales brochure with pictures of sunlit old school walls and pupils in their ancient, photogenic uniforms, there is an extensive section on "famous Old Etonians". The list of most recent "OEs" is startling, even to anyone well aware that elite Britain can be narrow. There are smooth media grandees (Geordie Greig, Nicholas Coleridge) and prickly dissenters (the New Left Review veteran Perry Anderson); lifestyle-sellers both macho (Bear Grylls) and gentle (Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall); environmentalists (Jonathon Porritt) and climate change sceptics (Matt Ridley); actors (Hugh Laurie, Dominic West, Damian Lewis) and princes (Harry and William); rising Tory MPs (Rory Stewart, Kwasi Kwarteng) and people who are likely to interview them (BBC deputy political editor James Landale). Reading the long, hypnotic index of Eton eminences, back to the college's foundation in the 15th century, British public life begins to seem little more than Eton – a school of 1,300 13- to 18-year-old boys – talking to itself. And the list is not even comprehensive: at the time of writing, no one has thought to include Justin Welby, the new Archbishop of Canterbury.

But the power of an institution can be more than its people. Under the coalition, the patchy egalitarianism of postwar state schooling is giving way to a more traditional philosophy: stricter uniforms and rules, pupils organised into private school-style "houses", more powerful headteachers, more competition and difference between schools. It is a philosophy increasingly friendly to Eton. The current headmaster, Tony Little, remembers his first headship at another private school in the late 80s: "The local comprehensive wouldn't invite me over the threshold. That has changed massively. The number of phone calls I get from heads of academies has greatly risen in the last two, three years. They want to visit, they want to collaborate." Eton now has state "partner schools" in nearby Slough, and this year joined with seven other private schools to open a free school in Stratford in east London.

Other trends are working in Eton's favour. With annual fees of £32,067 – more than the average after-tax British household income – Eton is, more than ever, "a luxury brand", as Greig puts it in fellow Old Etonian Nick Fraser's 2006 book The Importance of Being Eton. As the super-rich and the wish to imitate them have strengthened, Greig continues, "luxury brands have come back". Like Britain's many other luxury businesses, Eton has improved its product. "When I was there in 1958 to 1963, the bottom 40% of boys did absolutely no work," says Simon Head, fellow of the Rothermere American Institute at Oxford University. "That's gone. Eton has hunkered down. It's mobilised itself for the global economy."

Even the uniform seems more in keeping with the times. In an era of Downton Abbey and dandyish, aristocratic menswear fashions, Eton's waistcoats, tailcoats and stripes look less anachronistic. In the windows of the elderly school outfitters along Eton High Street, the long, theatrical approach to the college through the pretty, prosperous Berkshire town of the same name, there are items you could imagine selling well to east London hipsters.

Last month, a mildly droll Etonian reworking of the international pop hit Gangnam Style by PSY, called Eton Style, was posted by pupils on YouTube. Filmed around the school, it has had more than 2.6m views. Eton is adept at mocking and advertising itself simultaneously.

And yet, aspects of the school's success and longevity remain mysterious. What exactly is the source of its pupils' legendary charm and confidence, their almost as legendary slipperiness? In his book, Fraser interviews the late Anthony Sampson, the famous investigator of Britain's elites. "I'd meet Etonians everywhere I went," says Sampson, not one himself. "I've never understood why they were so good at networking and politics." Fraser speculates: "The Etonian mystique often seems a matter of mirrors, a collusion between those [non-Etonians] hungry for [Eton] notoriety and Etonians who are only too happy to supply it." One afternoon last week, I emailed the school to ask if I could visit. Within less than two hours, Little emailed back and offered to meet the next day.

Like many British centres of power, Eton owes some of its influence to geography. It was founded in 1440 on the orders of Henry VI, frequently in residence with his court nearby at Windsor Castle. Nowadays, the school emphasises its closeness to London, the great global money hub, a dozen miles to the east. "About a third of our boys have London addresses," says Little, leaving open the possibility that they also have others. For the tenth who live abroad – the proportion "has grown a little" since he became head in 2002 – Heathrow airport is even closer. Jets intermittently moan loud and low over the school's spikes and towers.

But otherwise, for much of the long school day, there is an uncanny hush. As you approach the college, there is no grand announcement of Eton's existence, just small, hand-painted signs, white lettering on black, indicating that an increasing number of the courtyards, alleyways and driveways branching off the High Street are private property. From the open windows of neat classrooms, some late medieval, some Victorian, some Edwardian, some with expensive glass-and-steel modern additions, little of the usual hubbub of secondary school life emerges. Pupils and teachers alike sit upright in the black-and-white uniform, which is somehow both uptight and flamboyant – some might say like Etonians themselves. The uniform was standardised in the 19th century and must be worn for all lessons, AKA "divs" or "schools" in Eton's elaborate private language.

When the lesson ends, the spotless pavements are suddenly flooded with pupils. Some are tall and languid, some are chubby and scurrying, some are black or Asian, most are white. Everyone carries old-fashioned ring-binder files, and no one texts or makes a phone call. But some of the boys greet each other with hugs, or bursts of transatlantic up-talking, or say "like" with a long "i", London-style – for a minute or two, many seem reasonably modern and normal. Then everyone rushes off to the next lesson. "It is possible to be bored at Eton," says the school website, "but it takes a bit of effort!"

"In many ways it is a conservative institution, with lots of tiny rules," says someone who was a pupil from 2002 to 2007. The ambiguous outside status of Eton often makes old boys reluctant to declare themselves. "But Eton is probably more liberal, more permissive than its reputation. There are amazing cultural facilities, to do art and theatre for example. There were so many opportunities, it seemed churlish to focus on how annoying it was to have to wear a gown in the heat of summer." Last month, the History of Art Society, one of dozens of such pupil-run bodies, held a typical extracurricular event, a talk on 20th-century modernism. It was given by the BBC's arts editor, Will Gompertz.

Some boys are so well-connected when they first arrive at the school, they already have a certain swagger. In focusing on a single institution, Eton's critics are sometimes avoiding the more uncomfortable truth that the roots of Britain's elites go wider and deeper. But for less overwhelmingly privileged boys, says theex-pupil, Eton can be life-changing: "It's just expected that you will drink from the cup of opportunity. So you become used to being able to do whatever you put your hand to. Or at the least, you learn not to seem fazed by opportunities in the wider world."

Little himself was a pupil from 1967 to 1972, "the first male in my family to be educated past the age of 14". His study is baronial and high-ceilinged, with a window austerely open to the cold evening, but he is less forbidding than you might expect, with a quiet, calm, middle-class voice, like a senior doctor. "Dad worked at Heathrow, security for British Airways," he says. One of the school's main aims, he continues, is to admit a broader mix. But how can it, given the fees, which have raced ahead of earnings and inflation in recent decades? "It's a huge amount of money," he admits – the appearance of candour is one of Little's tactics when he talks to the outside world. "Sometimes I think, short of robbing a bank, what d'you do?"

Currently, by giving out scholarships on academic and musical merit, and bursaries according to "financial need", Eton subsidises the fees of about 20% of its pupils. "Forty-five boys pay nothing at all," says Little. "Our stated aim is 25% on reduced fees, of whom 70 pay nothing." What is the timescale? "Quite deliberately non-specific. But I'll be disappointed if we have not achieved it in 10 years." Not exactly a social revolution. "A long-term goal" is for Eton to become "needs-blind": to admit any boy, regardless of ability to pay, who makes it through the school's selection procedure of an interview, a "reasoning test", and the standard private-school Common Entrance exam. Whether Eton would then become a genuinely inclusive place is open to doubt: one of its selection criteria is an applicant's suitability for boarding, and many people connected with Eton would surely resist its metamorphosis into a meritocracy. Hierarchy is in Eton's bones.

Either way, Little says, the school does not have nearly enough money to become "needs-blind" yet. According to its latest accounts, Eton has an investment portfolio worth £200m. The school looks enviously on the wealth of private American universities: Harvard, the richest, has an endowment of more than £20bn. Eton seems unlikely to return soon to its core purpose as decreed by Henry VI: the education of poor scholars.

In fact, the school's history has been more erratic than many of its admirers and detractors imagine. Henry VI was deposed when Eton was only 21 years old and its funding was cut off: the college was left with a stunted-looking chapel, built to less than half the intended length. Eton is hardly the oldest British private school – one of its main rivals, Westminster, was founded in 1179. According to Fraser, "Etonmania", like so many supposedly eternal British traditions, only started in the reign of Queen Victoria. From the 1860s to the early 1960s, the school enjoyed a golden age of power and prestige. Then its influence plummeted. The Etonian-packed, slightly drifting Tory administrations of Harold Macmillan and Alec Douglas-Home were blamed for Britain's apparent decline. Within the school itself, as Harold Wilson's 60s Labour government – there has never been an Etonian Labour prime minister – seemed poised to create a fairer Britain, a friend of Fraser's "wasn't alone in his belief that Eton was doomed, and should be forthwith incorporated within the state system … The Provost and Fellows [the school's governing body] did consider relocating to Ireland or France, but this was never a very serious notion."

A perceived lack of seriousness hampered Eton for decades afterwards. Reforming headmasters struggled against the school establishment, nostalgic Old Etonians, and sometimes the pupils themselves to make Eton more academic and less obsessed by rules and rituals. Margaret Thatcher still had OEs in her 80s cabinets, but she marginalised and often fired them: they seemed too passive and paternalistic for modern Britain.

