Earth's Politest Heroes

Centrists Assemble! David Gauke and Amber Rudd are back, if no one minds terribly

“Would you mind if I said something in response to your first question?” Andy Street, former Tory mayor of the West Midlands, asked a journalist solicitously, giving the distinct impression that if the assembled press replied that we’d had enough of answers, then he’d shut up.

This unusual level of diffidence was a sign that we were at an event that was out of place in our new shouty age of politics. It was the launch of Prosper, a centre right campaign group. Everywhere we looked were people who had been massive in British public life in about 2018: David Gauke, Amber Rudd, David Lidington, Ruth Davidson. Exiled under Boris Johnson, irrelevant in the glory days of Brexit, they had returned to ask whether we might, on balance, want to have a think about doing things a touch differently. It was, Street assured us, “a very significant day in British political history.”

What will the movie be called? The Empiricists Strike Back? The Revenge of the Seething? This outfit were less The Fast and The Furious than The Mild and The Miffed.

Now read on…

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“It’s also a correction of life half a century ago. We think now of the swinging 60s and the Beatles, and everything was changing, and Harold Wilson had thrown out old stuffy Tories, and it’s all mini skirts and flares. But in 1971, two of the biggest films released were TV spinoffs: Dad’s Army and On the Buses. That is what real Britain was wanting. Its parochial everymen, plucky, doing their best, surrounded by wallies.”

Last week’s episode of War Movie Theatre, on Dad’s Army, is our most successful yet. You can listen here, but my guest Matt Chorley has also written a Substack about the show, and why it matters so much, which you can read here.