How different Etonians seem now. Little says the school teaches pupils "how to juggle time, how to work hard", and how to present themselves in public: "One thing I say to them when they leave is, if you choose to behave the way a tabloid would expect … you deserve everything you get." He downplays Eton slang as "a quirk and an oddity. A lot of words have fallen out of use."

I wonder if he would say quite the same to a Daily Telegraph journalist. The classic Etonian skills – Cameron has them – have long included adjusting your message to your audience, defusing the issue of privilege with self-deprecation, and bending to the prevailing social and political winds, but only so far. "Do institutions in England change totally while seeming not to, or do they do the opposite?" asks Fraser. "I think the latter. And Eton has changed far less than Oxbridge."

Rushing between lessons with their old-fashioned files, some boys talk earnestly about their essays and marks. But Eton has not quite become an elite academic school: it is usually high, but rarely top, of the exam league tables. "Eton's view of education encompasses much more than just intellectual achievement," says the school's annual report. Nor does Eton participate unreservedly in the global education marketplace: it restricts its number of foreign pupils. "We are a British school that is cosmopolitan," says Little. "We're not an international school."

Does he think a school can ever be too powerful? For once, his affability gives way to something fiercer: "I'm unashamed that we're aiming for excellence. We want … people who get on with things. The fact that people who come from here will stand in public life – for me, that is a cause for celebration." If Eton is too influential, he suggests, other schools should try harder. Fraser has another explanation for the success of Old Etonians: "At moments in their lives," he writes, "they are mysteriously available for each other." Subtle networking, a sense of mission, an elite that does not think too hard about its material advantages – Eton's is a very British formula for dominance.

It can be a high-pressure place. For all the Old Etonians who have considered the rest of life an anti-climax, there have been others damaged by the school: by its relentless timetable, by its crueller rituals, such as the "rips" torn by teachers in bad schoolwork, and by Eton's strange combination of worldliness and otherworldliness. Compared to most other boarding schools, Eton seems more eccentric and intense, its mental legacy more lingering. "Eton never left me," writes Fraser. Little says: "I've come across a fair number of casualties who were here [with me] in the 60s." Another more recent ex-pupil describes Eton as "a millstone round my neck every day".

After my interview with Little, I had a parting look inside the grand, domed School Hall. The building was empty except for a single boy, onstage in his stiff uniform at a grand piano, and a watching teacher with a clipboard. Dusk had fallen, and his playing rippled gorgeously through the overheated building. When he finished, the teacher immediately came and stood over him. I couldn't catch what she said, but he touched his face nervously and nodded.

For some people, that is what education should be about. And Eton nowadays works restlessly to satisfy them. Beside its seemingly endless playing fields, the school is building a new quadrangle for 40 more classrooms. Next to the development is a small, bucolic, council-owned park, with litter and rusty goalposts. As Eton flourishes for the next few years at least, the rest of Britain may have to make do.

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Published on November 13, 2012 11:59

October 26, 2012

Thatcher, Murdoch, Hillsborough and beyond: What the 1980s did to Britain

The values of 80s Britain, which once reigned supreme, now seem utterly discredited. Are we finally waking up to what that decade did to us?

In 2006, the year before the financial crisis started, BBC2 broadcast a luxurious adaptation of The Line of Beauty, Alan Hollinghurst's heady novel about rich Britain in the mid-80s. In the Observer, Tim Adams, who had been a young adult in the heyday of Thatcherism, wrote a perceptive essay about the feelings the programme and book provoked. For some of the people who had read the novel on his recommendation, "certainly those a few years younger than me," he wrote, the "moral shifts Hollinghurst was concerned with no longer had the power to shock. They had grown up with nothing else but 80s values." Adams concluded: "The point about the 80s is that they have never finished."

In 2010, the Labour prime minister who did so much to ensure this, Tony Blair, argued in his autobiography, A Journey, that there were good reasons for Thatcherism's continued hold on Britain. "Much of what she wanted to do in the 1980s was inevitable, a consequence not of ideology but of social and economic change." In many ways, he wrote, "Mrs Thatcher was absolutely on the side of history."

It feels less like that now. Some of the most obvious cracks in the supremacy of the 80s have appeared where Thatcherism was supposedly strongest: on the economy. Home ownership, central to her popular capitalism, peaked in the United Kingdom in 2003. In England, it has been declining for two years longer: the National Housing Federation predicted last year that by 2021 owner-occupancy will be back to mid-80s levels.

In the privatised utilities, 80s dreams of consumer empowerment, choice and value have also soured. Ten days ago, David Cameron's hasty, misfiring announcement about energy prices tacitly acknowledged this: his supposedly free-market government was planning to legislate to make energy companies offer their customers their cheapest tariffs.

The economy as a whole was supposedly revitalised for the long term by Thatcherism. It has not quite worked out like that. Thursday's announcement of a single quarter of growth after one of the most protracted ever modern recessions was greeted with almost desperate relief – "the economy is healing" – by the chancellor George Osborne. Probably closer to the current mood of many voters and economists was a speech last month by the Labour leader Ed Miliband. He said that, in the 80s, "A set of [economic] assumptions emerged … A rising tide would lift all boats … Wealth would trickle down to all. And the rules governing our economy were unchangeable … All of these assumptions have been discredited by the events of the last five years."

A lack of faith in the Thatcherite free market now extends far beyond the left. Last October was the 25th anniversary of the "big bang" that deregulated the City of London. In the Daily Telegraph, an even-handed article by City historian David Kynaston prompted a long chain of reader comments whose recriminatory tone would have been unthinkable on previous anniversaries, but now seems quite normal. "So many of us were taken in by Maggie Thatcher at the time," wrote marknewdarkage. "I was a huge fan … But as time has gone by, I can see she has ruined so much of what was good about this country … It is going to take years and years before this mess is cleared up, if it ever will be."

A similar sense of a country belatedly waking up to what happened in the 80s has hung over the News International phone-hacking scandal, which may enter a new phase next month with the publication of the Leveson inquiry report. Rupert Murdoch's influence over Britain did not start in the Thatcher era – he bought the News of the World in 1968, the Sun in 1969 – but it was in the 80s that it hardened into one of the central facts of political life, through his breaking of the printing unions, his purchase of the Times and Sunday Times in 1981, and the relentless rightwing crusading of those papers and the Sun. Three decades later, in July 2011, to watch a slightly pasty, croaking, self-styled "humble" Murdoch appear before a televised committee of suddenly irreverent MPs was to see something dragged out into the light: a power relationship that would never be quite the same again. It was the first time he had ever faced direct scrutiny by British MPs.

This autumn, an equally unexpected reckoning has begun about 80s policing. On Wednesday, Sir Norman Bettison, chief constable of West Yorkshire, abruptly resigned, two days after being accused by Labour MP Maria Eagle of boasting that he had smeared Liverpool supporters following the 1989 Hillsborough disaster. Bettison denied the allegation, but his Hillsborough conduct is being investigated by the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC). On Monday, the Commons heard that the names of a startling 1,444 former and serving police officers have been passed to the IPCC, which is also examining whether there was a criminal cover-up of the police actions at Hillsborough. According to the IPCC, it is the biggest-ever independent investigation into British police behaviour.

In the 80s, many powerful people in Britain regarded football fans as nothing but hooligans, to be policed as robustly as possible. Liverpudlians sometimes attracted a similar contempt: their once grand, increasingly gaunt city was associated with riots, insubordinate leftwing councillors and unstoppable economic decline. The police fared rather differently as an interest group. At the first formal cabinet meeting after the election of the Thatcher government in 1979, the first item was police pay: after years of slow growth, it was to increase immediately by 45%.

A connection between the enhanced political status of the police in the 80s, the more militarised style of British policing that began then and the sometimes confrontational style of the Thatcher government has long been an article of faith for many on the British left. Last month, they gained an unlikely recruit in Jack Straw, the former Labour home secretary, not usually a liberal on law and order. He told the Today programme: "The Thatcher government, because they needed the police to be a partisan force, particularly for the [1984-5] miners' strike and other industrial troubles, created a culture of impunity in the police service … They thought they could rule the roost, and that is what we absolutely saw in South Yorkshire."

The South Yorkshire force policed Hillsborough and its aftermath. Five years earlier, in 1984, they also policed the attempted blockade of the nearby Orgreave coking plant by striking miners. Following "the Battle of Orgreave", one of the most violent and infamous clashes of the Thatcher period, dozens of miners were prosecuted, then acquitted: police evidence against them, it was revealed, had been fabricated. This week, a BBC1 programme, Inside Out, made further allegations about the faking of police statements at Orgreave, and the Labour party and the National Union of Mineworkers called for an inquiry.

Until recently, Orgreave, like much of the 80s, seemed increasingly like ancient history – all the more remote because the issues contested then seemed to have been settled, for good or ill. Each time the anniversary cycle came around, or new generations appeared of commissioning editors or writers or artists who had spent formative years in the 80s, the key events would be remembered, but rarely properly re-evaluated, let alone acknowledged as part of our present.

Those that attempted the latter during the placid years of the Blair boom faced difficulties. In 2001, artist Jeremy Deller famously restaged Orgreave, in well-researched detail, close to where it happened, using veterans from both sides. But for all the provocativeness of the idea and the moments of raw feeling it reportedly generated – "you bastards, bastards, fascists", Tom Lubbock of the Independent heard people shout from the watching crowd during "the first mounted police charge" – the event seemed to place Orgreave in a museum as much as bring it back to life. Two-thirds of the participants were actually from historic re-enactment societies, and ironising 80s pop hits played through a PA system at "half time". A fortnight earlier, Thatcher admirer Blair had been re-elected with another enormous majority. In 2001, raging against how the 80s continued to shape Britain felt like complaining about the weather.

The fact that the 70s remained – and remain – widely reviled has also helped make 80s values seem impregnable. Recriminations about the British 70s, about their messy politics, their spluttering economy, their sleaziness, started well before the 70s had even ended. It was not hard subsequently to present the 80s as an improvement, or at worst, a painful but necessary corrective – "inevitable" in Blair's words. In many ways, the 80s are the right's sacred decade; and in the British media, and in how Britain talked about itself, in the three decades from the election of Thatcher to the election of Cameron, the right's ideas generally prevailed.

Yet even the notion that the 80s represented an advance on the 70s' sometimes grisly sexual mores can be challenged. One of the many horrible aspects of the Jimmy Savile scandal is how his alleged assaults, seen initially by much of the media as emblematic 70s behaviour, seem to have continued well into the 80s and beyond.

More quietly, generational shifts are eroding the 80s' electoral influence. Thatcher and the changes that occurred under her were rarely overwhelmingly popular. The British Social Attitudes survey showed leftward as well as rightward trends during the 80s; her share of the vote at general elections was middling by postwar standards; and her iron majorities were in large part the products of splits and weaknesses among her opponents. Nowadays, the beneficiaries of her booms, such pivotal interest groups in the Britain of the 90s and 00s, are beginning to be rivalled politically by those too young to have taken part. To some of this economically stressed generation, the postwar world she replaced – of state paternalism and strong unions, of municipal housing and more workplace protections – looks quite appealing, which is one of the reasons the 70s are beginning to be rehabilitated. Meanwhile, pessimists of all ages look at Britain now and wonder if we are back where we were in 1979: economically vulnerable, unsure of our place in the world. Was all that 80s turbulence and toughening-up really worth it?

Even British thinkers on the right are beginning to wonder. From Tory philosopher Phillip Blond's attacks on "individualism", to Tory MP Jesse Norman's criticism of monopolistic "crony capitalism", to Ferdinand Mount – once head of Thatcher's Downing Street policy unit – worrying about the concentration of wealth among "the new few", there is strengthening disquiet at some of the forces the 80s set in motion. There is also an emerging, little-noticed common ground with Labour's bolder social critics, such as the MP Jon Cruddas and Miliband himself. In 2011, the latter's party conference condemnation of free-market "predators" – some of the more sharkish characters in The Line of Beauty come to mind – was initially received on the right with bafflement and derision. Miliband's populist, timely argument gets more respect from some Conservatives now.

How much of a reckoning about the 80s will there ultimately be? What the police did then may never be fully exposed: Britain probes and punishes police excesses with extreme reluctance. The same may go for the bankers. The privatised utilities feel more vulnerable: even the rightwing papers routinely deride them. Murdoch's political dominance has surely gone. He is 82, and British politicians are unlikely ever to attend his parties like they used to.

Thatcher herself has recently turned 87. At the TUC conference last month, T-shirts with a tombstone print and the words, "A Generation of Trade Unionists Will Dance On Thatcher's Grave", were briefly and controversially on sale. Last December, when there was the latest round of speculation about whether she would receive a state funeral, even Thatcher-admiring commentator Peter Oborne argued in the Daily Telegraph that she was too divisive a figure.

But I am not sure we should celebrate unreservedly if the 80s are written off as where it all went wrong. The 90s and 00s – the decades of complacency? – will be next. In an anxious country, the recent past is always to blame.

Margaret Thatcher Politics past The miners' strike 1984-85 Hillsborough disaster Police Rupert Murdoch Tony Blair David Cameron Conservatives Ed Miliband Labour Trade unions TUC Jeremy Deller Jimmy Savile Andy Beckett
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Published on October 26, 2012 16:15

October 23, 2012

Tim Montgomerie: pushing for a rightwing Tory party – with a heart

The ConservativeHome founder and editor is a critic of, and cheerleader for, the Conservatives

'Cameron has been one of the most disappointing Conservative leaders." During his tenure, "error has been piled upon error". His party is still seen as "a party of the rich". His big society "has been a complete failure as a message". In office, as well as lacking a plan, his party "has lost a sense of social justice … Conservative rhetoric often borders on social Darwinism". Instead of "a rightwing party with a heart", Cameron has "created a centrist party with cuts".

Even after months of Tory troubles, it is still something of a shock to hear these things from a lifelong Conservative. And not from some disgruntled activist or marginalised, anonymous cabinet dissident, but from one of the party's dominant figures, on the record, in the New Statesman, this newspaper and the Spectator over the past 12 months.

Yet Tim Montgomerie is not like previous important Tories. Instead of a parliamentary constituency or ministry, or a personal fortune used for strategic donations, he has an unofficial party website, ConservativeHome, and an increasing ubiquity in the rest of the political media. At 42, he is a fluent, seemingly inexhaustible writer, broadcaster, thinker, alliance-builder and campaigner. Over the past dozen years, he has played multiple, apparently contradictory Tory roles: internal critic and cheerleader; intimate of the party elite; self-appointed voice of the grassroots; polemicist for a more populist Conservatism – sometimes more, sometimes less right wing – and dispassionate analyst of the party's ups and downs.

"It's a new role in British politics," said Max Wind-Cowie of the Progressive Conservatism Project at the thinktank Demos. "Without being elected, originally without the endorsement of a national paper, standing outside the official structure of one of the main parties, he has established himself as one of the foremost voices about what that party should do."

Robert Halfon, Tory MP for Harlow, who has known Montgomerie since university, said: "I've never met anyone like him. He's got so much energy in his head. He is a political entrepreneur."

Montgomerie founded the ambitiously named ConservativeHome in 2005. Since 2009, it has been funded by the wealthy, perpetually manoeuvring Tory peer Lord Ashcroft. Edited by Montgomerie and four other staff, written by them and scores of contributors, it serves as a unique one stop shop for hundreds of thousands of rightwing Britons. "ConHome", as it is known in Tory circles, offers punditry, gossip, political philosophy, policy wonkery, a comprehensive roundup of Westminster news, appeals for help with Conservative causes, sales pitches from ambitious MPs, and sometimes raw contributions from party members and supporters.

"I and almost everyone else I know in the party read it at least once a day," said Wind-Cowie. Jesse Norman, Conservative MP for Hereford and South Herefordshire, said: "Very few younger MPs don't check it." Halfon added: "There are a lot of people in the Commons who say 'we don't look at it' when they look at it 50 times a day." Wind-Cowie, Norman and Halfon are all contributors – few prominent youngish Tories are not – but the site is also respected by bloggers on the left. Sunny Hundal, editor of Liberal Conspiracy, said: "As a political operation I think ConHome sets the benchmark for everyone else."

One well-connected Tory-watcher calls the site "a party within a party". A Tory MP said: "Being a ConHome reader has almost replaced the party membership. I don't think I've looked at the official Conservative party website for about six months."

Strikingly, senior Tories heavily criticised on ConservativeHome, such as the former health secretary Andrew Lansley, the former Tory chair Lady Warsi, and the former justice secretary Ken Clarke, often lose their jobs. On BBC Question Time in February, Clarke railed against "Tim Montgomerie, who sets himself up as representing every active Tory in the country on his blasted website". Sometimes mockingly, sometimes fearfully, many Tories have started referring to Montgomerie as "the high priest of Conservatism".

In truth, ConservativeHome is a little too broad in tone and content to be simply a personal mouthpiece. It publishes hostile reader responses to Montgomerie's more controversial stances, such as support for a wealth tax ("This is madness") and gay marriage ("You've sold your soul"). Yet an argument for a particular sort of Conservatism pervades the site. Montgomerie and his online allies are sceptical about the EU, and about Cameron and his Tory "modernisation", which they consider too metropolitan and – gay marriage aside – too socially liberal. Most Britons, they argue, want the Conservative party to be tough on crime, welfare and immigration; but also more socially concerned and less elitist – "rightwing with a heart", in Montgomerie's phrase.

"He's got a robust, highly intelligent, well-organised critique of Conservatism from within the right," said Norman. "The hybrid that Tim is pulling together is … rediscovering arguments from the 80s and 90s, but explicitly actuated by concern for the less well-off. The political effect of that is to reach out across political, class and emotional lines."

Recently, there have been signs that the government is paying these ideas close attention. "Conservative methods are not just good for the strong and the successful but the best way to help the poor," Cameron told his party conference this month. Montgomerie and ConservativeHome were even more prominent at the event than usual, their large, showily positioned marquee hosting events featuring Tory stars such as Michael Gove, Iain Duncan Smith and, most noisily, Boris Johnson – whose party leadership credentials Montgomerie has been pointedly talking up in recent months.

At Tory gatherings, Montgomerie is easy to spot: tall, more casually dressed than more conventional Tory players, speaking in a seductively calm voice that combines politeness and attention-getting jolts of candour. At conference this month, "he was just king of the whole place, striding about as if he really was running the party", said one attendee.

Montgomerie denies any such intention."I do not want ConservativeHome to be a party within a party," he said. "I want it to be the conference fringe that never stops." Have he and the website prompted the Tories' current populist turn? "It is possible that I was a little bit ahead of time … on the need for the party to support Britain's strivers. But the focus groups and opinion polls have been telling them similar things."

Conservative unpopularity, and trying to find ways to end it, have been the near-constants of his political life. Born into an army family in Hampshire in 1970, his politics were Tory from the start. But his teenage Thatcherism was tempered, he says, by discovering evangelical Christianity at 16. At Exeter University, he helped run the Conservative Association with Halfon and two other current Tory MPs, Sajid Javid and David Burrowes. It was the end of the 80s and support for the Tories was ebbing. "We used to talk about making the party not just for the rich," said Halfon. "Tim had a BBC computer with an old-fashioned printer. He'd produce leaflets, newsletters, posters. A complete workaholic. ConHome is just an outgrowth of that."

At Exeter, Montgomerie and Burrowes also started the Conservative Christian Fellowship, a still-extant organisation for uniting and expanding the party's Christian membership. Influenced by the US religious right, Montgomerie fiercely promoted what he now calls "traditional views on homosexuality. That was my upbringing. I don't hold those views any more." After working briefly in the 1990s as a Bank of England statistician – for a polemicist, he retains an unusual, and potent, zest for figures – Montgomerie moved into full-time politics at Conservative central office, first under the leadership of William Hague, then under Iain Duncan Smith. Influenced by the "compassionate conservatism" of pre-9/11 George W Bush, Montgomerie saw his mission as strengthening the Tories' social conscience while keeping them as a strongly rightwing party. Duncan Smith increasingly relied on him, first as a speechwriter, then chief of staff. The fact that Duncan Smith's leadership went so badly has provided ammunition for Montgomerie's enemies ever since. As one MP put it: "Tim is part of the problem, not part of the solution, some would say. The last time he had influence, the party was not in a beautiful place."

To some of his critics, Montgomerie combines a restless search for ideological purity with electoral naivety: "The Conservative version of Michael Foot's Labour party," wrote Matthew Parris in the Spectator last year. Others find Montgomerie's ever-quotable outspokenness sly or baffling or self-indulgent, given the already-buffeted government. "He does cause a lot of angst, particularly in No 10," said the Tory blogger Iain Dale. "But they still deal with him." Montgomerie is still invited to Downing Street drinks parties, and Cameron still talks to him at them. "They are civil, but you can tell there's an underlying grievance," said one observer.

Few doubt that Montgomerie would prefer a different leader. He was one of the earliest and strongest Tory pessimists about the party's chances at the next general election, and ConservativeHome, some Tories speculate, will play a pivotal kingmaking role if Cameron fails to win. Montgomerie said carefully: "One day, we could bring two huge assets together, Boris, as a presidential PM, and the [very rightwing] class of 2010."

Yet Montgomerie is a more complex person than sometimes imagined. Disarmingly mild-mannered, he "never forgets if he feels you've let him down", said Halfon. A veteran Westminster player, he lives in Salisbury, not London, most of the week, in the same otherworldly cathedral quarter as the former residence of Edward Heath. He is single, and able to work six days a week, he says, following "biblical principle": on the seventh, he gets the train with his sister to watch Manchester United and their famously Labour-supporting manager.

Like many obsessive activists – Montgomerie insists he never wants to be an MP – he oscillates between optimism and pessimism, dissidence and loyalty. He recently launched another website, strongandcompassionate.com, straightforwardly dedicated, it appears, to campaigning for a Tory majority in 2015. He has described his political trajectory as a journey. He said: "Perhaps I've moved leftwards on the NHS and rightwards on crime."

His long-term ambition, he said, "is for ConservativeHome to be handed over to someone else" to run. Then what? There is an uncharacteristic pause. "Maybe something in the [international] development world." Whoever is Tory leader then may breathe a sigh of relief.

Highs and lows

Born 24 July 1970

Career Son of a soldier who discovered Thatcherism and Christianity in his teens, rose and then fell as an influential behind-the-scenes Tory, then reinvented himself as a new kind of political player through ConservativeHome.

High point Predicting before the 2010 general election that the first-ever televised party leaders' debates would be "a big boost for Nick Clegg", and that the Tories might "live to regret" agreeing to participate.

Low point Failure, as Iain Duncan Smith's chief of staff, to help protect the Tory leader in 2003 from an internal party coup has been cited ever since by critics who say he is too cerebral and naive.

What he says "I'm not worried about ConservativeHome being too powerful. I'm worried that I'll wake up tomorrow morning and find a group of Conservatives with a lot of money behind them have launched a rival."

What they say "He's a natural politician," says one well-briefed Tory journalist. "He'll make an alliance with anyone on a single issue. What if he had become an MP in 2001 like Cameron and Osborne? It was an incredibly weak intake; had Montgomerie been there, Cameron and Osborne would have had more competition since."

Tim Montgomerie ConservativeHome Conservatives Thinktanks Politics and technology David Cameron Andy Beckett
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Published on October 23, 2012 10:20

October 12, 2012

Secrets of the Conqueror by Stuart Prebble – review

Andy Beckett on the men who sank the Belgrano and what they did next

Of all the mysteries and controversies around the Falklands war, that patchily reported, pivotal confrontation 30 years ago, some of the deepest involve submarines. Did Britain seriously consider threatening Argentina with submarine-launched nuclear missiles, as has sometimes been alleged, if less apocalyptic tactics failed? Was Argentina dissuaded from launching an earlier invasion of the islands, in 1977, by Margaret Thatcher's less bellicose but militarily shrewder predecessor, Jim Callaghan, who despatched a submarine to the south Atlantic as a deterrent? And most infamously, why exactly was the elderly Argentinian cruiser Belgrano sunk by a British submarine in May 1982, killing 323 sailors and hugely escalating the Falklands conflict?

This book touches tantalisingly on the first two questions but only seriously addresses the third. Prebble's subject, the attack submarine HMS Conqueror, whose history and on-board culture he describes with compelling intimacy but sometimes questionable reverence, torpedoed the Belgrano. He is also good on the broader, murky business of undersea warfare. In the early 80s, submarines could still easily hide, but also slid through the oceans semi-blind. Their tightly bonded crews habitually kept quiet about their missions whenever they resurfaced. "Submariners have an air about them," he writes, "which seems to hint that they know things the rest of us can never know."

The Conqueror was a fat, finned sea monster of a vessel, nuclear-powered but not nuclear-armed, used by the Royal Navy from 1971 to 1990. The stories Prebble has prised from its crewmen, some named and some not, go beyond the Belgrano incident and its highly charged aftermath, and into waters previously uncharted by journalists and historians. From this testimony, and other, guardedly described research - there are no footnotes or lists of primary sources, only a brief bibliography made up mostly of standard histories - he has extracted quite a scoop: that both shortly before and shortly after the Falklands war, the Conqueror undertook a bizarre but ultimately successful cold-war mission which has remained secret ever since.

In August 1982, "close to, or inside, the territorial waters of the USSR", probably near the Soviet naval base of Murmansk, the submarine stole a giant eastern bloc undersea listening device. A long, thick metal cable strung with unusually effective underwater microphones and designed to be towed by a submarine or surface vessel, the stolen device was an important component in both the maritime balance of power and east-west espionage. Britain and America, writes Prebble, needed to know whether the cable had been developed by the Russians or copied from similar western technology by Soviet agents. With typical, baffling-to-civilians services humour, the Royal Navy called the undersea heist Operation Barmaid.

Prebble is a veteran TV producer, and in the introduction he talks up his exclusive in the style of a press release or the breathless opening minutes of a modern documentary, as "a tale as incredible as the exploits of James Bond, straight out of John le Carré". Some of the story of how Prebble got it is threaded through the book, mildly self-congratulatory journalistic reminiscences running alongside the sterner military history.

As a young producer in the mid-80s, he had made a Belgrano film based around an interview with an unusually forthcoming former junior officer from the Conqueror, Narendra Sethia, who had kept a diary that dealt in detail with the Argentinian ship's sinking. Sethia and his diary had been drawn into the vortex of smears, cover-ups and revelations that followed the torpedoing, but he had been happy with Prebble's programme, and afterwards invited him to his wedding in south London. "Later that day I found myself in a nearby public house with several of the former crew of the Conqueror," writes Prebble. The conversation turned to an infamous missing six months in the official log of the submarine's activities, including the Belgrano incident, which Sethia – wrongly – had been accused of stealing. With a little prompting from the ex-submariners, Prebble suddenly came to a realisation. Much more of the log had disappeared than the few days dealing with the Belgrano: "Perhaps what was being hidden was not to do with the [Falklands] war." He cagily continues: "One way and another, in the course of the remainder of that evening and after some other enquiries in the following days, I learned about … Operation Barmaid."

With the cold war still going on, he quickly – too quickly? – decided that Barmaid was too sensitive to "national security" to reveal to the public. He would wait until a less delicate moment. For quite a few chapters, the reader waits for the story of Barmaid too. Nonfiction books that are labours of love can have their disadvantages, such as the desire to include every scrap of material, and instead there are long, extraneous passages about the off-duty exploits of the Conqueror's sailors, and about Sethia in particular, his family background and his post-navy life running a yachting business in the Carribbean. In the hands of a more novelistic writer, this could add up to more than padding and colour: there is clearly a connection between the elaborate pranks played on each other by the submariners and the slyness and cheek of the Barmaid plan, but Prebble is too fond of blokey anecdotes about naughty sailors in "some of the most exotic locations in the world" to properly draw it out.

Excited stuff about the Conqueror as "a state-of-the-art fighting machine" and submarines as "the chariots of modern war" also mars the early pages. But once the submarine puts to sea for its cold war and Falklands missions, the tone shifts. Prebble writes concretely and well about the vessel and life on board it: the impossibly tight spaces, the incessant hums and smells, the lack of exercise, the absence of nature except for the potentially crushing mass of water all around.

The attack on the Belgrano is described clearly, blow by blow. "Late that morning … the captain announced to the crew that they had orders to sink the Belgrano and that after lunch they would be going to action stations." Before condemning the Argentinians to burn, freeze or drown, the submariners ate "roast pork with all the trimmings". After the sinking, some of the submariners were "all pumped up"; others were stunned and introspective.

The account holds no bigger revelations. These come instead, at last, in two dozen concluding pages on Operation Barmaid. Back at base in Scotland after the Falklands, the Conqueror was secretly fitted with two pairs of giant pincers. Then it slipped out to sea to intercept an eastern bloc trawler that had been spotted towing one of the sought-after listening cables. With canny, patient navigation, the submarine rose slowly upwards beneath the trawler, to within "a few feet" of its engine propellers, without being detected. Then one pair of pincers cut through the cable, roughly, to make the break look like an accident. The other pair grabbed the severed section before it sank to the sea floor. And the Conqueror ghosted away with its precious cargo.

Once the submarine docked in Scotland again, "within hours" the cable "was on its way to Prestwick airport for a flight across the Atlantic for analysis". What our American allies learned from the seized listening device, and whether the Russians saw its disappearance as suspicious, Prebble, despite his own impressive display of patience and ingenuity here, does not know. Some of the secrets of the Conqueror, like many of those of the cold war, elude us still.

• Andy Beckett's When the Lights Went Out is published by Faber.

History Falkland Islands Andy Beckett
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Published on October 12, 2012 00:00

October 7, 2012

David Cameron: where did it all go wrong?

In 2005, he was the slick and charismatic saviour of the Tory party. Today, his bouts of red-faced anger and loss of authority have got the critics' knives out

David Cameron likes risks. On his second day as Tory leader, 7 December 2005, he took one of his biggest. In that now-distant era, Tony Blair was prime minister: not as dominant as he had been for the previous decade, but still formidable in the Commons, where he had seen off four of Cameron's predecessors with patronising politeness and lawyerly precision.

Yet Cameron used his first prime minister's questions to mount a surprise frontal assault. After a few minutes of mild back-and-forth, with Blair seeking to settle once more into his accustomed role as the only grownup in the room,a smiling Cameron, looking leaner than he does these days, switched suddenly from consensual to mocking. "It's only our first exchange," he said, "and already the prime minister is asking me the questions." Then Cameron leaned showily forward across the despatch box, and said with careful emphasis: "He was the future once."

That such a lethal soundbite might backfire one day was lost amid the triumphant Tory laughter. Blair sat listening to the uproar with a fixed smile, and for the rest of prime minister's questions spoke untypically fast. He seemed rattled. In the Commons and beyond, there was a sense that a new political star had announced himself. "David Cameron was clever and people-friendly, and I thought he had some real steel to him," Blair wrote later in his memoirs about Cameron's performance as opposition leader.

In fact, some have marked Cameron for greatness ever since Margaret Thatcher was premier. Two years ago, in a Sunday Telegraph article headlined "David Cameron: born to be prime minister", the authoritative Tory-watcher Matthew d'Ancona recalled that in the late 80s, "A mutual friend ... told me about the young hot-shot at [Conservative] Central Office who 'will be Tory leader one day'. This was taken as read in his [Cameron's] circle."

In 2003, after barely two years as an MP, Cameron began to be publicly promoted by seasoned Conservatives and political journalists as the long-awaited Tory equivalent of Blair. As Cameron became opposition leader and then, almost immediately, prime minister-in-waiting, expectations rose further. He would be "one of the most important politicians of the early 21st century", wrote the veteran rightwing commentator Bruce Anderson in the Spectator. "Cameron is the most immediately likable leader of a Conservative opposition since Stanley Baldwin [in the 20s]," wrote Anderson's centre-left equivalent, the late Alan Watkins, in the Independent on Sunday. Michael Cockerell, the revered political documentary-maker, made a 2007 BBC2 film titled David Cameron's Incredible Journey.

His failure to win the 2010 election suggested this potential might have been a little overstated. But his seemingly assured role in forming and managing the coalition, and the smoothness of his first months in office, convinced most of the commentariat that the election had been an aberration. "Like it or not, Cameron is a born leader," ran the headline of a December 2010 Independent piece by Blair's biographer John Rentoul. As prime minister, wrote Rentoul, "Cameron has two outstanding qualifications ... His convictions are adaptable ... [and] he is very polite." Thanks to "the effortlessness with which he plays the part of national leader ... How quickly we [have become] used to David Cameron in No 10."

To underline how many New Labour figures admired and feared Cameron, Rentoul quoted a recent BBC interview with Blair's former home secretary John Reid. Cameron, Reid said, was "a better prime minister than he was leader of the opposition", "successful" and "astute". With Ed Miliband – it seemed then – shakily installed as Labour leader, and voters widely assumed to be deeply weary of his party, the Westminster consensus in 2010 and for much of 2011 was that Cameron would get two terms as prime minister, if not more.

There had been hints even before the election that the Conservatives were thinking along those lines. In 2008, Francis Maude, then the head of a high-profile, faintly hubristic Tory "implementation unit", working out in advance precisely how his party would govern, told the Independent: "We have a vision of how Britain can be. It will take a long time to deliver it." In 2009, Cameron told SunTalk, a short-lived internet radio spinoff of the Sun, "We need a government acting for the long term ... with a five- to 10-year horizon." A key former Cameron adviser says: "He really admires Margaret Thatcher, rather than Blair, as an achiever [in office]. Blair didn't think about changing the national culture. David wants to change Britain."

How misplaced much of this confidence and praise, how distant his first slick phase, seems now. His political arc has turned downward. In the Sun, always sniffing for political winners and losers, he is "struggling David Cameron". In the Mail on Sunday in May, even before this summer and autumn's anti-Cameron plots and government calamities, he was "a wounded PM". In the Sunday Times last month, the well-connected rightwing columnist Martin Ivens reported: "Tory loyalists and critics alike increasingly fear that David Cameron is a loser ... real doubts have taken hold that Cameron can win the next election." In the current issue of the Tory journal the Spectator, a cover article by the editor Fraser Nelson is more definite: "Drift and disillusionment will lose Cameron the next election," runs the headline. "Dave's going down."

Some of his problems are big – the recession, the deficit, the polls, the collapse of the plan to redraw parliamentary constituencies in his party's favour, the Boris bandwagon, the maturing of Miliband, the growing popularity of Ukip, the upcoming trials of Cameron's friends and allies from News International. Some of his problems are small – his increasingly noted tendency to redden when angry, his stumbles on the David Letterman Show last month, his reputation for "chillaxing" too much with DVD boxed sets and games of Fruit Ninja. What is ominous is the way all these issues are beginning to interact and reinforce each other. Fruit Ninja, he unwisely confided to the Telegraph in January, during a brief uptick in the polls, is "quite good to get your frustration out. If you can't have a reshuffle, play Fruit Ninja."

At prime minister's questions these days, Cameron is a less commanding presence. A kind of stutter has crept into his voice – "Let me, let me, let me explain what this reshuffle is all about ..." – and an anger chokes what used to be languid dismissals of Miliband – "Let me tell him what is actually happening in our economy!" While he leans an elbow on the despatch box with his old insouciance, his other arm often makes a downward, stabbing gesture to emphasise his point, one rigid finger out.

All prime ministers ultimately fray and weaken. But Cameron has done so fast: "His shelf life has narrowed incredibly," says Tim Bale of the University of London, a historian of the modern Conservative party and its troubled post-Thatcher leaders. John Curtice of the University of Strathclyde, a leading authority on voter attitudes, says: "People used to think Cameron was charismatic. But he is proving to be a kind of average prime minister. His ratings are not terrible, but he's not Thatcher, he's not Blair. He is not a dominant figure. Nobody loves him. That is why the Boris story is taking off."

All prime ministers have internal enemies and critics, but Cameron's are tellingly ready to speak out. From Nadine Dorries's "arrogant posh boy" jibe to Stewart Jackson putting Cameron "on notice" after the Conservatives' poor May local election results, government MPs openly attack the prime minister with a frequency that Blair – with his proper electoral mandates – never suffered. The Tory blogger Iain Dale says: "Nobody's really frightened of No 10."

Even during Cameron's ascendant period, his circle of able intimates always felt smaller than Blair's. Now, with his policy guru Steve Hilton absent much of the time on an ambiguous "sabbatical" in California, and his spin doctor Andy Coulson lost to the phone-hacking scandal, Cameron is served by a No 10 that many observers of Whitehall consider underpowered or even chaotic. "David is not an intellectual," says his former adviser. "A bit of slackness and complacency can creep in. He is coasting a bit now."

There are also wider and deeper reasons for his changed fortunes. Governments are unpopular across the west, and have been since the financial crisis abruptly ended the long 90s and noughties boom in 2008. At first, as centre-left administrations such as Gordon Brown's struggled and fell, it was commonly believed – not least by many Conservatives – that rightwing parties would benefit. That conclusion looks shakier now. Cameron's close ally, the centre-right French president Nicolas Sarkozy, lost power in May; even the formidable German centre-right chancellor Angela Merkel is beginning to look vulnerable in the polls. Austerity policies, initially popular while still largely theoretical, as they were for Cameron in 2010 and early 2011, in practice are proving electorally toxic for almost all incumbents.

For Bale, Cameron's party has a particular weakness too. The Conservatives have not won a general election for more than 20 years. "The party is still stranded too far to the right from where most voters want them to be on public services and the economy. There is an absolutely clear consensus among academics that the Conservatives didn't win the election because ... they scared too many people. In government, they have proved to these people that their fears were well-founded." Max Wind-Cowie, head of the Progressive Conservatism Project at the think-tank Demos, agrees: "In many ways Cameron has transformed the Conservatives – for example, Tory MP's now look and feel more like the rest of us – but the one thing he didn't do was rethink economically." Cameron retains a Thatcherite faith in the free market; since the financial crisis began, it has felt more and more out of date, given all the market meltdowns and "the public's quite sudden distrust of the neoliberal economic project". His desire to shrink the state, similarly, has come up against voters' stubborn fondness for big state institutions such as the NHS: "The right of the party need to accept that the public are not just one snappy libertarian argument away from telling the state to bugger off."

And then there are Cameron's well-fed features and inherited wealth, his elite education and grand family connections; his easy manner and 90s career in public relations, perhaps that more comfortable decade's archetypal business; and the fact that he spent his first three years as Tory leader arguing that Britain's economic problems were largely solved, while promising that as prime minister he would match the Labour public spending he now condemns as profligate. It is not the best persona and CV for an austerity prime minister. For all his hairshirt talk – expect more in his almost make-or-break speech to the Conservative conference on Wednesday – Cameron often feels like the last major politician of the boom years.

How long has he got left? "You would expect the coalition to survive until 2015," says Curtice, "except for" – he cites the famous phrase from Harold Macmillan, the previous Old Etonian prime minister, for the inevitability of political shocks – "events, dear boy". Boris Johnson is scheduled to speak at the Tory conference today and tomorrow. Next month is the Corby byelection, the first in a Conservative seat since the general election – the absence of such awkward contests has been a characteristic piece of Cameron luck – and Labour are likely to win it. If that happens, a workable Labour-led coalition government becomes theoretically possible, involving the Liberal Democrats, the Greens, Plaid Cymru and Labour's traditional Ulster allies. While Nick Clegg remains Lib Dem leader that is hard to envisage, but as Stephen Tall of the website Liberal Democrat Voice puts it: "Lib Dems are starting to look post-Clegg and post-Cameron."

Tall suggests that thoughts may become deeds if the Lib Dems are still dismally unpopular in 2014. That pre-general election year also brings the European elections: a common current prediction is that the Conservatives will come third behind Labour and Ukip. Such a surge by the latter, warns Dale, could permanently "pull away enough Conservative voters" to make a Tory general election majority almost impossible. It is already much less likely than many people realise. According to Curtice, depending on how the Lib Dems do, the Conservatives need between 6% and 10% more votes than Labour to win outright. Yet in most polls the Tories are at least 10% behind. "People in the party are very realistic about the chances of winning the next election," says Wind-Cowie. "They see the chances as marginal at best."

If Cameron is not prime minister after the general election, says Bale, "he's toast". His lack of political obsessiveness – his biographers Francis Elliott and James Hanning note scant political activity until well into his 20s – and of a large support base in the party make it unlikely he would battle on as a defeated Conservative leader.

A second Lib Dem-Tory coalition, says Bale, would probably enable Cameron to cling to office. But everyone I spoke to agreed that it would be far harder to sell to both parties than the 2010 version. A Conservative minority government might in some ways be better for Cameron: "The more precarious," says Bale, "the less likely a leadership challenge." Yet neither would be a glorious outcome for "the heir to Blair", as Cameron called himself when campaigning for the party leadership in October 2005.

And, given that the Lib Dems are likely to lose seats to Labour in 2015, both outcomes would almost certainly require the Tories to gain seats overall – not something any British government has achieved for three decades, since Margaret Thatcher's great success in 1983. That victory was made possible by the Falklands war, the foundation of the SDP, Michael Foot's frail Labour leadership, a partial but dramatic economic revival, and a crusading, crisis-hungry prime minister – an almost freakish combination of factors that feels close to unrepeatable.

Yet Thatcher's recovery from her nadir in 1981, when a struggling economy and misfiring austerity policies made her far more personally unpopular than Cameron is now, convinces some Conservative strategists to this day that any mid-term problems can be overcome. "That's the Tory party's problem – 1979-1983 is the script they're still following," says Bale.

Cameron does have some Thatcher qualities. "He is best in a crisis. He can do the high-wire business," says his former adviser. Elliott and Hanning describe Cameron's behaviour the morning after the 2010 election, as news of his party's potentially fatal electoral shortfall spread: "'He had to think very quickly how he and George [Osborne] were going to get out of this alive,'" said a friend ... But since things were in flux there was still a chance to shape events."

As Thatcher did, Cameron is also reshaping the country. "Education, welfare, the NHS – these are huge, huge programmes of reform," says Wind-Cowie. It may be that Cameron is beginning to see these as his goals instead of a second or third term. His former adviser remembers: "I asked him once what he would like to have achieved as prime minister, when he looks back, and he said: 'I would rather be in for one term if it meant we could reform welfare and education.'"

In politics, as elsewhere, people often conceive of the future as simply an extension of the recent past. Back in 2005, when Cameron became Tory leader, that meant Blair and Thatcher and whole decades of near-impregnable single-party rule. Now we are in a different world. The last time British politics was this turbulent, between the mid-60s and the mid-70s, the central figure was the Labour prime minister Harold Wilson: charming, telegenic, slippery, lazy, plotted against, despised by many in his own party. Remind you of anyone? Wilson somehow won four general elections.

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Published on October 07, 2012 12:00

September 19, 2012

Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division by Peter Hook – review

Andy Beckett on a raw, surprising account of the classic post-punk band

Of all the great doomed rock bands, with their mayfly lives and drawn-out, highly profitable after-lives, few have a legend as potent and precisely defined as Joy Division. They played their first concert in January 1978 and their last in May 1980. In that time they released two albums and a few other songs: a pop music close to unique in its icy, addictive bleakness. They wore stark, photogenic clothes and haunted the hollowed-out cities of a decaying northern England. Their singer, Ian Curtis, was so intense onstage that he had epileptic fits. The day before a pivotal first tour of the United States, he hanged himself. He was 23.

This solemn version of the Joy Division story has endured for decades, periodically reinforced by authoritative accounts such as Touching From a Distance, a claustrophobic 1995 memoir by Curtis's widow Deborah; Control, an acclaimed 2007 band biopic, shot in reverential black and white and directed by onetime Joy Division photographer Anton Corbijn; and finally, by all the musicians who have drawn from Joy Division's seemingly inexhaustible well of young male angst and moody looks and riffs.

Peter Hook was the band's bassist. Much louder and more melodic than in traditional rock, his tough-but-tender throb and hum was the heart of their sound. Since their demise, he has been a leading curator in the Joy Division heritage industry, and gives over a substantial part of this book to a list of every concert the band played, sometimes with a set list as well. Even the group's pre-history, as a less poised and original punk-influenced outfit called Warsaw, is lovingly detailed. Hook recalls his eager acceptance of a just-recorded live tape offered by the promoter of a Warsaw show, "the start of what was to become a collecting obsession". And when the author listens to it? "What a great revelation – we were really good." The rock star as fan writer about his own band is not, you fear, going to be the most rewarding of literary enterprises.

So it comes as a shock, and a welcome one, to discover quickly that the main project here is quite different. Hook wants to show his band's rise and fall as messier, more collective and more human than the usual Curtis-dominated Romantic parable. Thus, instead of Joy Division as a quartet of tragic heroes – "Here are the young men, the weight on their shoulders," runs a much-cited Curtis lyric – Hook presents them as a gang of lippy, laddy northerners with a "reputation for trouble".

There were frequent fights at their gigs: "All of my mates were involved," he writes of one. "Like a giant ball rolling up and down in front of us as we were playing … Which of course wound me up. So I started kicking these kids from the stage … kicking them in the head." To rehearse, the band used a disused mill near the centre of Manchester, "decorated with cans of our piss because the toilet was miles away". At shows by rival groups, "We were terrible for nicking things … We used to [see] all this beautiful stuff backstage and nick it all."

Hook writes with conversational glee about the scams and pranks that accompanied his band's sharp-elbowed rise to prominence. The anecdotes can get tiresome, but the picture they build, of a seedy, arty, aggro-fuelled, semi-derelict urban England – of Manchester, in particular, before being bohemian was city council-approved – is revealing and vivid. Meanwhile, the pen portraits of his bandmates have a surprising delicacy. Drummer Stephen Morris had a jazzy, educated style and comfortably-off parents with "a koi-carp pond". Guitarist Bernard Sumner was sly and self-contained, always finding a heater for himself for their freezing practice rooms. And Curtis was a chameleon: already married, but also "one of the lads"; a father, but also having an affair with a Belgian journalist; a pop star in the making, but also a devotee of the rock and literary avant garde. "By the end," writes Hook with gruff astuteness, "there were just too many Ians [for him] to cope with."

Exhaustion also took a toll. Joy Division, for all the graveyard stillness of their record sleeves, were participants in a frenetic golden age for British pop, which had begun with punk in 1976 and would peak, commercially at least, with the British dominance of the American charts in 1983. Groups grew up fast and seized their moment, or disappeared. Yet Joy Division did not earn enough from their feverish touring and recording to give up their day jobs. Hook worked in the offices of the Manchester Ship Canal Company, Curtis at an employment exchange, and Sumner for a film company where his "job was to colour in Danger Mouse".

Such weird, novelistic details freshen the story throughout. But for Curtis at least, the pressure of multiple lives became increasingly perilous. In 1980 his epilepsy worsened fast. Onstage, Hook remembers "looking at Ian wondering if, or when, it was going to happen". The fits left "some of the audience laughing, some scared, some cheering". Britain in the early 80s could be a pretty cruel, unthinking place. Meanwhile Curtis's lyrics, always melancholy, turned almost relentlessly morbid. With unsettling honesty, Hook tries to explain why the band did not see the crisis coming – or, if they did, do much to avert it. First, he rather jaw-droppingly admits: "We never really looked at his lyrics." They could rarely hear them over the distorting roar of their crude practice and performance equipment; but also, the bandmates were increasingly "little musical islands", concentrating on their individual parts, which Joy Division's eccentric, dictatorial producer Martin Hannett – "a wizard surrounded by [dope] smoke and in charge of his strange machines" – isolated further into the group's lovely, lonely archipelago of sound. By the spring of 1980, that sound seemed ready to be played in stadiums, and the band, Curtis included, were reluctant to slow down. For what followed, concludes Hook, "We're all of us to blame."

As an attempt to rewrite the Joy Division legend, this uneven book succeeds only partially. For all the gritty new context and boisterous new stories here, Curtis still dominates. But Hook has restored a flesh-and-blood rawness to what was becoming a standard tale. Few pop music books manage that.

• Andy Beckett's When the Lights Went Out is published by Faber.

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Published on September 19, 2012 00:00

September 14, 2012

Museum Without Walls by Jonathan Meades – review

Andy Beckett admires the bristling prose of one of our best cultural critics

Deep into this labyrinthine collection of English and foreign explorations, architectural polemics and other, highly entertaining provocations, Jonathan Meades arrives on the coast of north Kent. He finds it "thrillingly cheerless": "marshes, mud … pylons, silos, hoppers, bulky mills, ships that tower over the earth, horizontal bands of smoke". In six quick pages, he surveys the area's unusual, ugly-beautiful intertwining of the industrial and pastoral, the historic and banal. Apart from a certain city swagger to the prose, and a slightly haughty tone to the historical material, the passage might be one of hundreds written in recent years by English authors examining their country's once-ignored "edgelands", as they are now fashionably known.

Except that Meades's piece was written 21 years ago. Over his three decades as an architecture critic, food writer, novelist, and author and presenter of strange, faintly hectoring television documentaries, he has often been ahead of the game. The revival of English restaurants; the power of postwar concrete buildings; the excesses of ever more individualistic and materialistic ordinary Britons – Meades's preoccupations have had the double-edged fate of becoming mainstream. As with Iain Sinclair and Martin Amis, near-contemporaries and sometimes stylistic and thematic peers as well, you sometimes wonder what territory Meades has left to explore.

One solution may be to expand abroad. A few years ago he moved to France, and that country was the topic of his most recent TV series. Yet, as demonstrated by this loosely themed assortment of newspaper and magazine articles, TV scripts, and essays for museums and architectural publications – a rare such retrospective worth reading – Meades has long been a cosmopolitan. There is an urbane 1998 depiction of Buenos Aires, its endless grid of streets "magnificent in its dogged monotony, claustrophobic, incarcerating"; and a characteristically esoteric 2005 appreciation of the suburbs of Bremen in Germany: "grand … sinuous … bourgeois opulence".

References to northern Europe pop up in even the most involved lectures on Englishness here. Partly, Meades's refusal to wear his enormous knowledge lightly is a reaction against the "cretinocracy" he sees as dumbing down the media. Partly, his northern European fixation is a response to most of Britain's ongoing fascination with the Mediterranean, a century-old trend he considers an escapist delusion. And partly his instinct as a writer is to please himself. "It is surely more honest," he warns in the combative introduction, "to write for an audience of one."

Meades writes repeatedly that he loves northern Europe for its "civility". But his writing is compellingly uncivil. Of the late British architectural grandee James Stirling, designer of angular landmarks from the 1950s to the 90s, he says: "His buildings, like their bombastic maker, looked tough but were perpetual invalids, basket cases." Of the postmodern, highly commercial styles that Stirling and many of his peers adopted during the Reagan-Thatcher era, Meades is utterly contemptuous: "nursery colours", "toytown rustication", "a children's entertainer's garrulous importunacy".

The sentences and vocabulary in this book zigzag between the lordly and the thuggish, between high culture and low, between grand assertion and intricate description. A single, virtuoso, almost page-long sentence pans across the much-depicted landscape of the lower Lea Valley in east London before its sterilisation by the 2012 Olympics – as if to say: "I can do urban dereliction better than anyone else." As with Sinclair and Amis, the writing style constantly calls attention to itself; and in a sense, applying that style to anything and everything is the book's main undertaking.

Some readers will find the verbal and factual one-upmanship tiresome – I suspect an appetite for Meades is a bit of a boy thing – but there are also novel and important ideas here. A long, calmer, even melancholy 2012 essay on the last half-century of architecture in Britain and the wider world notes how, after an idealistic postwar interlude when social housing and other everyday public amenities were prestige projects, architecture has reverted to its traditional role of providing "show and swank" for the powerful. A pair of shorter, more cartoonish pieces from 2007 and 2008, just before the financial crisis, warn against "the curse of Bilbao", what Meades sees as the mistaken belief that ailing cities can be rescued by grafting on spectacular new cultural facilities. With cities all over Spain now close to bankruptcy despite acres of new trophy buildings, this scepticism seems prescient.

Other Meades dislikes listed here include most architects, the architectural press, rigid government planners, English suburbs, and the modern English countryside, "the free-for-all toxic playground that cities once were". What Meades likes, besides list-making at ostentatious length, emerges less readily from these bristling pages, but it includes urban mixing and improvisation, gentrification, and wider pavements – not so different a recipe for happier cities from that promoted until recently by New Labour and its city councils and urban taskforces. Meades frequently insists, regardless, that he loathes New Labour. Perversity is one of his vices and virtues.

England, specifically southern England, is his favourite love-hate object. A fragment of memoir is untypically lyrical about mushroom-picking as a boy on the downs near Salisbury: "Dawn would barely be breaking when we crossed the vaporous floated meadows …" But another section is full of slowly acquired fury at the country pubs where his father lingered: "The stink of the gust of the bars … the intense jocularity … Beer is the enemy of food."

The climactic, most overtly emotional work here, though, is a posthumous profile of Ian Nairn, the angry, atmospheric British writer and broadcaster on cities and architecture who became a national figure in the 50s and 60s, and then slid into disappointed, beery passivity before he died in 1983. Meades calls Nairn "anarchic", "contrarian" and "a poet". He clearly regards him as a partial role model: "Why should a meditation on a city … not be a greater work of literature than a novel?"

But when it comes to Nairn's television, Meades goes on: "The programmes are clumsily shot like news reports, technically coarse, artless." There is only one poet of place whom Meades rates unreservedly. I hope he grumbles on for decades to come.

• Andy Beckett's When the Lights Went Out is published by Faber.

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Published on September 14, 2012 14:52

September 10, 2012

Bradford free school fiasco: the hard lessons learned

What went wrong at the One in a Million free school in Bradford, which was prevented from opening at the eleventh hour by the Department for Education? And what does the debacle mean for one of the government's most radical policies?

Two years ago, in the final, adrenalised days of the general election campaign, David Cameron went to West Yorkshire. In the marginal seat of Batley and Spen, near Bradford, where local parents were lobbying to set up a free school, the prime minister-in-waiting made what his party hoped would be a politically pivotal speech on education. Shirtsleeves rolled up, Barack Obama-style, with the future education secretary Michael Gove nodding beside him, Cameron told a whooping, cheering rally of the campaigning parents: "You are an inspiration ... an active community that is not going to put up with the bureaucrats saying 'no'". Whereas the Labour government had blocked the school scheme, "The whole aim of my government, if we win this election, will be to help people like you to realise your dream."

Two and a half weeks ago, Matthew Band, chief executive of One in a Million, a Bradford charity also working to open a free school, received an email from the Department for Education (DfE). It was 2pm on a Friday and the bank holiday weekend loomed: what should have been a final breather for the charity after 18 months' effort establishing the small secondary, before it admitted its first pupils on 3 September. But the email was not a routine communication, as the charity had regularly exchanged with the DfE as part of the intricate, still-novel, sometimes politically sensitive process of creating a free school. Instead, completely out of the blue, says Band, the charity was told the DfE would not allow the school to open. Its inaugural term was due to start in nine days.

"I couldn't believe that they'd actually just done it – that they'd said no," says Band. "We were completely amazed ... devastated." For the prospective pupils and their parents, the shock was even worse. "It bowled us all over," says Janet East, whose 11-year-old son James was signed up for the school. "Not one of us [parents] had a clue this was going to happen." She had bought James a uniform; they had visited the school "five or six times", and met the teachers; they had even agreed with the school that James would be provided with specially adapted classroom furniture, as he is disabled and has behavioural and learning difficulties.

It took her several days to break the bad news to him: "It was an evening, and he'd been talking about One in a Million [school] all day long. I told him, 'You can't go there.' And he said, 'Why?' Then he got very angry. He still is. We've had no decent sleep since."

Shortly after vetoing the opening of the school, the DfE issued a statement: "Setting up a free school is a difficult task, and we thank One in a Million for all their hard work. Before any new schools open their doors, we have to be sure that all conditions that we have set have been met... We still hope that One In A Million will open in [September] 2013." The DfE did not elaborate on which "conditions" the school had failed to meet. But in Bradford and in Yorkshire Conservative circles it has been widely speculated that the fatal shortcoming was a failure to attract enough pupils. The initial intake was only between 28 and 32 – on this, as with much of the school's history, the precise details are disputed – rather than the 50 originally anticipated. For the past fortnight, the charity and the DfE have been in talks to see if they can agree on how the project might be salvaged. Band says he expects the talks to conclude this week.

But whatever their outcome, damage has been done. To the prospective pupils who, even if a delayed opening can somehow be arranged, will be too old to attend One in a Million by then – and who are now scrambling to fit into schools that they and their parents did not choose. To the reputation of the project: "I can't believe there's a parent in Bradford who's going to say, 'Oh yeah, I know that school. It shut down nine days before the start of term. I'm going to put my child's name down,'" says East. And to the reputation of the free school policy as a whole – against strong competition, one of the coalition's most radical, or most reckless.

One in a Million's educational experiment is housed in the former official shop of Bradford City football club. A dozen years ago, City were briefly in the premiership and built cavernous retail facilities to match; now, after a series of financial crises, they are three leagues lower. In 2011 the charity, which was co-founded by Band and Wayne Jacobs, a former City player and caretaker manager, proposed buying the under-used shop building and turning it into a free school. At first sight, it does not look very suitable: a long, grey retail shoebox with blank corrugated walls, not many windows, and car parks around it rather than outdoor space for pupils. The whole complex is overshadowed by the football stadium right next door.

On the would-be school's outside walls, banners still read, "Brand New School For Bradford. Opening September 2012. Enrolling Now. 01274 723439. One In A Million Free School. In Partnership With Bradford City FC." Left-over logos for the former club shop and a former club cafe hang confusingly alongside. At the school's intended entrance, there is recent builders' junk but there are no longer any builders. Graffiti already marks a newly boarded-up door. A torn One in a Million banner lies on the tarmac.

Yet inside, the dream of the school is still alive, at least for now. Band and a few charity colleagues occupy a cluster of desks at one end of the largely deserted premises. Stuck to the walls are architects' drawings of the building as a much glassier, more attractive three-storey structure, with brightly dressed pupils arriving and eagerly studying; and also neat rows of "certificates of intent", 47 in all, signed by parents to "register a strong interest in applying for a place" at the school.

Sitting at an empty boardroom table, wearing a polo shirt carrying the logos of the charity and the football club, Band speaks with an uneasy mixture of diplomacy and exasperation. "We were ready to open. We did not fail. People say we failed to attract students. We haven't failed to attract students." He pauses. "Failed to retain them, possibly ..."

In the spring of 2011, when the charity made its initial application to the DfE to set up a school, "We had collected over 200 signatures of interest and support." Before joining One In A Million in 2005, Band was a businessman, and he describes its school concept as "mainstream ... but with a certain offer. What it's based on is ... the US Charter School. Small school size, small class size ... focusing on the individual child. An individual learning plan. Every child has an iPad." The school would offer much of the national curriculum (free schools are not obliged to follow it) but with a vocational emphasis on "sports, art and enterprise", as a slick promotional film posted on YouTube explained. The US for-profit education business EdisonLearning was hired as a consultant to help devise the school timetable, hone its overall philosophy, and assist the school once it opened. "Edison was a perfect fit," says Band, and testimonials about the charity and company's "excellent" relationship remain prominent on the EdisonLearning website.

Along with this corporate influence, the school project had more purely altruistic elements. Its site is in Manningham, a deprived, mainly Asian part of inner Bradford, and the charity's aim was to attract pupils of all races and faiths, or none, from poor areas across the city. One in a Million already has a strong city-wide reputation from organising volunteer-led classes for hundreds of children a week in everything from football to cookery to film-making; the school, says Band, was intended to give the charity a permanent base and higher profile, and act as "the crystallisation of six, seven years' hard work". Qualified teachers would be hired, "exceptional facilities" constructed, as the still-bullish One in a Million website puts it, and a school established that would be at "the leading edge of education delivery".

For much of last year and this, the scheme was on course, according to Band at least. The DfE declined to comment on his version of events. After the charity's initial application to start a school, "We were selected, one of 50 out of 300 [applicants] who were asked to interview. We went to interview down in London, August 2011." Band sighs: "Should've been sooner ... There's been continual delay."

He smiles and goes on: "We then found out in October 2011 that we'd got through the interview. In January/February 2012 we started on the funding agreement [the detailed contract negotiated between every free school and the DfE]. We'd done the funding agreement documentation by March/April ... In June, we had our finance plans for an initial 25 to 50 students approved and signed off. We were told we were moving towards [the government signing] the funding agreement, which was the basis on which we started to say to parents, 'We will guarantee these school places,' and on which we appointed our staff." By this July, One In A Million had passed a "pre-inspection" by the school inspectorate Ofsted, and builders had started converting the basement of the Bradford City club shop into the school's initial premises. The rest of the building would be ready, the charity assured the local media, by the spring of 2013. Coverage was plentiful and positive. "The future looks rosy" for the school, reported the Bradford Telegraph & Argus on 18 July.

But in fact its prospects were much more ambiguous. Creating a free school is a form of entrepreneurship – hence its attraction to a still market-infatuated government – yet a more complex and perilous one than most, with pupils, buildings and government support all having to be individually secured, but simultaneously, and with securing one being largely dependent on securing the others.

In March 2012, One In A Million's delicate balancing act started to go wrong. With its school site so hemmed in, the charity had been forced to look elsewhere for a site for the pupils' sports facilities, and had eventually found some suitable land, says Band, "two to three miles away". That month, the charity discovered that the land "hadn't been secured, and that we'd actually lost it to someone else". Buying the land, he says, was "the DfE's responsibility".

The same month, existing schools made their customary annual offer of places to pupils. Local parents and children who had been interested in One in a Million began to exercise their rights as consumers in the coalition's haphazard education marketplace by taking their custom elsewhere. "The two things parents were asking us when they were making a decision," says Band, "were: 'Can you guarantee my child a place?' Well, legally no, because we don't have the funding agreement signed yet. And: 'Where is my child going to be at school?'"

From the spring onwards, the purchase of the Manningham site from Bradford City – again, says Band, the DfE's job – also stalled: even now it has yet to be completed. Band says he warned the DfE that uncertainty over the school's sites and funding agreement, which remained unsigned as the inaugural term approached, was fast eroding likely pupil numbers. During August, the One in a Million Twitter feed began issuing slightly desperate-sounding appeals for punters: "Limited places available ... iPad for every student." But the charity's advertising yielded diminishing returns: in its three and a half months on YouTube, since late May, the school's promotional film has been viewed only 188 times.

Visiting the school this year, Janet East "noticed one of the open days was not quite as busy" as its predecessors. But she was enthused by the half-dozen teaching staff: "They were all so vibrant and passionate." And she does not accept that by August declining pupil numbers had made the school impractical: "They've opened other free schools with a smaller percentage [of the hoped-for intake] than we had."

Yet gradually a view solidified at the DfE that the Manningham school "would not be financially viable", at least in the form the charity was proposing it. Perhaps ominously in retrospect, on 16 April Gove responded to a parliamentary question from Philip Davies, a Tory MP with a constituency near the school, asking him to come and open it, and also for a meeting to discuss its "capital allocation", with the bland cheeriness he reserves for tricky subjects: "I'm committed to doing everything I can to improve education in Bradford."

Shortly before the school's opening was stopped on 24 August, "We were asked to make significant cuts in our start up grant," Band admitted in an email to me after our interview, somewhat undermining his insistence that the August decision came completely out of the blue. "Although we felt this was wrong with little evidence or justification from the DfE and that they were reneging on their Agreement, we fully met the condition."

On 17 August, the builders were pulled from the Manningham site by the DfE. "We were told it was a temporary measure and [they] could be back on site very quickly once the [funding agreement] decision was made." The builders never returned. Away from One in a Million's desks, the building feels desolate now, stuffy and dark and silent. A half-removed escalator lies on the floor of what Band still hopes will become the school assembly's hall, an easy metaphor for children's progress stalled.

Modern Bradford sometimes feels like a city of abortive schemes, from City's premiership ambitions to the infamous city-centre hole where, until the financial crisis, a new Westfield shopping centre was meant to have been. One in a Million school has already officially cost taxpayers at least £213,000: on grounds of "commercial confidentiality", Band declines to discuss whether that figure covers all the DfE's and the charity's costs, which seems unlikely.

Ralph Berry, Bradford council's executive member for children's services, a Labour veteran and no friend of free schools, thinks One In A Million has been a "sacrificial lamb", harshly treated to scare other would-be free schools into sharpening up their applications. For an education policy that sometimes seems to treat education as secondary to the more ideological and party-political business of establishing beacons of "social enterprise" and "freedom", that would not be an entirely surprising outcome.

In the meantime, the school's staff are either looking for new jobs, or wondering whether to risk staying with the project. This year's supposed pupils have been reimbursed by the charity for their uniforms.

Free schools Schools Secondary schools Bradford Michael Gove Education policy Andy Beckett
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Published on September 10, 2012 12:00

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